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Comment by doctoboggan | Hacker News Reader

I hate to be cynical but I give this a near zero chance of happening. I do think its a good idea though.

When someone says "x could never happen", i always want to ask "what would have to change for x to happen".

If congress has to act on this, yeah i think it's DoA, regardless of how good of an idea it is. But why couldn't the Federal Reserve do this?

Why can't the Obama administration who's still sitting on a pile of stimulus money team up with the Fed to do this? Grants + loans?

The Fed absorbed a huge amount of weird shit (assets like houses and such) in the aftermath of Lehman Brothers collapse. I would be interested in what they would have to change to set something like this up.

Seems like a modern equivalent of the FDR work programs. What did it take for him to pull it off?

EDIT: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Works_Progress_Administration

Looks like the executive branch should have enough power to do this on its own.

Well, i think a key difference is that the Works Progress Administration directly employed people (as far as my understanding goes).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Works_Progress_Administration

The difference in what Cuban is suggesting is that he's just asking why the government can't loan directly to businesses to hire.

Right, but that's why I'd say it is a modern take on it. It actually makes the program more like an opportunistic specialized VC/investment bank combo.

From your link, emphasis added: Created by order of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the WPA was funded by Congress with passage of the Emergency Relief Appropriation Act of 1935 on April 8, 1935.

funding seems like a sort of crucial detail to me.

Perhaps I'm just overly cynical, but I'm under the impression that the stimulus funds have been primarily used to stimulate the politically well-connected rather than truly stimulate the economy as a whole.

Actually, i'm happy to hear you say that.

Let's fix it and demand accountability. I want a government that functions, and even if you are of a different political persuasion, I would hazard to guess that you probably do too.

Let's make politicians act in ways that are accountable.

Legally I would guess the Fed could probably do something like this, at least indirectly. The restrictions on what they do are intentionally pretty limited.

The problem is the political fallout. Far-right will scream about socialism, far-left (and I'm one of them) will at least be concerned about the potential for abuse by corporations, and pretty much everyone will be asking why we should trust the Fed to do this right when they've done a lot in recent memory to erode any trust they had.

This is potentially a great job to give a central bank, but maybe not for the current US central bank.

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