Quote Originally Posted by Banquo's Ghost View Post
Dave (and anyone else who feels similarly) do you have suggestions about how this economic crisis should be managed which don't involve a stimulus package?
Cut taxes to stimulate investment - capital spending and corporate income taxes. This and other measures to increase incentives to invest. I am skeptical of the benefits of income tax cuts to middle and lower class brackets.

Ensure credit in the banks by giving out the money with explicit contracts and guarantees from the banks that they would open the lines of credit.

I am unconvinced huge amounts of money spent by the government outside of this will do much good. It didn't in the US in the 30s or in Japan in the 90s. Of course, the lesson the Keynesians take from this always seems to be that we didn't spend enough. Though of course Japan did get out of the doldrums, and we are spending relatively significantly less than they did in the 90s, so I am scornful of their opinions, as is my wont.

This however, means radical changes to the goals for our standard of living and, for example, the removal of corporate rights and regulation of size (so that there is never again a company "too big to fail" which status removes the benefit of market forces).
I don't see why we need to rework our standard of living. As for 'too big to fail' - that's a myth. I believe the effects of trying to save dying companies are worse than simply letting them die. We should have let those lousy banks fail. Instead we spent hundreds of billions for nothing.

CR