There’s A Lot of Good Stuff Back There

In case that line above doesn’t sound familiar (or it does and you can’t remember), it comes from Jimmy Buffett. He was referring to some of his old albums. And there are, indeed, some very good songs “back there”.





I was looking around my old ramblings and found something I forgot I was looking for.

Aftershock

”Last night, after BBC World News America, they ran a program entitled Aftershock. It was a look back at the beginning of the Great Recession -- one year after the fall of Lehman Brothers.”

”There is no Republican Party in China so when China decided to go with a stimulus plan, they spent big. It helps that they didn’t have to borrow theirs like we did. The numbers vary slightly (currency conversions, different methodologies, etc.) but China spent (or is spending) between 15-20 percent of their GDP. If America had the same size stimulus, it would be well over $2 trillion dollars.”

The numbers being bandied about now make the calculations much easy. America has a 14 trillion dollar economy (roughly the same size as our debt) so 20% would be 2.8 trillion dollars.



I may be mixing up numbers (I’m not an economist) but $2.8 trillion reminds me of a number I just read on Krugman’s blog the other day.

”I mean, how could you have a clearer test of liquidity preference versus loanable funds than having the US government borrow almost $3 trillion with zero, absolutely no, effect on interest rates?”

So, we could have had a $3 trillion economic stimulus and put a few million Americans back to work -- almost 2 years ago. The economy and the credit markets would have supported it. But we didn’t believe it was politically possible. In other words, the Obama Administration couldn’t get the Republicans to vote for it.

You are going to see this theme again. It has happened again on this very day. Our recovery is economically possible. It is politics that is stopping it.

Oh well, I’m getting far afield again. It happens every time. I mean, I started searching for something, noticed some neat stuff in the archives, had to chase down a Jimmy Buffet song, got distracted by Krugman’s new posts and then, while I was searching for a number on the economy, I found this:

False Start

”(A bunch of ANSPs)... employ 11,497 ATCOs (Air Traffic Control Officers) ?

According to this same chart, the Air Traffic Organization (ATO) of the FAA employs 14,930 Air Traffic Controllers.

All told, all of these other organizations run 218 Air Traffic Control Towers. The FAA runs 448. (The Irish Aviation Authority runs 3 Towers.)”

My whole point in writing this post was that there is some interesting stuff buried here in the archives of Get the Flick. I hope you’ll use it as a resource. Or just browse around. There’s a lot of good stuff back there.

Don Brown
July 2, 2011