Posted on 09/19/2011 1:18:11 PM PDT by SeekAndFind
Doctors used to believe that by draining a patient’s blood they could purge the evil “humors” that were thought to cause disease. In reality, of course, all their bloodletting did was make the patient weaker, and more likely to succumb.
Fortunately, physicians no longer believe that bleeding the sick will make them healthy. Unfortunately, many of the makers of economic policy still do. And economic bloodletting isn’t just inflicting vast pain; it’s starting to undermine our long-run growth prospects.
Some background: For the past year and a half, policy discourse in both Europe and the United States has been dominated by calls for fiscal austerity. By slashing spending and reducing deficits, we were told, nations could restore confidence and drive economic revival.
And the austerity has been real. In Europe, troubled nations like Greece and Ireland have imposed savage cuts, even as stronger nations have imposed milder austerity programs of their own. In the United States, the modest federal stimulus of 2009 has faded out, while state and local governments have slashed their budgets, so that over all we’ve had a de facto move toward austerity not so different from Europe’s.
Strange to say, however, confidence hasn’t surged. Somehow, businesses and consumers seem much more concerned about the lack of customers and jobs, respectively, than they are reassured by the fiscal righteousness of their governments. And growth seems to be stalling, while unemployment remains disastrously high on both sides of the Atlantic.
But, say apologists for the bad results so far, shouldn’t we be focused on the long run rather than short-run pain? Actually, no: the economy needs real help now, not hypothetical payoffs a decade from now.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
D-E-A-D! From the vile apologist for the 911 murderers, Krugman the dissolute hobo is out on his corner, hustling passers by...”Keep your eye on the pea. It’s under the walnut shell...tax, borrow, spend....repeat...tax, borrow, spend...repeat.” It’s the old con, the “Keynesian shell game.”
We’ve got a president driving around in brand new multimillion dollar, deluxe, Darth Vader buses fabricated in...wait for it...Canada! We’ve got a First Lady who is rightly criticized for spending in excess of $10 million in public funds on vacation this year alone. The White House is concerned over the “optics” of the blossoming Solyndra boondoggle, but not at all worried over the squandering of over a half billion dollars (can they spell STIMULUS?). Yet, Herr Krugman still writes...”fiscal austerity is reducing our future prospects...For the time being we need more, not less, government spending” Austerity? More spending? Really?
Krugman is nuts. That’s all there is to it.
He and his Keynesian economics have bled us dry, and yet he wants to let more blood.
He’s a quack.
Great minds think alike . . . I was distracted a couple of times while writing my post before hitting the button, and you beat me to the punch . . .
The proper analogy is that bleeding the patient is like squeezing $1.5 trillion of additional taxes out of a private sector that is already pale, weak and anemic.
Taking that $1.5 trillion out of the private sector to support high and oftentimes wasteful government spending would leave the patient in intensive care.
It's apparently still an effective practice. Just about the first things health care workers do is to let some blood out of you.
It worked in 1920, the last time it was tried here.
You do not get out of debt by getting another credit card. You can by robbing a bank, but the government hates competition.
The “bleeding cure” is correctly associated with excessive regulation and taxation. Government regulation and taxation are bleeding the economy dry.
Where is this austerity he’s been talking about? Am I missing something?
It’s amazing the number of different ways he can write the same BS over and over.
This fool can’t even come up with a decent analogy. A person with lowered blood levels will be weak. A person without blood is dead. A country with lower debt levels is strong, and a country with no debt is great.
Mortgaging the future to distribute goodies today is not the lifeblood of an economy, idiot!
We’re killing our economy with government. Just like the rest of the world.
It was sarcasm - Krughead is dead to me after his jackassonian 9/11 editorial screed.
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