Idiot wind at the New York Times: "consumers need to save less and spend more in the name of a better future”

This is the advice of a highly paid professor of history at Rutgers, James Livingstone in a truly comedic Op-ed today.

AS an economic historian who has been studying American capitalism for 35 years, I’m going to let you in on the best-kept secret of the last century: private investment — that is, using business profits to increase productivity and output — doesn’t actually drive economic growth. Consumer debt and government spending do. Private investment isn’t even necessary to promote growth.

I hate to be the one to clue this gavone with a great deal of disposable income, in, but buddy, if your job as result of the collapse earns you significantly LESS, you have no available debt to spend, and if you are responsible are not buying ANYTHING except chicken, hamburger, fresh fruit and potatoes, and thus have no disposable income to throw out in order to fullfil this vision of economic patriotism.

More people have entered poverty, LITERALLY, so where is this debt to come from? Moreover the collapse which created this death spiral and controversies over how to recover out of it WAS CAUSED when no more debt was available because real state values, the prime repository of borrowed against wealth and bank for spending, DECLINED. In other words, consumer debt combined with manufacturing leaving the USA for cheap labor (and increased productivity), erased any future spending created by more debt.

The void of the jobs whose pay created disposable income to spend with confidence is the ROOT CAUSE of lack of recovery, not a lack of the desire to have more debt.

As far as government spending, let’s do what worked PERFECTLY before. Let’s have a BIG FAT WORLD WAR which eats the products we are compelled to research, design, manufacture, spend on, and then see destroyed (consumed) at unimaginable rates.

Other than that, it is LITERALLY demonstrable in the last few years that dramatic govt spending FAILS, otherwise consumer demand and confidence would be arrowing upwards

That intelligent people whose name begins with “PROFESSOR” can delude themselves into espousing LUDICROUS STUPIDITY such as THIS COLUMN is the cause of Americans with common sense looking at the academic elite with a singular cynical lack of confidence, and an acerbic bitter response.