Saving Private Keynes

Like the movie Saving Private Ryan it is time for the Keynes economic ideas to go home. It is not that the ideas are necessarily wrong but as Allan Metzer argues in How Obama Got Keynes Wrong, the bPOR(Bush-Pelosi-Reid-Obama) administrations have used the name of Keynes to justify bad fiscal policies.

While the Obama team is laying out huge sums of money, Meltzer says it’s neglecting a key part of Keynes’ plan: You can’t run up a debt without a way to cover it.

Running up huge debts without a plan to pay it off is a bad plan in almost all economic theories. Keynes’s ideas are tainted now so it is time for some ideas that actually have a chance at working. Hopefully our Congress men and women will not need a California IOU moment to spur them on to fiscal responsibility. If they do not start acting responsibly we will probably throw out as many of them as we can in the November elections.

FORTUNE: How Obama Got Keynes Wrong….
Glenn Reynolds
Sun, 07 Feb 2010 19:10:03 GMT