Digesting it now for a new post with meat. I don't like how they report households instead of individuals. Bottom line poverty soared in 2010, no surprise and very unfortunately they put "Asian" all together instead of "H-1B workers from India" and so on.

When you say, "we should" in 2008, that presumably means the White House should have taken that action in 2008, under authority of the PATRIOT Act. Interesting experiment that would have been. Would have assured the election of either of the two candidates who would have stood up and opposed it ... but neither of them would. Anyway, it's all hypotheticals now. Result would have been that the nationalization would have gone very fast to the SCOTUS and turned around there on a dime (cf. Truman's nationalization of steel, Carter's mere mention of nationalization of oil). It would have been a constitutional crisis, which would have resulted in a real banking/liquidity crisis, with all the same housing problems. But it seems that no matter what 'we' do or don't do, there's a constitutional crisis around every corner, regardless of which way we turn. And if it's unemployment, foreclosures, balance-of-trade ... whatever you decide to tag as "it" -- there's no solution, no stability in sight.

And yet ... there are safe and sound 6% notes (5 year CDs) around. Why not? "Steady as she goes."

We should have temporarily nationalized the banks in 2008 and it's pretty clear investors needed to forgive a large portion of Greece's debt, take haircuts, and so on. We did one post which truly it's squeezing blood from a stone in terms of Greece's GDP and projections.

Australia did a pure keynsian fiscal stimulus without tax cuts and avoided a recession. This is proven by the multipliers R.O. shows in the attached charts.
Tax cuts have the worst performance as stimulus and spending the best. Obama administration is now loaded with closet Republicans for economic advice. A 2011 version of Mellon, "Liquidate labor, liquidate capital,
liquidate all.", they just won't admit they are just like Mellon.

Missing from the charts and Obama's new plan is puting metal in the ground. Previous analyses give the traditional CCC, WPA, Rural Electrifcation stuff gives up to 5.0 as a multiplier. Best success was GM as a job generator, and it was denounced (there is a sidebar discussion about outsourcing,yes).

As a matter of principal, if you use public debt, you should insist on creating a long term stream of cash flows, lower risk to reward. Again, just put metal in the ground. Do what Australia did, avoid the recession.

This makes sense, but if you look at history, you see that there are cultural prerequisites for anything like these enormous essentially social programs to work. For such programs to work, they have to be big enough to amount to a full employment program. They have to be made available to all comers. That's almost unimaginable, given the political situation today. But I think your idea is within the realm of the possible.

My information on, for example, the Job Corps, is that it is riddled with bureaucratic cupidity and idiocy. Same for CCC-like entities recently attempted in the stimulus. Plus, you are looking at VC of the old RFC type, which did have many successes, but I don't think it will work with current preference systems, although of course you have to include a citizenship or permanent residency requirement. The thing is to clearly understand at the gitgo that the purpose is to foster small productive businesses and create productive employment -- not to solve all the other problems of the world.

I don't know. In a way, the proposal makes sense, but thinking about the current state of society ... I'm not sure. Just to set up a WPA and a CCC ... that won't work as intended ... there are legions of devils in the details ... think back to Johnson's War on Poverty ... and, on top of all that, there's the little noted first part of Bush v. Gore that makes discrimination by neighborhood or by town unconstitutional, as such. There are just an accretion of structural obstacles that would need to be cleared away. IMHO.

incorporated with infrastructure jobs and also a "VC" branch or incubator start ups with public funds, and salaries.

The more I pour over these numbers and between the politics, spin and then watching money just pour out of the country in the first stimulus, I think this is the only way to keep the money in the domestic economy ...by tying it to U.S. citizens, preferred and having the program also opened up to permanent residents, but have a preferred clause for those with citizenship.

It's pretty clear the government is so corrupt and outsourced, it's a mess, but I wouldn't give even one task to an outside contractor. About the only organization I'd trust to operate a direct jobs program would be the military (and we know how that goes on Contractors and the DoD already)...

but it seems to go downhill from there in terms of giving contracts to people who can actually execute on them and deliver, not rip people off and just in the business of doing government contracts and their other business is just some topic in order to obtain federal grant and contract dollars.

I am willing to give some weight to Fletcher's summary that overall, if Romney means what he has put into the record in 2011, having announced as a candidate for the presidency in 2012, he's the best of the lot on trade issues.

Romney's Plan for Jobs and Economic Growth (LINK TO PDF)

TradeReform states the negative side in a comment by 'Arthur Taylor':

Romney made his fortune at Bain Capitol by buying American manufacturers and sending their production to China.

Okay, that's Romney the capitalist, the individual without sworn loyalty to government.

Here's an excerpt from a Romney press release (5 March 2004) when he was governor of Massachusetts --

News Release (Mar 05 2004) via MIT archive

Gov. Mitt Romney called on members of the Legislature's Joint Committee on Commerce and Labor to help him stem the outsourcing of jobs from Massachusetts to other states and nations.

"In Massachusetts, we are losing jobs to other countries and other states," Romney said. "Manufacturing jobs have fled from Massachusetts for decades. But the new wave of outsourcing is particularly alarming
because it involves the very jobs that replaced those jobs that were lost."

If the point is that when operating as a private capitalist in the private sector, that Romney downsized corporations and outsourced jobs as a means of increasing equity values, then we have to ask if Romney as President might be, or might not be, like the case of FDR's appointment of Joe Kennedy to head up the SEC. FDR's opposition accused him of hiring a fox to guard the hen house, but when FDR was asked why he had tapped such a crook, FDR replied, "Takes one to catch one." It turned out that the choice was excellent, Kennedy did a great job as SEC head, establishing a sound set of rules that lasted for many years. It's widely believed that Kennedy's knowledge of financial markets equipped him to identify areas requiring attention of regulators.

Fleming's analysis is based on Romney's published policy positions on trade and those are worthy of consideration as something seriously intended. What I like is that Romney is unafraid to use the term 'tariff'.

However, as Fletcher points out, Romney's proposals aren’t perfect, they aren’t consistent, and he (Fletcher) in no way endorses the entirety of Romney's economic philosophy, let alone his candidacy. "But they are still an order of magnitude more serious about fixing America’s catastrophic trade mess than what has been proposed elsewhere."

It really comes down to an element of trust -- it's either there or not. It appears to be a matter of record that Romney signed legislation that ended some substantial corporate tax breaks while he was governor, and there don't seem to be accusations that he led any move to outsource state jobs while he was governor.

I still think that we should pay a whole lot more attention to contests for House and Senate and a whole lot less than we do to the Presidential two-ring circus.

BTW: The supposed contradiction between Romney's Massachusetts Health Care Plan and Obama's Health Care Act is no contradiction at all. It's a very simply understood matter of the Tenth Amendment to the Constitution. I am hopeful that Romney has actually read and understands the Constitution of the United States.

Came out the makers of the HPV vaccine have close ties to the Perry campaign, Merck, what a surprise.

They all are corrupted. I think this, as usual, has much more to do with politics than actually putting together a target program to generate jobs.

It's really quite simple.

We need to do three things - give notice to our NAFTA "partners" of our intentions to withdraw from the
agreement. While Mexico has gotten most of the attention,relatively little attention has been paid to the migration of manufacturing and high-value-added service jobs to - Canada.

Second, we need to give notice of our withdrawal from
the WTO and the imposition of high, industry-specific
TARIFFS on a broad range of goods, with special tariff and other penalties applied retroactively to those manufacturers who have specifically moved their manufacture of goods intended for US domestic consumption overseas.

If we are going to have "Free Trade" it must be only with those nations with comparable levels of wages and social development who also allow us access to their home markets on the basis of fair and equal competition. This is essential to exclude Japan, which although a high-wage, high-development nation, is even more mercantilist and protectionist than China.

This would still give us free trade with Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the UK, and many of the EU nations. As they progress, other nations can gradually be added - perhaps Russia, Korea, even Brazil and Chile. That's plenty. The rest of our needs - we can make ourselves.

Autarchy anyone?