Left to its own devices, the credit crisis, which began in August 2007, would have crushed economies as severely as did the Great Depression.

Belatedly, but thankfully, governments recognized that the only way to get credit flowing again was for them to make quick and direct massive infusions of new equity into beleaguered banks, as well as commit to other emergency measures hitherto unimaginable.

If sensible rescue efforts continue–and they will–the immediate crisis will quickly pass. Shell-shocked businesses and consumers won’t recover rapidly from the trauma of recent months, especially as we now cope with recession. But the downturn shouldn’t be prolonged: The economy here and those overseas should start to pick up no later than next spring.

That soon? Despite the crisis, the global economy still retains enormous strengths. Between the early 1980s and 2007 we lived in an economic Golden Age. Never before have so many people advanced so far economically in so short a period of time as they have during the last 25 years. Until the credit crisis, 70 million people a year were joining the middle class. The U.S. kicked off this long boom with the economic reforms of Ronald Reagan, particularly his enormous income tax cuts. We burst from the economic stagnation of the 1970s into a dynamic, innovative, high-tech-oriented economy. Even in recent years the much-maligned U.S. did well. Between year-end 2002 and year-end 2007 U.S. growth exceeded the entire size of China’s economy. Obviously China’s growth rates were higher, but China was coming off a much smaller base.

The world is flush with cash. It’s frozen because of fear, but the cash is there. Productivity gains are burgeoning.

So, will this global boom resume next year, slowly at first and then with increasing momentum? It should. Whether that happens, however, depends on the next, highly dangerous phase: <<<Read the Full Story>>>

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If the conservative era is over, can liberals come out of their defensive crouch and call themselves liberals again, instead of progressives?

In the last two decades, Democratic politicians, including Barack Obama, have abandoned the term “liberal” for “progressive.” The theory was that Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush — and Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity and Pat Buchanan — had succeeded in equating “liberal” in the public mind with weakness on defense, softness on crime, and “redistribution” of Joe the Plumber’s hard-earned money to the collective bogey evoked by a former Texas rock band’s clever name: Teenage Immigrant Welfare Mothers on Dope.

I’ve always been uncomfortable with this rather soulless and manipulative exercise in rebranding, for a number of reasons.

Objection No. 1. Futility. It’s not the name of the center-left that the right objects to, but the policies and values. Suppose the defeated Republican minority decided that it needed to rebrand itself by replacing “conservatism” with “traditionalism.” Would anybody on the left or center be fooled, if traditionalism was defined by exactly the same synthesis of free-market radicalism, anti-Darwinism and support for a neoconservative foreign policy?

The center-left is going to be trashed by the right, whether the right adopts one term or another. If conservatives continue to call the new progressives “liberals,” then the right wins, by implying, correctly, that progressives are liberals who are ashamed to admit what they really are. If, on the other hand, “liberal” becomes as extinct as “Whig” and conservatives agree to use the term “progressive,” then what has the center-left gained? Nothing. The same conservatives who formerly denounced liberals as tax-and-spend appeasers would now denounce progressives as tax-and-spend appeasers. What then? Would wimpy progressives then abandon progressivism and hope to avoid the wrath of Limbaugh by disguising themselves with a new alias — reformists, or pragmatists? Your enemies will caricature you, no matter what you call yourself.

Objection No. 2. Progressivism as neoliberalism. Some have sought to distinguish progressivism from liberalism in content. This was the project of the disproportionately Southern “neoliberals” like Bill Clinton and Al Gore and Dave McCurdy and the Democratic Leadership Council and Progressive Policy Institute in the 1980s and 1990s. Instead of using the obvious term, “moderate” or “centrist,” they sought to co-opt the term “progressive,” even though they weren’t very. In their analysis, liberalism was too identified in the public mind with organized labor and big-city machine bosses like the first Mayor Daley. They struggled and largely succeeded in creating a new Democratic Party based among upscale suburban whites and financed by the Industry Formerly Known as Wall Street rather than private-sector labor unions.

Fine by me. While the New Democrats were too conservative for my taste in some ways, a majority party has multiple factions or wings, and in the late 20th century the only way that the Democratic Party could grow was by appealing to>>>>Read the Full Story

We are never going to win elections if we remain broken up into separate factions, sometimes barely speaking to one another. Bizarre as it seems, each group within this Balkanization of the GOP is united in the belief that Ronald Reagan is its standard bearer.

This, they tell us, is the man they want to follow. Ronald Reagan was not someone who found ways to disagree with you, but spent most of his life trying to find ways to agree with you.

He always sought to find a common ground — to move the party and the country forward. A lot of Republicans quote his statement that we must not let the bad be the enemy of the good. But today’s Republican Party is wedded to allowing the bad to be the enemy of the good.

As a result, we don’t win elections. I may agree with you on taxation, for example. Or I may agree with you on immigration. If I disagree with you on abortion, however, I may just stay home on Election Day, or not vote for you; I might even vote for your opponent.

As a result, we end up electing the candidate who disagrees with us on taxation, a person who disagrees with us on immigration, and also disagrees with us on abortion and everything else. We excuse this exercise in irrationality by claiming we want to make a statement.>>>>Read the Full Article