Economists Have The Answer(s)

Harvard educated economist Brad DeLong's parents also went to Harvard, but so did two of his grandparents, two great-grandparents, and three great-great grandparents. He has been designed by natural selection to be a progressive, and he advocates the memes that have hijacked his gene pool very consistently. A recent post signified exasperation at why pols don't listen to economic experts:

90% or more of professional economists think times of high unemployment are cases of a disease that can be cured by strategic interventions to rebalance financial markets. They disagree about how and what those rebalancing policies should be. But they agree that there is a cure

That's comforting. They all have solutions, albeit solutions that are wildly different. In the middle ages if you didn't feel well a doctor would give you a variety of orthogonal cures: laxatives, emetics, bloodletting, herbs. If they didn't have a cure they could not have make a career out of it.

Of course, the best cure back then was to drink lots of fluids and rest; basically, ignore the quacks and do nothing. It's similar for macroeconomic problems, where prior to Herbert Hoover, the federal government would not do much, and growth rates were as high as ever in our history.

With all the plans in the stimulus pipeline, and vast amounts of health care and financial regulations passed but not implemented (or written), doing nothing is not going to happen in the US any time soon.