I won’t be at this meeting, though I’m sure they would benefit from the insights and wit my wife and I would bring.

O wise founding father, thank you for bestowing the blessings of understanding on us silly progressives.

Who are we to complain about the works of our betters? I’m sure they’re all out creating jobs with those trillions of dollars they’ve piled up over the years and naturally they need more spoon-feeding.

You, on the other hand, are too wise for all of us, so perhaps you would be better off commenting in John Galt land.

Hey, what do you know, neither Gregory nor Durbin asked Ryan for a list of loopholes he plans to close. I was right again.

I think we agree that the bailout seems to have been a good idea, and seems to have staunched the disaster. You will note that I didn’t say to the contrary in the post. By early 2009, we were in a position to start working our way back out of the black hole, and that’s where my criticism begins.

I do not believe the theory that the private sector can help dig us out of the dumpster where decades of bad, primarily conservative, governance got us. I never thought it would work. Now that’s obvious, and as the JPMorgan debacle shows, there is real risk that things will deteriorate.

We have to change course. That starts with recognizing where we are.

I don’t understand your criticism. I say that the tools that Obama and the Democrats tried to use are the tools that republicans say are the right ones: create incentives that will encourage the “free markets” and the “private sector” to do what we want done.

I say this was a stupid idea that had no chance of success, that it was a right-wing idea dreamed up by trickle-down theorists, and that the administration refuses to change course. I say we know what to do, and that the government refuses to do it. I explain that both parties are complicit.

Explain this fact. Before cramdown came to a vote, Obama didn’t lift a finger to push it. It did not get a majority of votes in the Senate, with many democrats voting no. This happened even though Obama discussed the idea with approval during the campaign, and it was supported by Senator Durbin, the number two man in the Democratic leadership.

You say no one could have predicted that corporations would sit on trillions of dollars. Please explain the theory that rich people who run corporations will invest money to meet non-existent demand from people who have no money and no prospects and giant debt.

Note that I’m not saying Obama and his political and economic advisers are corrupt. I’m saying they did their best to make an incredibly foolish theory work and they failed, just as every sentient creature thought they would.

So why don’t we change course?

Thanks for visiting with us, Professor.

I’ve been reading economics papers, including several by Casey Mulligan, and I am struck by all the equations. They aren’t particularly complicated equations, and I can’t see exactly what they contribute to the thought process.

Is math a big part of getting an advanced degree in economics? What is a typical level of math taught in grad school?

Has there been any effort to apply any 20th Century math, like, say, fractals, or anything I don’t know about, to the mainstream education of economists?

Gee, you don’t suppose that the point was that the police were lying about who was where when.

You go right on respecting this kind of police terrorism. After all, who are those protestors to have opinions about the nature of police work, just because of the consistent treatment of protestors by Chicago Police going back to the Democratic Convention in 1968.

The amount of cognitive dissonance among right-wingers must be really high.

Sometimes I wonder if their corpus callosums are fully functional.

These interim polls are irrelevant. When the Dems unleash the negative ads pounding his atrocious record of job destruction, he’ll plunge again.

And don’t forget your drones.

Bad America! No Government for You!

Reasons? We don’t need no stinkin’ reasons.

I realize that the issues I identified aren’t liberal. They are class issues. Rich people don’t need those things, they just hire people to do whatever they want done. It’s the rest of us who need collective action and legislation to insure that the collective action will be enforced.

I doubt that people who are seriously into right-wing politics are able to see common ground with anyone but those who agree with them. That’s true of women and any other affinity group. Except LGBT people. How did that happen? What can we learn from the success of the LGBT community?

It seems to me that women don’t think of themselves as having group issues, unlike the LGBT community, which is able to work as a group on the issues that unite them and ignore the issues that divide them.

You don’t see Republican Gays strenuously working against gay marriage or ENDA, and neither group self-identifies when they fight about economic issues where there are vast differences between the parties.

Republican women fight against anything that smacks of liberalism on issues that are exactly the same for them as for Democratic women, issues like flextime, equal pay for equal work, day care and so on.

The stock market is a bit better than the secret markets in credit default swaps. Not all corporations play in the derivatives game, and those that tend to their businesses, and pay regular dividends are worth thinking about.

It would require congessional action or action by the Fed. Neither is going to happen. It isn’t clear that the President could make it happen.

It sure as hell won’t happen if Mitt Romney has anything to say about it: he thinks we’re too immature to understand the actions of the brilliant bankers, our moral and intellectual superiors.