The End Of The World

If you listen to Chris Matthews and Jim Cramer you would think that 10% unemployment was the end of the economic world. The problem is we are not there now (although we could to be sure) and we have seen worse. This kind of hysteria helps no one and hurts many. PERSPECTIVE.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E01ou2JyqMM

Ed Morrissey provides perspective here and here.

All of this hysteria goes to one purpose: to create a sense of panic that will make any government intervention seem rational and reasonable.  Instead of taking policy one step at a time, schemes and plans get made only to be eclipsed by even more grandiose schemes and plans without ever having tried anything else first.  The TARP plan was never even given the chance to work, thanks to a panicked Secretary of the Treasury who literally begged for its funding and then used the money to start nationalizing private enterprises.

Read the whole post. Oh and how about this on the “New Deal”

Just how divided are experts? In 1995, economist Robert Whaples of Wake Forest University published a survey of academic economists that asked them if they agreed with the statement, “Taken as a whole, government policies of the New Deal served to lengthen and deepen the Great Depression.” Fifty-one percent disagreed, and 49 percent agreed. Whaples today says that the New Deal remains a thorny issue for economists because it’s so difficult to measure the effects it had on the country. “You need a credible model of the economy, and not everyone is going to agree on what that model should be,” he says.