Like a record spinning.....

With all the talk of the deficit commission going around, I had prepared a very lengthy post on the relative merits of the commission. I was going to post lots of charts, graphs, and discussion of the topic focusing mainly on the points raised by Dr. Krugman.

But that post had gotten so overly large as to be unwieldy, so instead, I will just sulk and point to this post from earlier this year:

It really sucks to be right about the predictability of politicians and the punditocracy. But if I recall, some extremely brilliant blogger had this to say several months ago:

It is like people refuse to learn the lessons that history teaches us.

Reminder FDR listened to those who were clamoring for "deficit reduction" and that plunged the US back into depression.

I make this simple statement ignore the budget hawks for now. Do what we must to repair the economy and get job growth positive. I guarantee the public will not say a fucking word about the deficit if that happens.

The American people have an extremely limited vocabulary when it comes to economics. During high economic anxiety deficit reduction is always the first thing people say they want, even though it is the wrong thing to do in the midst of an economic contraction.

But don't listen to me, I don't really know that much about economics or "liquidity traps", but there are a few articles, from actual experts like Dr. Paul Krugman here and here, with a solid piece in the Washington post, here.

This is why we need to do better at teaching history.

This also looks very bad, for the rest of us, because the people in charge are either to blinded by
ideology or too stupid to take the proper corrective.

That's right, I have quoted myself twice! Anyway, this push for austerity is common during economic contractions. When it is absolutely the wrong sort of thing to do. Cutting spending in the midsts of a recession is a sure fire way to prolong that recession.

So again I must ask, why do we have a deficit commission instead of a "growth" or "get people jobs" commission?

There are some arguments and suggestions in the chairman's commission report that do bear some discussion, however, the very existence of the commission is concession to the arguments made by Republicans. The idea that we are talking about this instead of ways to create more jobs or encourage growth is extremely disappointing and demoralizing.

-Cheers