Robert Kuttner : "In the 1930s, when the United States faced a far deeper depression, we built the Golden Gate Bridge, the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge, the George Washington Bridge and the first modern highway systems"

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Robert Kuttner : "we constructed and renovated thousands of public schools, fire stations and post offices; planted a billion trees; laid 20,000 miles of water mains; electrified rural America and undertook countless other public works projects. And when the early projects were not sufficient to end the Great Depression, we doubled down."

Huffington Post
What Bernanke Couldn't Quite Say
By Robert Kuttner
September 2, 2012

What Bernanke Couldn't Quite Say

Some excerpts :

This time around, President Obama in February 2009 persuaded Congress to enact a $787 billion stimulus program that his own advisers considered inadequate, but one that did a lot of good -- for two years. Then nearly all of the stimulus spending petered out. Of the total, the Congressional Budget Office estimated that $718 billion was spent by 2011. And by 2011, of course, Republicans controlled the House so no further stimulus was politically possible.

Today, there is so much public infrastructure in disarray, such a crying need to move the nation to a sustainable energy path, and so great a need for the jobs that could be created by large-scale public investments that more stimulus spending should be a no-brainer. But this alternative is not even being seriously debated. Rather Democratic paths to deficit reduction are jousting with Republican paths.

So here is Ben Bernanke -- a Republican, first appointed by George W. Bush, a huge admirer of Milton Friedman -- saying what no other Republican and too few Democrats are willing to say: The problem is not the deficit, but the risk that Congress will overreact to the deficit.

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