Tuesday, September 7, 2010

Paul Krugman argued yesterday...

...that it was deficit spending -- World War II in particular -- that lifted the United States out of the Great Depression. (That's nothing new; we all knew that.) But what surprised me was the scale of the spending (my emphasis):

Over the course of the war the federal government borrowed an amount equal to roughly twice the value of G.D.P. in 1940 — the equivalent of roughly $30 trillion today.

$30 trillion? Is that what it's going to take? President Obama couldn't even get a $1 trillion stimulus passed in 2009.

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