When you hear claims that the New Deal made the depression worse, they often come directly or indirectly from the work of Amity Shlaes, whose misleading statistics have been widely disseminated on the right.

Now, Ms. Shlaes has found a new target: John Maynard Keynes. There’s a lot to critique in this piece, but this one takes the cake:

But the most telling fact about the new rush to spend is that its advocates have insisted on invoking the New Deal. They tend to gloss over the period when the phrase, “We are all Keynesians now,” was actually first uttered: the mid-1960s. (Uttered by Friedman, in fact, though he meant only that we all work in the terms of the Keynesian lexicon.)

The Great Society of that period was the ultimate Keynesian experiment, and it didn’t work very well.

Grr. Keynesianism says that deficit spending can help create jobs when the economy is depressed. The Great Society wasn’t deficit spending, it wasn’t intended to create jobs, and the economy of the 1960s wasn’t depressed. It was social engineering; we can talk about how well or badly it worked, but it had nothing whatsoever to do with Keynesian economics.

Now, LBJ did engage in some Keynesian economics: namely, he imposed acontractionary fiscal policy in the form of a tax surcharge in an effort to cool an overheating economy.

Alas, pretty soon we’ll have all the usual suspects saying that the Great Society proves that Keynesian economics doesn’t work — after all, the “experts” told them so.

by Paul Krugman

I just knew Ms. Peek would pick this  Mammogram  issue and try and link it to the Health Care Reform . This recommendation, by the way, is decades old. Any woman can get as many mammograms as they want, nothing is changed here. 

Whatever it was you wanted to say, it somehow, mysteriously has gone away. Don’t feel bad, many of my posts lately cannot go through until I copy those crazy numbers and letters because they think I am SPAM! And I try so hard to be nice!

P.S. I used to eat Spam in my college days––we used to fry it, put it on a roll with lettuce, tomatoes, a little mustard and if I remember, it was quite tasty. 

Do you recall this little ditty sung, to the tune of "Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star," by American advisors  during the war?

We are winning, this we know

General Harkins tells us so.

In the delta, things are rough.

In the mountains, mighty tough.

But we’re winning, this we know.

General Harkins tells us so.

If you doubt this is true,

McNamara says so ,too.