patrick.net

Plus we had the baby boom massively flooding into the job market.

Births peaked in 1957:

1952 3,913,000
1953 3,965,000
1954 4,078,000
1955 4,104,000
1956 4,218,000
1957 4,308,000

18-20 years later, they were looking for work.

And finding it . . .

http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/PAYEMS/

shows jobs increased 20M, from 70M to 90M in the 1970s.

Jobs also increased 20M in the 1980s and 1990s, but that took much more debt leverage to accomplish:

http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/graph/?g=1GX

By this measure, we did pretty damn good in the 1970s.

How Keynes enters into this is a mystery. I guess Nixon closing the gold window allowed us to tolerate more inflation, but the picture is complicated since other nations were also competitively inflating with us.

mdovell says

We have a want and not a needs based economy. If the economy was based on needs we wouldn't have patrick.net or any other website.

we have both. It is the easy satisfaction of the needs that gives us the surplus to produce the wants. Haven't you ever played Civ?

Seriously, in our economy food, clothing, and transportation are not the long poles in the tent.

Housing is, but that's due to the economics of land more than the cost of the structure itself (the house itself is a very durable good that, with proper maintenance, depreciates minimally over the decades).

Health care is a major expense, only because we're getting raped by that industry's profit margins.

UI is generally used for consumption and consumption alone does not create jobs. Capital investment does.

This is perhaps the most dogmatically stupid thing I've ever read.

Seriously, your dogma is making you stupid. Find some new ideology.

For one, Capacity utilization is still in recessionary territory:

http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/TCU

So more fixed capital is not necessarily the train that's going to save us.

Furthermore, the hundreds of billions we spent on UE 2008-now were bottom-up stimulus to the economy. They did more for the working class -- and working class jobs -- than the hundreds of billions of top-down stimulus, though both were needed to keep the rubber on the road.

The key thing you need to wrap your head around is the flows available to the working class. NAFTA, the yuan rate, and the steady flow to oil exporters have pulled trillions out of the J6P economy, 1990 to now.

We used the housing bubble to hide this, 2002-2007, but that play is over now.

J6P is dead man walking.

>He employed supply-side economics to get PRODUCTION up

LOLers

http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/graph/?g=1Hn

blue line shows government spending / GDP rising from ~20% of GDP to 22-23% of GDP in the mid 1980s. Supply side my ass.

The red line is annual gov't deficit to GDP -- yeah, cutting taxes does give a boost, but the deficit doubled from ~3% of GDP to 6% of GDP under Raygun.

National debt to GDP shows the full story:

http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/graph/?g=1Ho

with it rising from 32% of GDP to 55% in the 1980s.

Supply side economics FTW, LOL.

Here is an excellent rebuttal of Moore:

http://www.tnr.com/blog/jonathan-chait/93942/in-which-i-try-restrain-my-nasty-impulses-limited-success

I have been following Moore for years, and I have met him -- yes, it was awkward -- and I can assure you that this is not just some oddball rhetorical game he's playing. He genuinely has no idea what he's talking about. And I'm sorry to be mean to what seems to be a fairly nice guy, but it does matter that there are completely ignorant people wielding great influence over the policy debate.