Not one of them had a damn clue. The whole concept that the economy can be fixed by hiring more road-workers and teachers is so patently moronic that, like the Olympics, these guys need to have their Nobels stripped.

House prices on average still have a long ways to drop just to get back to ‘normal’. People that aren’t upside down yet soon will be. I simply don’t know whether mortgages should be modified, but if so, they should be done across the board, once, with weighting by region and date of issue, without respect for whether the morgage is in trouble or not. If you can’t do it across the board, then don’t do anything, period. Even after you do it, if 5% still get foreclosed, so be it. To say that ‘anyone’ who got into a house they couldn’t afford to START with, should be bailed out, while others who bought a house next door, but is managing to make their payments is just WRONG! What’s even more wrong is bailing out someone who, as their home value more than doubled, re-financed and took out ‘fake’ equity to buy a swimming pool, home theater add-on, new cars, and so on, while the guy next door struggles along to pay the last third of his mortgage.

Aside from that, I would much prefer to hear from people who have actually developed and run businesses than from academics who have lots of theories but no clue.

Stiglitz is an economist who admits to leaning more toward socialism in government. But when he says:

So, while we are talking about stimulating the economy, the states are engaged in de-stimulating the economy. The first thing that we should have done is to say, we have to prevent this downturn. It doesn’t make any sense to have the states fire teachers when we’re — you know, and say, OK, now we’re going to build some roads.

So is he saying that we should take the teacher and put them to work fixing pot holes? Typical socialism.

And then there is Sachs, who is another out-of-touch academic who says about the so-called Obama stimulus package:

It has the seeds of it within it. But it was so weird — I have to use that word — how Congress held back anything that looked beyond 2010, said that that was even illegitimate. Our country has become so short-sighted and so short-term, that we’re not thinking about the real way out of this. And the model that the Congress — especially the Republicans — seem to have in their mind, is this quick rebound. And that’s the wrong model.

Maybe it’s me, but isn’t that the single focus of a stimulus is to ignite something short term? Is English a foreign language at Harvard?

Then Stiglitz chimes in with:

But even in the short run, it was deficient in two respects — first of all, too much emphasis on tax cuts, which are not likely to give a stimulus.

This is the problem with too many academics in the room and not enough real people with business experience.

Would someone who has been laid off in Michigan rather have a real long term job generated by a business who received a tax credit targeted for new jobs, or be told to go fix roads or build a bridge by the government for a year or two?

Corporations in the U.S. are the most over taxed in the world, so no one should wonder why more and more are headquartered outside our borders.

If you work with investment bankers and private equity firms they will tell you that reduction in certain taxes do attract investment which build businesses which build solid jobs.

The so-called stimulus package by Obama/Pelosi is nothing more than a spending spree to secure votes for the next election (or bribes).

The OMB was highly critical of the package as not doing much for what it was intended for – short term stimulus.

Next time Zakaria should bring on real business people and get the truth out.