Thursday, May 24, 2012

How Long Will It Take ?

Everyone has his favorite solution to the Great Recession. The MMT people are fond of saying that a deficit in the public sectors, including the current account, will lead to a surplus in the private sector. And so we can expect things to improve. And they are, at a glacial pace.

To be sure some of them - to name just  Randall Wray, Bill Mitchell and Warren Mosler - are in favor of the job guarantee. And Wray has written and defended a number of blogs in recent weeks on the idea.

I heard recently that the job creator, Mitt Romney, says unemployment will be down to 6% by 2016. I guess the budget office said the same thing. Wow! So how many real unemployed will that leave us with?

We have twenty five million today of real unemployment counting the "official" number plus all those who gave up looking for a job or are employed part time. That official number is 8.1% but the real number is around 14.5%. So I guess we wait for 2016 to get the real unemployment down to around twenty million.

It doesn't appear the MMT people have any real answers to the problem. Every once and a while one of them touts the job guarantee. But most of the time these folks would rather quarrel over an equation or the niceties of the current account. Debating is much more fun than solving a real world problem. But they are no different than our elites. None of them these days seems to give a rats ass about the people milling around the streets.

Which brings me to Jill Stein, the Green Party candidate for President. She has a snow ball's chance in hell of winning anything but she does have a comprehensive program to fix the country's problem. Now she could use a little MMT help to sell her ideas, since it appears she is struggling to say how she will pay for it. But she flat out says she will create sixteen million jobs not counting the knock on effects in other sectors. Now that is a Wow!.