Reading List of the Day 1-27-2010 Edition

American soldiers have been blamed for a lot of problems over the years, but give them credit today in Haiti. Two food drops in two different places showed how to do it well and how to do it poorly.

there is now a very strong case to turn the focus of the US economy from measures aimed at increasing demand to measures aimed at boosting employment directly

Starting immediately after enactment, any private-sector employer that hires a worker who had been unemployed for at least 60 days will not have to pay its 6.2 percent Social Security payroll tax on that employee for the duration of 2010. The Social Security trust fund will then be made whole with spending cuts elsewhere in the budget between now and 2015. That’s it. Simple to understand, and easy to explain.

For many years, economists thought this “secondary recession” was inherent in the nature of the business cycle. Today, however, economists generally believe that the only thing that caused the 1937-38 downturn was disastrously bad government policy.