Against Learned Helplessness - NYTimes.com

" Learned helplessness" is a brilliant new polemical phrase from Paul Krugman, who is not much of a phrase-maker.  It ranks up there with crackpot realism (ideas like  "mutual assured destruction" which at least had the right acronym - MAD).  Here it refers to the fact that "everyone knows" that we can't have a massive government jobs program (Yes, we can!), and that we can't write down consumer  debt (Yes, we can!  by inflating wages and prices).
Against Learned Helplessness - NYTimes.com: 
by Paul Krugman
"The core of our economic problem is, instead, the debt — mainly mortgage debt — that households ran up during the bubble years of the last decade. Now that the bubble has burst, that debt is acting as a persistent drag on the economy, preventing any real recovery in employment. And once you realize that the overhang of private debt is the problem, you realize that there are a number of things that could be done about it.

For example, we could have W.P.A.-type programs putting the unemployed to work doing useful things like repairing roads — which would also, by raising incomes, make it easier for households to pay down debt. We could have a serious program of mortgage modification, reducing the debts of troubled homeowners. We could try to get inflation back up to the 4 percent rate that prevailed during Ronald Reagan’s second term, which would help to reduce the real burden of debt."