"AUSTERITY IS A CANARD".
But then-- most of you already knew this. More below from Brown University's Mark Blyth.
Canard, trope, truism, call it what you will. It’s one of those wonderful “well, it stands to reason that,” common-sense sort of tropes. The problem is, it fails because it’s not a common-sense argument. If there is a single insight that deserves the title of the key insight of macroeconomics, it’s the one that the whole is different from the sum of its parts. While it makes sense for anyone, family or firm or even state, to try and reduce its debts in order to grow better, if everybody tries it at the same time it becomes self-defeating. You need income from which to save, so if everybody tries to save at once nobody’s generating any income and therefore the project becomes self-defeating…
The common sense is, well, the more you cut the more you’ll be rewarded. No, I say the more you cut the more debt you end up with. That’s what I mean by being a canard, a trope. it’s one of those common-sensical things that seems to be true but just look at the evidence and you’ll find that the reverse is actually true.
But with the victory of the anti-austerity party Syriza in Greece’s recent election, the state-of-play in Europe has changed dramatically. After years of economic pain and dislocation, Greek citizens now have a reason — however small — to hope that political pressure may force the leaders of the eurozone (German Chancellor Angela Merkel, first and foremost) to reevaluate their approach. Still, years of failure have not loosened austerity’s grip on much of the West; the appeal of the economic philosophy to its proponents seems to operate beyond the level of simple reason.
ONE MORE TIME: the "fiscal conservatism/austerity" advocated by snake oil salesmen like Norquist is in fact
selective. Our massive level of "defense" spending which equals the total spending of something like seventeen other first world nations
combined-- THAT spending is never actually to be cut. in the words of Pelosi in reference to single payer and impeachment of Bush II: it's "off the table". this massive level of spending year after year simply goes on and on-- regardless of who controls the White House or congress.
Instead; social programs like SNAP must be cut-- in spite of the fact our nation's childhood poverty rate is thru the roof.
In short: "austerity" is a gigantic fraud. a Fraud put into place by the worst human beings currently on the Planet. please read the entire piece in Salon.
http://www.salon.com/...