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 ...
Funny, I was just thinking the other day that the people defending Keynesian economics were a lot like those defending blood-letting. Never mind that nothing we said would happen did happen, imagine how bad it would have been if we didn’t.
Funny, I don’t see anything on the page.
It is as if the author was dead to me.
Anyone else experiencing the same thing?
I can’t see any words on the page, but I keep hearing faint cries of “Bleed the rich!”
I wish someone would do to krugman what obama is doing to the rest of us.
LLS
we should ALL go out and blow money we don’t have just like big brother
Funny, I don’t see any austerity except individual austerity forced on people
I do see a boatload of people who want to work but no one hiring because of the uncertainty of the environment. Noone can plan
I agree austerity never works. But Krugman considers these mythical “cuts” to be austerity. Hardly, when you are running 1.5 trillion dollar annual deficits that is austerity. You are taking money from the private productive sector and giving it to the public unproductive sector. That is why Europe is in a mess, their generous welfare states have run into the big wall of demographics.
To rid ourselves of Krugman supported austerity you turn the total economic engine over to the people in the productive sector who now how to produce economic growth and jobs. You don’t raise taxes, you lower them to 1984 levels, you get rid of the capital gains tax, and abolish every regulation produced since 1973 and see how much the economy grows and how many real jobs are produced.
We tried Krugman’s way, it failed. Now lets try again the way we know works.
RE: Funny, I don’t see anything on the page.
CLICK THIS LINK :
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/19/opinion/economic-bleeding-cure.html?_r=1&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss
Has this guy ever heard of Japan?
RE: We tried Krugman’s way, it failed. Now lets try again the way we know works.
It is Krugman’s contention that even the first stimulus and QE’s are NOT ENOUGH. We need more of it.
And of course you'll be spending our money.
Bill O'Reilly kept yelling at Krugman, "But the people can't pay anymore taxes...they don't have the money!"
Krugman stared blankly each of the three times OR said it.
He reminds me of the Sheriff of Notingham.
Forget leeches, what we really need are cattle prods to zap the hineys of all those on the entitlement teats to get off their butts and work for a living rather than “leeching” off the system. This applies to businesses that are on the government teat too.
Krugman is never right about economics, so why does anyone think he might be right about medicine?
Where does that ancient remedy of bloodletting come in?
The discovery suggests that bloodletting, done early enough, may have slowed staph infections by starving germs of iron, National Institutes of Health iron specialist Tracy Rouault wrote in a review of Skaar’s research.
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/09/10/health/main642559.shtml?tag=untagged
The less blood that’s available, the harder it is for the bacterium to scrounge up enough heme to thrive.
“Bloodletting in the preantibiotic era may have been an effective mechanism for starving bacterial pathogens of iron and slowing bacterial growth,” writes Rouault.
http://men.webmd.com/news/20040910/bloodlettings-benefits
Better analogy is a tolerable but growing tumor which is left alone due to potential inconvenience/discomfort to the patient, until it gets so big removal is vital to survival, which is not assured due to the severity of surgery required.
“Bleeding” patients was a manifestation of medical ignorance.
Modern surgery is not.
The $1.5T deficit MUST be removed. NOW. Yeah, it will hurt, but economic death is not a desirable alternative. (I’ve had the option of painful heart surgery vs. drop dead. Time for the surgeon!)
RE: Bill O’Reilly kept yelling at Krugman, “But the people can’t pay anymore taxes...they don’t have the money!”
Krugman stared blankly each of the three times OR said it.
_________________________________________________________________________
I wonder why Krugman did not respond with -— oh yes they do — we have hundreds of thousands of millionaires in this country who don’t pay their fair share.
And I wonder what BOR’s response would be...
Just fantasizing my friend.
The "austerity" he so fears is government austerity, not austerity of the whole country.
The analogy isn't to the medieval practice of bleeding, unless what you're talking about is the government bleeding money from the entire country in order to "cure" its ills. THAT won't work, and will just wind up killing the "patient" (with kindness, perhaps, but killing it nonetheless.)
The better analogy is to, perhaps, a liver that has developed a large, cancerous tumor, now grown large enough to seriously affect the "quality of life" of the patient.
"Bleeding" a tumor like that does no good at all--it will just kill the patient that much quicker, actually.
What you have to do is cut the tumor out, in an attempt to restore the proper function of the liver. Humans need a liver. We need a government. But we have a government that has grown too large and is now beginning to consume the entire country.
It needs to be cut back down to size.
We’re killing our economy through excessive taxation and regulation. ESPECIALLY regulations.
We need to roll back regulations and taxes until the engine starts again. Then keep them a a low level.
I thought bleeding = spending as in the common expression ‘bleeding red ink’. When someone is referred to as a leech, that means that he is sucking off someone, as in draining their wealth. A leech is in fact a type of parasite.
I hate this POS. Paul Krugman, hia brain consists of two spirochetes held together by a neuron. Let’s leech this guy.
As if the government has approached anything that could remotely be called “austere”. Laughable.
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