The Keynes adherents would be a bit more interesting if they were less predictable.

On planet Washington, where reducing the federal budget deficit continues to be more important than creating jobs, everyone is talking about “triggers” that automatically go into effect if certain other things don’t happen.

Yet no one is talking about the most obvious trigger of all — no budget cuts until the official level of unemployment falls to 5 percent, its level before the Great Recession.

What if it never does?  There's no evidence that it will, you know.

Here's the problem, in a nutshell:

See that nice move from roughly 1980 onward? 

Guess what it correlates with?

Notice anything?  The so-called "acceleration" in that labor participation rate was driven by...... debt being accumulated in excess of growth in GDP.

Or, to put it more simply, by fake demand.

Demand that didn't really exist. Pressure on the production of goods and services and their prices that would not have existed were they to have been purchased with economic surplus.  That pressure grew more and more strident in the form of more and more debt per unit of GDP added, and after the 2000 recession we did on steroids, reaching an insane level of about $6 of new debt in the economy for every dollar of GDP increase in 2007 - right before it all went to hell.

That's where your "asset and price inflation" came from too.

What Robert wants to do is go back to that model.  But you can't get there from here, because there's nobody who can create credit at that rate any more.  The Federal Government is madly spinning its wheels in an attempt to do so, but it has failed to move the needle as the private economy remains mired in too much debt and everyone, including Reich, doesn't want to see the bad debt resolved since doing so will blow up all the Ponzi finance institutions..

So we have a consumer who still is told he "should" pay 3x-5x his income for a house "and we'll be happy to loan you the money at a little interest", instead of the house being 1x income and him being told he should save 10% of his income for ten years and then pay cash. Cars are now frequently 1x incomes, and people are told "just pay a little interest" (over 4 or 5 years!) instead of saving the price of one over some period - say, five years.  The cost of borrowing has been destroyed by active suppression thereby destroying the incentive for saving, which in turn means no capital formation.  And the latter has resulted in the roughly $6 trillion in savings being reduced an effective zero earnings rate from a blended rate that was probably in the general area of 3%, which is a direct whack on the economy of close to $200 billion in spending that is shifted from the prudent to the imprudent that are trying to maintain the Ponzi scheme!

When you look at the FRED employment chart what you see is that prior to the monstrous accumulation of leverage in the system the natural employment rate was about where is now! 

In fact, we are currently at the upper end of the historical range!

Why is this important?  Simple: Robert is still trying to have his 1990s, the Internet Bubble, or his 2000s, the housing bubble, back for another round of stupidity.

We can't have that back as there is no debt payment capacity expansion available in the economy to do so.

The underlying problem with Robert's (and the rest of the clowncar brigade) meme is that it's Keynesian Revisionism.  The simple fact of the matter is that those who claim belief in Keynes' economic theories are actively lying about what he called for.

Keynes called for running budget surpluses during good times and paying down the debt.  This stored surplus was then used during recessions to blunt their impact.  This is the premise of countercyclical economic policy at the government level in an attempt to "balance" natural economic cycles.

Ok Robert, when was that policy -- ever in the last 40 years -- practiced on the restrained side?

That's simple: NEVER.

Thus there's no surplus to spend.  Nor will there be in the future.  We know this because every time it's been claimed before it's been a lie.  Therefore we must presume that it will be a lie this time.

And Robert, let's hold you personally accountable for this to some degree, shall we?   After all, you were one of Clinton's secretaries (of Labor), right?  You don't think that just perhaps you should take responsibility for your blatant and outrageous perversion of Keynes' policies, do you?

Well, I do.

And despite your desire to bury the truth, the numbers and graphs are what they are.

Come back to the debate when you're willing to stop with the revisionism and actually propose something that accepts that which has been done in the past along with what is possible for the future, including an admission of your personal involvement in the mess we find ourselves in today.