(hat tip to Eric Tymoigne, Lewis & Clark U)
It's amazing to read that, in 1946, we came this close to declaring full employment as a national directive, a requirement "to provide such volume of Federal investment and expenditure as may be needed [to maintain continuing full employment]."
Restated, we could easily revisit this and make it part of Public Purpose to permanently "Denominate, via direct Treasury Contracting, such volume of Public Initiative as may be needed to fully utilize our existing citizenry in exploring our constantly expanding National Options."
4 comments:
Shades of Warren Mosler!
"As initially proposed, the [1946] legislation required the federal government to intervene to smooth out the business cycle. The legislation was based on the principle of compensatory finance, which argued, for example, that a projected slump in economic activity could be offset by runnning a sufficiently large deficit in the federal budget."
p.14
This used to be substantially more common sense? What the hell happened to us?
In 1976,"Congress, however, had become no more sympathetic in the intervening 30 years."
So it's up to the electorate to be sympathetic to it's own options and outcomes?
"raising the level of economic literacy in the United States." ?
Seems to me that freezing that level is a more accurate term.
Google Leon Keysarling, he was the Senate aide who drafted the Full Employment Act of 1945 (which was watered down to pass as the Employment Act of 1946) who later became Truman's CEA chairman.
Thanks again, Beowulf.
C. J. Santoni said:
"The legislative process was less kind to the 1976 [full employment] bill than it was to its 1945 forerunner,"
http://research.stlouisfed.org/publications/review/86/11/Employment_Nov1986.pdf
You could almost encompass the whole of post-war US policy history under that last sentence.
Yet this is also a cogent warning example:
'A comment of Raymond Moley’s regarding the proliferation of conflicting goals in some New Deal legislation seems perlinent at this point. Moley wrote that “to look upon these policies as the result of a unified plan was to believe that the accumulation of stuffed snakes, baseball pictures, school flags, old tennis shoes, geometry books, and chemistry sets in a boy’s bedroom could have been put there by an interior decorator.” Moley (1939).'
p.13, in the same link, below
Beowulf,
You really should do 2 things:
1) Post an online bibliography of the minimar set of available articles anyone seeking Situational Awareness for US policy should understand, especialy institutional momentum. (And invite additions to it. We desperately need to save time.)
2) Please write an initial summary view interpreting what we currently know about fiscal policy and fiscal/tax/monetary policy momentum, as a Wiki page - and again, ivite additions.
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