Ah balls…
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Aw man… did you ever get to shop there?
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Sure, just about every time I went to New York (for the past 8 or 10 years, anyway; there was an overlapping period before that, when they were not open at all and I did not make any trips to NYC). I always came back with at least one CD (usually from Fania, but more recently, some older Tito Puente recordings). It was like a ritual, and part of my reason for going to the city.
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Fred Armison auto replaces Tito in my head now.
Thanks Fred!
If you are ever in the Richmond, Va. area check out Plan9 Records in Carytown.
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That really sucks that they’re closing down. I suspect lots of places like that are going to end up shuttered at the end of all this. My local record/comic shop just had to stop doing subscription boxes because they can’t afford the pre-orders any more…
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That perfect marriage of venal scammers and imbeciles is now going to kill a bunch of us as well.
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We remain a tiny island of sanity in this shithole state.
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We’re rapidly dropping into a situation where businesses are closing because they have no customers, they have no customers because nobody has money to spend, nobody has money to spend because they’re out of work because the businesses are closing. And on top of that, the closed businesses cause supply chain interruptions so that even those who would be customers can’t get their stuff! (I recently - during the pandemic - urgently needed some electrical work done, and had a month-long delay because the electrician couldn’t get the necessary materials.)
You’re a historian. Is there good precedent for how you get out of that economic death spiral without having a war?
1873-1896 isn’t really parallel, or maybe it is: the Gilded Age robber barons certainly prospered in that period, raising real GDP with their excesses even as the money supply contracted and the rest of the world struggled. In any case, it more or less appears that the end of that deflation came as the Witwatersrand and Klondike gold strikes increased the currency supply; there doesn’t seem to be an obvious parallel that a modern economy could try to achieve.
Macroeconomics always seems to me like voodoo. (I can grasp the differential equations that the economists spout: I just can’t make sense of the results, and suspect strongly that neither can they.)
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I’ve certainly always been told that, but insisting that the US recovery from the Great Depression was only possible because of the Second World War smacks of anti-FDR conservative revisionism to me.
Still, if it is true, then the only thing that would make a war specially economically beneficial would be shifting the country to a command economy…oh, yeah: and capping executive salaries.
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Not anti-FDR revisionism! FDR might have been able to turn things around in 1936 had it not been for Owen Roberts. (He was surely the swing justice. It’s pretty obvious that nothing would have swayed Butler, McReynolds, Sutherland or van Devanter.)
Ramping up production for the war effort was what finally put people back in the factories. Arguably, having the government create artificial demand some other way would have worked as well, but whether that would have been possible politically is a question beyond my pay grade! (We don’t have another history to compare it with.) The Hughes Court really seemed to believe that the Federal government had no power to have an economic policy.
If by some miracle Biden is elected, any reforms will face a similar blockage, with another Roberts being the swing justice.
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I defer to the professionals on this, but was not WWII a pretty special case? The US had the only significant economy not totally destroyed by years of total war, and so essentially had the entire world market to itself. That is rather unlike to occur this time around, I would think.
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There was plenty of economic recovery before WWII.
Covid19 is fairly different though.
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It’s incredibly easy for a modern economy to have the equivalent of a gold rush. Indeed, the recovery from the Great Recession of 2008 was fuelled in part by such a reaction- Central banks can now create money through Quantitative Easing, and increase the supply of money that way. Indeed, Ben Bernanke has postulated that in extreme cases, the economy could be restarted by creating new money and distributing it directly to the public.
(Economic history side note- The UK effectively ran a helicopter money programme during the aftermath of the 2008 recession, in the form of PPI refunds, where £50bn in compensation was paid to people who had been mis-sold expensive insurance by their banks. It’s difficult to see how effective it was, due to the government at the time doing their best to counteract the effect entirely by slashing welfare and public spending at the same time.)
As I have said before, QE is not the optimal way to do this:
If you have a “stuck” economy (as if your economic motor has magneto trouble), as the world economy will be after we come out the other side of the pandemic, then the best way to get it started again is to put the idle forces of production directly to work, creating things that are very much needed,but which the hand of the market in its glorious invisibility, has failed to provide.
The obvious candidate for such an effort today, would be all the infrastructure improvements required to shift the global economy onto a low-carbon path. Insulating a nation’s worth of homes to increase energy efficiency, building the metro systems and high speed rail that will allow people to get out of their fuel-guzzling cars. Building all the renewable power that will allow us to run all of this without burning megatons of coal. That would take a massive investment and huge amounts of resources, but if they happen to be sitting idle anyway, then great, let’s get to work
In short, the Green New Deal:
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I’m totally on board with this, but my prediction is that the Supremes (with Alito drafting the majority opinion and Roberts filing an opinion arriving at the same conclusion on entirely different grounds) will find 6-3 (Sotomayor, Kagan and Ginsburg if she’s still alive, dissenting) that the government can’t do it. What legal theory the majority will adopt, I don’t even want to guess. (That’s assuming that there aren’t still 41 Republican Senators to filibuster it - and it’s almost a mathematical impossibility for the Dems to gain a larger majority than that.) Again, we find ourselves limited by what is possible politically.
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I’m not even sure how they would find standing to overrule a duly voted spending bill like that. It’s not a Constitutional question.
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The conservatives on the supreme court don’t win every case. They aren’t all crazies, at least, not all of the time. Yet.
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Yeah. Even friggin’ Gorsuch would be like, “Hey, guys, I didn’t join up here to rule on mundane cases. Constitution or GTFO!”
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I am also not an expert, but I think another issue is that going into a war footing gave the economy a boost, buuuuut we never really left that state, so how can it give us another boost?
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