Found this on the Daily Beast and it makes sense, though Congress never does.
GET AMERICA BACK TO WORK
Fourteen million unemployed represents a gigantic waste of human capital, an irrecoverable loss of wealth and spending power, and an affront to the ideals of America. Some 6.8 million have been out of work for 27 weeks or more. Congressmen went home to celebrate July 4 having failed to extend unemployment benefits.
We recognize the necessity of a program to cut the mid- and long-term federal deficit, but the imperative requirement now, and the surest course to balance the budget over time, is to restore a full measure of economic activity. As in the ’30s, the economy is suffering a sharp decline in aggregate demand and loss of business confidence. Long experience shows that increasing the money supply will not be enough; as Keynes remarked, it is like trying to get fat by buying a bigger belt.
The urgent need is for government to replace the lost purchasing power of the unemployed and their families by substantial investment in our decaying infrastructure and by selective tax-credit incentives for innovation and startups. Making deficit reduction the first target, without addressing the chronic underlying deficiency of demand, is exactly the error of the ’30s. It will prolong the great recession, harm the social cohesion of the country and continue inflicting unnecessary hardship on millions of Americans.
Signatories:
Alan Blinder
Alan Blinder was vice chairman of the Federal Reserve and served on Bill Clinton’s Council of Economic Advisers; he’s the Gordon S. Rentschler Memorial Professor of Economics and Public Affairs at Princeton University.
Daniel Kevles
Dan Kevles is the former faculty chair at California Institute of Technology and serves as a professor of history at Yale University.
David Reynolds
David Reynolds is an international history professor and fellow at Christ’s College in Cambridge.
Derek Shearer
Derek Shearer served as the ambassador to Finland from 1994-1997. He is now a diplomacy and world affairs professor at Occidental College in Los Angeles.
Jim Hoge
Jim Hoge is editor of Foreign Affairs and the former editor of the Chicago Sun-Times, which won six Pulitzer Prizes under his tutelage. He is co-editor of How Did This Happen? Terrorism and the New War.
John Cassidy
A journalist and author, John Cassidy has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 1995, covering economics and business.
Joseph Stiglitz
Joe Stiglitz is the former chief economist of the World Bank, and a recipient of the Nobel Prize and the John Bates Clark Medal; currently, he’s a professor at Columbia University.
Laura Tyson
Laura Tyson served as the chair of Council of Economic Advisers and the director of the National Economic Council during the Clinton administration. She is a professor at the Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley.
Lizabeth Cohen
Lizabeth Cohen is the Howard Mumford Jones Professor of American Studies in the History Department at Harvard University, and author of Making a New Deal: Industrial Workers in Chicago, 1919-1939.
Harold Evans
Sir Harold Evans is a journalist and former editor of The Sunday Times and the Times, who was knighted in 2004 for his services to journalism. His award-winning book, They Made America, chronicled the country’s most important innovators and inventors.
Nancy Folbre
Nancy Folbre is an economist specializing in political economy, feminist theory, and the economics of care-based labor. She is the winner of a MacArthur Genius Award and a professor of economics at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst.
Richard Parker
Richard Parker, a former congressional consultant, is a public-policy lecturer and senior fellow at the Shorenstein Center at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government.
Robert Reich
A professor of public policy at the University of California at Berkeley, Robert Reich was the 22nd secretary of Labor under President Clinton.
Sean Wilentz
Sean Wilentz is the Sidney and Ruth Lapidus Professor in the American Revolution at Princeton. His book The Rise of American Democracy: From Jefferson to Lincoln won the 2006 Bancroft Prize.
Sidney Blumenthal
Sidney Blumenthal is a former senior adviser to President Bill Clinton and advised Hillary Clinton during her 2008 presidential campaign. His books include The Clinton Wars and The Permanent Campaign.
Simon Schama
The author and host of the BBC documentary A History of Britain, Simon Schama is a historian who teaches at Columbia University.
