Mark Thoma stresses the importance of automatic stabilizers--food stamps and other "taxes and transfers" that "automatically change with changes in economic conditions in a way that dampens economic cycles." Over at Moneywatch , Thoma writes that these stabilizers are key in mitigating the impact of economic downturns. And yet we have spent so little time discussing them during the past two years, largely because, Thoma writes "automatic stabilizers bypass this difficulty by doing exactly what their name implies, they kick in automatically without the need for Congressional action." We need to do a careful and thorough assessment of the strengths and weaknesses of existing automatic stabilizers, to identify missing pieces and extraneous parts, and we need to design new stabilizers that can improve our ability to smooth fluctuations in the economy (e.g. payroll taxes that decline automatically when conditions deteriorate, investment tax credits that vary countercyclically, or a continuously updated list of infrastructure projects that can be started ahead of schedule or brought online anew if the economy goes into recession). Then we need to begin the difficult political process of getting the needed change through Congress and signed into law before the next crisis hits. Read The Importance of Automatic Stabilizers here .