1673 The Age of Keynes, by Robert Lekachman (read 21 Nov 1981) This is a 1966 book and the author is full of glow about the Kennedy and Johnson economic policies, and I sure would like to know what he says today, when "balance the budget" is a loud cry of newly-elected Senators, etc. I was impressed by these sentences: "Strongly as the President [Kennedy] spoke, he evidently thought it prudent to stop short of the standard textbook proposition that the size of an internally held public debt is of little importance since its handling amounts to no more than a series of income transfers among citizens of the same political jurisdiction. Certainly, there is no sense in which the public debt represents the sort of burden upon the community that a private debt does upon an individual." This is, of course, a little more elaborate way of saying the debt is not bad, since we "owe it to ourselves." But a trillion dollars? Well, anyway, this book was still interesting and a good antidote to the Reagan aura. [2008 note: "internally held public debt"--not today's situation.] ( )

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