The difference between stupidity and genius is that genius has its limits.

Albert Einstein

Via the NYT:

But his living standards slowly crumbled along with Japan’s overall economy. First, he was forced to reduce trips abroad and then eliminate them. Then he traded the Mercedes for a cheaper domestic model. Last year, he sold his condo — for a third of what he paid for it, and for less than what he still owed on the mortgage he took out 17 years ago.

“Japan used to be so flashy and upbeat, but now everyone must live in a dark and subdued way,” said Masato, 49, who asked that his full name not be used because he still cannot repay the $110,000 that he owes on the mortgage.

Few nations in recent history have seen such a striking reversal of economic fortune as Japan. The original Asian success story, Japan rode one of the great speculative stock and property bubbles of all time in the 1980s to become the first Asian country to challenge the long dominance of the West.

But the bubbles popped in the late 1980s and early 1990s, and Japan fell into a slow but relentless decline that neither enormous budget deficits nor a flood of easy money has reversed. For nearly a generation now, the nation has been trapped in low growth and a corrosive downward spiral of prices, known as deflation, in the process shriveling from an economic Godzilla to little more than an afterthought in the global economy.

The continued stimulus spending by the Japanese government has crushed their economy. And of course, Liberal Democrats in our government are calling for even more spending:

“The federal government has provided a couple hundred billions dollars in additional stimulus beyond the Recovery Act stimulus we put in place a year and a half ago,” Zandi said. “In my view the recovery needs more help.”

“We have two trillion or so dollars of unaddressed infrastructure needs,” Tyson said. “You want to start with something really big? Start with developing a high-speed rail system . . . [or] modernizing our air control traffic system, for goodness sake. These are things we want to do anyway.”

Tyson, who is a key economic adviser to President Obama, said the issue of the national debt, which the Republicans are ratcheting up as a key economic problem, is not important at all at the moment. The immediate need, she said, is to create jobs.

Aside from the simple fact that jobs cannot be ‘created’ by taking money out of the productive part of the economy (or worse devalue our currency by ‘creating’ more of it) and giving it to another. Stimulus spending didn’t work during the Great Depression and it didn’t work in Japan.

Why are Liberal Democrats claiming it will work now?

Almost every nation rejected Obama’s plan for massive government spending, and they are in better shape for it. Furthermore, the global economy would be in even better shape if the largest economy in the world was growing again and not pursuing flawed Keynesian economic models.