Bruce Bartlett 1992 versus Bruce Bartlett 2011

As I noted earlier today, Bruce Bartlett wrote this morning in NYT:

Many economists, myself included, believe that a more aggressive Federal Reserve policy is needed to turn the economy around. Additional fiscal stimulus would also help.

A friend sends along a WSJ column, where Bartlett wrote in 1992:

Only since the advent of Keynesian economics have governments come to believe that they can moderate, or even eliminate, the business cycle by pumping up demand through countercyclical tax and spending programs. Yet even John Maynard Keynes expressed deep skepticism about government's ability to do this. "Organized public works at home and abroad," he said, "may be the right cure for a chronic tendency to a deficiency of effective demand. But they are not capable of sufficiently rapid organization (and above all they cannot be reserved or undone as a later date), to be the most serviceable instrument for the prevention of the trade cycle."

Many things need to be done to address our economy's problems. But we should not delude ourselves that such problems began with the recession or can be cured by an antirecession program.