“Policy makers seem helpless in the face of bad economic news,” you open your article about the Fed and the American budget (“Policy Fatigue,” June 11, 2011). Starting with the budget, the Republicans have stopped the Obama administration dead in its Keynesian tracks. Among other things, the big infrastructure rebuilding program is moribund. But the Fed is another matter. Ben Bernanke’s quantitative easing has done next to nothing to hoist the American economy up. It has only helped the Wall Street foment yet another bubble. The unemployment figures show clearly enough that the recovery does not deserve that name. Economists have failed once again at defining it properly, let alone helping the economy out of it. Returning to policy fatigue, it is very welcome. So-called policy has failed America utterly. It is thus high time for Keynesian policies of old. The Great Depression offers good lessons for the Great Recession, its duplicitous name notwithstanding. And the infrastructure rebuilding program is there already. Mind you, only the Republicans are in the way.