There Is No National Sock Shortage

Yglesias:

This USA Today story about kids asking santa for basic necessities is actually more tragic than most people recognize:

Santa Claus and his elves are seeing more heartbreaking letters this year as children cite their parents’ economic troubles in their wish lists. U.S. Postal Service workers who handle letters addressed to Santa at the North Pole say more letters ask for basics — coats, socks and shoes — rather than Barbie dolls, video games and computers.

Something important to note here is that this is not only sad, but fundamentally avoidable. The world is not suffering from a shortage of socks. If the government tried to give an iPad to everyone who writes in asking for one, we’d swiftly run out of iPads. The supply is constrained. But we have lots of socks. There’s nothing stopping the government from buying socks and giving them to everyone. What about the money? Doesn’t the money have to come from somewhere? Not really. As Ben Bernanke says “[t]he U.S. government has a technology, called a printing press (or today, its electronic equivalent), that allows it to produce as many U.S. dollars as it wishes at no cost.”
Now of course having the Post Office initiate a big sock-purchasing program would be pretty goofy. But the point is that we have in this country right now lots of factories running below capacity. Lots of workers doing no work. Lots of trucks not delivering anything. We’re not short on ability to produce more things, or on ability to transport, and distribute more things. We have citizens who would buy more things if they had more money. The real shortfall we’re facing, in other words, is a shortage of money. This is a good kind of problem to have, since it’s actually really easy to fix: Just print more. But it’s also an extremely frustrating problem to have, since it’s so easy to fix. The shortage of money isn’t the only problem America has. We also have, for example, a shortage of really excellent teachers and it’s hard to know what to do with that. But our money shortage is very solvable.