Put your money where your mouth is

Internalize his point that Keynes was completely full of shit about the relations between aggregates driving economic cycles; that microeconomic factors and not macroeconomic ones cause recessions; and that even well-intended Keynesian interventions require central planning that inevitably leads to totalitarian abuses given the power incentives of the central planners.

And then shut your useless fucking cakehole complaining that others are "parading [their] ignorance for all to see", you collectivist cocksucker.  We should shut down the government "demand generator" because the only way in which it can generate demand is by expending capital that has been or will be forcibly expropriated from the citizenry, with massive waste and corruption along the way.  If we have to suffer through a deflationary spiral to finally free ourselves from economic central planning and to get you and the other collectivists to stop stealing our fucking money, it will be well worth the cost.

Do you really intend to cheer on a deflationary wage/price spiral?

Nobody is suggesting that we "cheer on" any spiral.  It remains to be demonstrated, however, that we are actually in, or even on the verge of, a deflationary wage/price spiral, especially in the context of the Fed's gigantic increases in the money supply.

Understand supply and demand, then tell me why, when government spending is the only demand generator in our control, we should shut it down in the face of the collapse of aggregate demand throughout the world.

Nobody is suggesting shutting down all government spending.  The federal budget is over $3 trillion even without this porkulus bill.  As others have noted, this already is an awful lot of fiscal stimulus.  And then there's state governments with their own stimulus proposals.  (Oregon just passed one.)  So please, no more strawmen.

So the real question is, should the government increase the size of an already huge federal budget by a whopping THIRTY PERCENT (~$900B), in one fell swoop, financed entirely with debt, based on economic theories of stimulating demand that have never conclusively been proved to be successful in the past.  It is a very, very risky gamble, because even if all this expenditure has a stimulative effect, the returns on the investment have to cover (a) the initial cost, AND (b) the interest on the debt used to finance it, AND (c) some substantial amount of additional economic activity, to make it all worthwhile.  I don't like those odds.  I would expect a true conservative to be more cautious in how they approach matters of financing and debt.

I would also expect a true conservative to consider the Law of Unintended Consequences when increasing the size of government by so much.  It is a transfer of power to the state, and henceforth a reduction in our individual liberties.  It is a tax on future generations, which is by itself morally questionable.  It is a perpetuation of the preposterous idea that we can borrow our way to prosperity.  Finally it only perpetuates the idea in the mind of the public that government's proper role should be to 'manage' the economy, as if it were a machine that requires maintenance from time to time.  That's dangerous thinking to those of us who value truly free markets.

Besides, it is inherently anti-capitalistic to think that governments ought to prop up sagging demand when markets say the demand really isn't there.

johnson springs is the sole voice of reason on this board.

It's not beyond us.  It's just that, unlike people with a (D) after their name, we eventually progressed beyond learning economics from coloring books, and grasped that Keynes was a charlatan whose theories have about as much empirical basis as alchemy.

we're in a global depression. America needs a NEW economy, not just the old, FIRE one all over again.

This is why I'm going to continue to bitch about that Housing Credit, and why I'm all in favor of more money being spent in stimulus.

Not that it will help, very much. the opportunity for action has slipped through our fingers.

there is no way that the government would be able to jump in and spend 70% of our GDP, like consumers do on a regular basis. NO WAY. Even wwII cost 25% of GDP, and that may have helped us out of a worse depression than the one we're currently in (don't know how bad this one will get, yet).