Robert Reich Spots the Flaw in Hopeful Keynesians

Robert Reich, Labor Secretary under Clinton, has a blog entry, The Logic of Keynes in Today's World, where he notes that born-again Keynesian friend has high hopes for a quick fix from applying Keynesian remedies. Reich points out that quick is not what to expect and spots a flaw in that kind of false hope:

The first assumption is that American consumers will eventually regain the purchasing power needed to keep the economy going full tilt. That seems doubtful. Median incomes dropped during the last recovery, adjusted for inflation, and even at the start weren’t much higher than they were in the 1970s. Middle-class families continued to spend at a healthy clip over the last thirty years despite this because women went into paid work, everyone started working longer hours, and then, when these tactics gave out, went deeper and deeper into debt. This indebtedness, in turn, depended on rising home values, which generated hundreds of billions of dollars in home equity loans and refinanced mortgages. But now that the housing bubble has burst, the spending has ended. Families cannot work more hours than they did before, and won’t be able to borrow as much, either.