A Touch of Economic Realism for Coral Gables Candidates

The economy of  South Florida, Miami-Dade County and including Coral Gables are not doing well.  Our city may do a little better because of its perverse income distribution (more wealthy who are doing better than others because of a rising stock market), but construction, construction employments, retirement incomes, family consumption should remain daunting for years to come.

It would appear that the city commission and city manager are living in a different world, raising taxes year after year, favoring intransigent labor unions and continuing to spend on superfluous activities.

…what we’re looking at over the next few years, even with pretty good growth, are unemployment rates that not long ago would have been considered catastrophic — because they are. Behind those dry statistics lies a vast landscape of suffering and broken dreams. And the arithmetic says that the suffering will continue as far as the eye can see.

via Deep Hole Economics – NYTimes.com.

Jobs are Priority (For Now), Not Spending and Debt Reduction

There is a lot of recent evidence among countries and regions that the best policy in a grave economic crisis and recession, the central issue is to create jobs as fast as you can, even if this means running a large deficit over the short-term.  More growth will cause tax revenues to increase over the medium-term.

The broad pattern is clear: the more that governments have worried about enabling future moral hazard by excessive bailouts and sought to stem the rise in public debt, the worse their countries’ economies have performed. The more that they have focused on policies to put people back to work in the short run, the better their economies have done.

via A Time to Spend by J. Bradford DeLong – Project Syndicate.