L.A. Times: "Audacity as economic experiment"

Audacity itself as economic experiment
(Los Angeles Times, 1/11)

In a measure of how quickly its options are shrinking, the United States is about to embrace an economic theory that was widely thought for most of the last generation to have been discredited: the idea that great bursts of deficit-funded government expenditure can jolt an economy back to growth.

And the nation is poised to put this theory to the test on a scale untried in peacetime by any developed country on Earth. ...

Obama's plan represents an unexpected comeback for the ideas of the late British economist John Maynard Keynes, who argued in the 1930s that governments could end the Depression by spending heavily to maintain demand for goods and services until frightened consumers and damaged businesses gained the courage to resume buying and selling on their own.