Innovation Summit: Exactly How Do we Fix the Economy?

The Daily Beast is hosting its "Innovators Summit" in New Orleans this weekend, and we wanted to direct your attention to a panel of particular interest. The topic? How to get America out of the economic troubles it faces.

Among the panelists are Peter Orszag, Distinguished Visiting Fellow, Council on Foreign Relations; Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation Sheila Bair, and Professors Niall Ferguson and Joseph Stiglitz.

Former head of the Office of Budget and Management, Peter Orszag, maintained that the "despite views to the contrary, the Recovery Act has helped take the edge off of what otherwise would have been a dramatic decline in activity."

"We're bumping along in slow growth," he said. He advised take focusing on good long-term fiscal policy and reducing the medium- and long-term deficit. Orzag said he wouldn't be in favor of a second stimulus package unless it were coupled with a long-term fiscal plan.

Blair recommended short-term spending on infrastructure--both educational and physical--to stimulate the economy. "Short term it costs money, but longer term creates a more stable economy," she said, adding that such a program could help fill the dearth of skilled people in science and engineering fields in the U.S.

Economist and Columbia University professor Joseph Stiglitz favors a second round of stimulus, while Harvard professor Niall Ferguson said a second stimulus would stimulate the wrong things--commodity and emerging market, which he said are already "overstimulated" and reaching a bubble.

[YrWrongAgain]

We fix the economy through political re-education. Teach everyone that wanting nothing is better wanting something. To share the nothing they've got. Even better, to give away whatever they have to whoever wants it.

Then we all skip, skip, skip.

[rockcutr]

Repeal all income tax. Shut down the insurance companies. Limit the medical communitys ability to pillage grandmas piggy bank. Grow your own food. The stuff we get now is poison grown in human fecal matter all in preperation for us all to become soilent green.
Save the economy by not working for the jerks any more.

[magnumdr]

#1 stop the nafta law. #2 put a high import tax on everything coming here from other Countries. #3 Putting an end to all of the illegal immigration can save the US taxpayers app $40 billion per year + give legal citizens more jobs. #4 stop letting our Government spend our money like it's an endless supply. That might be a good start. What do you think?

[maiingan]

The problem with panels like this one is that none of the panelists have "skin in the game" from our current economic/employment conditions. Lasy year, I wrote an article focusing more on fixing the economy one individual at a time, than the whole. It's online at http://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/webform/How%20to%20Put%20America%20Back%20to%20Work.doc. I'm not qualified to say much on the macroeconomic level. But we might say "all economics is individual" thinking of all us unemployed/underemployed Americans. The solutions which America needs most now are those explained by a "crowd-sourcing" exercise of Americans who are unemployed and/or underemployed now.

[sjc_1]

Use the SBA to make direct equity investments in new companies developing renewable energy. This provides clean energy, competitiveness in a new industry growing worldwide and provides new, stable good paying jobs for millions of people.

[rockcutr]

Do you really want the gooberment to be in your business pocket? SBA only assists those who march in time with political wind. All that wind smells of sulfur and rotten eggs. Worthless as teats on boar pigs.