Escaping the Bust Bowl

By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
NYT

In a moment, we’ll come to a two-step solution to the banking mess: First, tar and feather America’s 100 leading bankers; and, second, take over insolvent banks and distribute shares to members of the public (without ever using the term “nat...” — oh, never mind).

But first, let’s look at the problem. President Obama and Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner stumbled badly in introducing the bank bailout. But the larger conundrum is that a bailout is both: A) urgent and essential; and B) unfair and unpopular.

I was The Times’s Tokyo bureau chief during much of Japan’s “lost decade” of the 1990s, and one of the lessons of that debacle was the need to attack a major downturn with Colin Powell’s doctrine of “overwhelming force.” The neo-Hoovers criticizing today’s stimulus package make perfectly valid points about this or that flaw in the stimulus package. But the alternative is perhaps three million fewer jobs and the national economy looking like a balloon losing air.

Another thing: those railing against the stimulus are often the same folks who inherited an economy producing budget surpluses and transformed it into today’s fiscal catastrophe. In rural Oregon where I grew up, we were taught that if you’ve made a huge mess in someone else’s living room, it’s not polite to denounce the cleanup.

(More here.)