Wednesday, October 24, 2012

Cutting Federal Spending right now is a horrible, horrible idea

To understand why cutting Federal spending now is a truly horrible idea that will cause mass suffering in the US, i.e. beyond the quite slow recovery from a deep recession we're currently experiencing, please take a look at this article, and the link it references:
http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/10/24/the-economic-consequences-of-mr-osborne/
The chart shows how Great Britain, having been in a similar economic situation to the US in 2009, managed to INCREASE the size of their depression through budget cuts--rather than experiencing the weak recovery we've had. It makes use of data on consumer and financial industry debt to predict the course of the recession with no fiscal changes either way. The result? The US is doing moderately better than, according to the data, we had any right to expect, and the UK, starting in 2010, has been doing worse than us, falling below predicted levels of GDP growth in 2012 as the cuts bite harder.
 So what do we do about the current runaway deficits that feel so dangerous? Good question, and here's your answer: leave them alone for now. Wait until we're out of our current unemployment and growth crisis and the economy is booming again (or something close to it) before gradually withdrawing gov't support. There's not much disadvantage to doing this, because right now the government can borrow at about 0 percent interest on a ten year bond (not including inflation--and, yes, when the world economy picks up again, it'll become much more expensive to borrow. That's fine, because that's exactly when we should stop borrowing :) ).

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