Letter to the editor:

Economy should be fixed from the bottom up

Paul Gwin, Las Vegas

Friday, Oct. 24, 2008 | 2:05 a.m.

Bailing out bankers, money lenders and stock market wheeler dealers at the top of our trickle-down economy may have been necessary, but it isn’t likely to solve the problem. What it will do is add another $700 billion, plus interest, to our debt. Here are a couple of ideas for priming the pump at the bottom instead of the top:

• Divide $700 billion by the current population, 305 million, and distribute that sum to every citizen, which would roughly amount to $10,000 for a family of four. An ambitious young entrepreneur in Las Vegas, who bought a beauty salon shortly before the crash and is now up to her neck in mortgage debt, told me why she favors such an idea:

Wouldn’t that put money in women’s purses again so they don’t have to cut down on beauty services? Wouldn’t it enable couples to eat out more often and help mom-and-pop restaurants? Wouldn’t it enable people to pay off credit cards, replace the family car, update their electronic equipment, buy more groceries, buy more from small shops that offer personal service?

• Then there is FDR’s method: He told his advisers to come up with all the ideas they could think of to create jobs. The object: Put money back in pockets of citizens so they could buy products and start the economy rolling again. Programs such as the Civilian Conservation Corps, the Farmers Home Administration and the Public Works Administration came from this and got us out of the depths of the Depression. (In the 1950s, President Eisenhower, a Republican, invested huge sums of money in the interstate highway program and other areas, and he balanced the budget.)

Wouldn’t either of these bottom-priming methods make more sense than bailing out financial institutions at the top? Tax cutting like John McCain recommends can’t give the economy a jump-start and get us out of a depression.

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By neiman1

Oct. 24, 2008

7:06 a.m.

Flag

How much will the Obama cuts help if you lose your job to taxes on your employer? Corporations don't pay taxes, they just collect them by raising taxes and hide how much the government sucks from the economy.
By NVMakz

Oct. 24, 2008

11 a.m.

Flag

Will EVERYONE getting 10K bail out the SMALL % OF PERSONS who signed for mortgages they either won't, can't or never did intend to repay (flippers, primarily)?

Nope.

Will it loosen the bad-debt-constipation resulting from LIBERAL social engineering projects such as QUOTAS for the FMs to load the rotten-debt on to their books - with scant capitalization requirements?

Nope.

When the poor are giving the rich jobs and upward mobility == THEN this socialist bad-LSD-trip might work.

Also, isn't the length requirements to be approved for an LTE in the Socialist Sun like - sure is after looking - 250 words? Guess this applies to those Republicans / Conservatives.

To support this "New, REALLY New Deal" - the rank Socialism of the FDR original caused the "Great Depression" to be something like 3-4 times LONGER than if free-market principles were employed (liberal-socialist econ-thought never learns anything from history) = Mr. Gwin gets much more than 250.

Sure is the limit for conservative submissions. I've spoken with Campbell about trimming submissions of mine in the past = for sure.

Liberals get a blank check" to re-sell disasterous schemes such as failed, discredited Socialism, I guess?

Those (REALLY New Dealers) who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it.

CHA-CHINGGGG..........
By Future2012

Oct. 24, 2008

4:36 p.m.

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As any student of history know the economy was worse at the end of the 30s than at the begining of the depression. That the government make work project could not sustain premanent jobs.

Products were not being made that people wanted over the long and would buy again to buy up to improve their productivity like computers.

You can only build so many parks and golf courses and then what is next. By the way have you ever played on those courses back East

It is about sustainable jobs not temporary job.

By every account the new deal failed.