Stupid, stupid, stupid...

[LoveLife&Laughter]

When will they get it?

Even William Kuttner agrees it's been a very bad week for the merchants of austerity.

In Europe, the just-released statistics on first quarter performance show EU nations sliding deeper into recession. In Spain and Greece, unemployment rates are approaching a staggering 30 percent. In Britain, the Tory government took as good news the fact that the UK managed to eke out 0.3 percent growth. Even Germany, the prime sponsor of these policies, is on the edge of recession.

You don't promote growth by slashing demand.

Supposedly, fiscal tightening improves business confidence. But if some entrepreneur somewhere decided to break ground for a new factory because the president and Congress at last cut the budget, nobody could find such a person. Even the Washington Post editorial page, which has long been promoting a budget bargain built on more cuts, warned in its lead Sunday editorial, that austerity is pinching too hard -- in Europe, that is. How about at home?

[LoveLife&Laughter]

Austerity is having a devastating effect on health in Europe and North America, driving suicide, depression and infectious diseases and reducing access to medicines and care,  http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/04/29/austerity-health-reduces-h...

[P.A.]

When you really think about the austerity programs they defy common sense. Nobody is going to create jobs if there is no demand for what they produce. I is that simple, period.

[exedir]

Its the economy stupid. or at least it was for James Carville as he gave the watch phrase as campaign manager in the first Bill Clinton presidential campaign, and it is still true, no matter how stupid it was then, or is now decades latter.

The real problem is you neither spend your way out of or cut enough to solve what has happened and is happening now as far as the economy is concerned, the world's economy that is.  

What is majorly different in the two decades of when Carville made the statement is that we, the United States, is more integrated and more dependent on the world economy then we were in 1991.  Plus the US and world economies has suffered severe shocks that make what we are facing more difficult and complicated than spending and cutting our way prosperity on the back of manufactured debt.

The only solution is growth, which means investment that does stuff, not just putting money into stuff and hoping for the best.  And right now that is the rub, most of what is being done with money is chasing money not investing.

When I was in school studying economics things were simpler, the fight was against the evils of inflation and the need for a stable growth of money all set  against econometric ideas that there was a science in all of what happens in an economy as a game was played out.  However, things have changed, the rules are now not as sharp and the results tend to be more surprising and unanticipated in that economics is once more a social science, not mathematics.

What we have currently is uncertainty and a lack of opportunity while awash in cash sitting to be used. A stagnation really of ideas and risks with levels of rewards that are attractive enough to put money back to work rather sitting on balance sheets, bank accounts and vaults, here and elsewhere.

[Ioruach]

Speaking of cuts, did anyone notice that congress is insisting on building more Abrams tanks even when the army says it neither wants nor needs them. The bottom line is that cuts are legitimate if the right things are being cut.   From the Huffington Post:

WASHINGTON -- Built to dominate the enemy in combat, the Army's hulking Abrams tank is proving equally hard to beat in a budget battle.

Lawmakers from both parties have devoted nearly half a billion dollars in taxpayer money over the past two years to build improved versions of the 70-ton Abrams.But senior Army officials have said repeatedly, "No thanks."

It's the inverse of the federal budget world these days, in which automatic spending cuts are leaving sought-after pet programs struggling or unpaid altogether. Republicans and Democrats for years have fought so bitterly that lawmaking in Washington ground to a near-halt.

Yet in the case of the Abrams tank, there's a bipartisan push to spend an extra $436 million on a weapon the experts explicitly say is not needed.

"If we had our choice, we would use that money in a different way," Gen. Ray Odierno, the Army's chief of staff, told The Associated Press this past week.

Why are the tank dollars still flowing? Politics.
 

[ProblemAgain]

congress has done the same thing about an amphibious assault vehicle that the marine corps doesn't want and that is defective yet the corps has been forced to include in their budget because it is assembled in 'important' districts.....where are people who bitched about having politicians running the military a la vietnam?...

 

[exedir]

Waste not..want not...not a political axiom....whereas earmarks are found gold....