No end in sight to this unemployment? The reincarnation of supply-siders

I am flummoxed that unemployment has not become a big time political nightmare despite all the horrendous trends.  President Ronald Reagan Barack Obama continues on his supply-side path, writes Robert Reich:

we’re not hearing any of these sorts of demand-side solutions from the White House. In seeking Republican votes, Obama is putting forth Republican supply-side ideas – lowering the employer costs of hiring, cutting corporate taxes – that have nothing to do with this demand-side crisis. He may attract some Republican votes for these, but what’s the point if they’re irrelevant to the real problem?

WTF is wrong with Obama, Democrats, and our elected officials?

Fellow Oregonian, and uber-blogging economist, Mark Thoma adds:

Obama and his advisors mayd believe supply-side polices are optimal at this point, in which case I just want to throw up my hands and give up. And he may believe that negotiation over the policies would simply delay getting needed help to the unemployed without changing the policy in the end. On the last point, the fact that the administration waited until there was little time to negotiate when so many people were urging them to tackle the unemployment crisis months, if not years ago is their own fault (and the time crunch seems to be more about getting re-elected than helping struggling families anyway). Perhaps if the administration hadn't wasted so much time figuring out how to cut make the emplyment problem worse by cutting the deficit and had targeted unemployment instead, they would have had the time to negotiate properly.

Paul Krugman notes after reading "Zachary Goldfarb’s deeply depressing piece on Geithner’s role in the internal economic debate:

Also, when I read this from the Goldfarb piece:

The economic team went round and round. Geithner would hold his views close, but occasionally he would get frustrated. Once, as Romer pressed for more stimulus spending, Geithner snapped. Stimulus, he told Romer, was “sugar,” and its effect was fleeting. The administration, he urged, needed to focus on long-term economic growth, and the first step was reining in the debt.

I get really depressed. Whether he knew it or not, Geithner was making the Mellon-Schumpeter-Hayek argument that any effort to push up demand was somehow artificial and unsound. Not what anyone should be saying in the modern world, least of all a top official in an allegedly progressive Democratic administration.

Progressive? Progressive Democratic?  There are only two parties in the country: Republican and Republican Lite!

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