porphyrogenitus“which has actually helped spawn infrastructure job creation”
Does he have any numbers to back that up? Can he tell you whether they were efficiently allocated, and did not just displace other potential investment?
Bob Murphy’s “propositional question” applies to the last four years. In lots of places on the web, there is a chart comparing the current “recovery” with past recoveries. What would things have to look like for him to accept that these policies have retarded recovery, rather than helped it?
Likewise in lots of places on the web there is the famous unemployment chart, showing what they said unemployment would be without their Keynsean policies, what it would be with them, and what the actual unemployment was. If he objects to this, claiming “well, they didn’t know how bad things were at the time” – point out that this objection fails, because the entire premise of Keynsian-based macro-economics is that they understand the economy well enough to predict what will follow from a given set of policies. If they couldn’t even understand what *already* *happened* well enough, then they certainly can’t claim the technical expertise to manage the economy – which they do all the time.
Here’s a pretty good Murphy Youtube video on the management of the present crisis: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UmYtyl8s05w
Here’s a shorter one where he is responding to Robert Reich on “rich people gutted the social safety net for the middle class and the poor, and that produced the crisis”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mXm4j2ORYcg
Especially rebuts the bogus claim that “there have been sharp cuts in spending” or even “there have been sharp cuts in social benefit spending” – these claims are false to the point of being. . .dare I say it? Lies.
And here he is on contrasting views of the Great Depression:
Edit, Added: I just noticed the little “edit” button. I also just stumbled uncontrollably across this review of Burton Folsom’s book, by the great Robert Higgs. Interesting paragraph:
“Folsom presents a valuable discussion of the great extent to which taxes were increased during the 1930s, especially excise taxes–on alcoholic beverages, gasoline, cigarettes, radios, movie tickets, and many other goods–that bore relatively heavily on lower-income people. From 1933 through 1936, federal excise taxes exceeded federal individual and corporate income taxes combined, and during the following four years excises always brought in at least 40 percent of federal revenue. After 1935 Social Security payroll taxes diminished poor people’s wages disproportionately.“