Re: Deficit

On Mon, Nov 19, 2012 at 7:58 AM, <Larry Trout> wrote:

There is probably no one you could disagree more with on the deficit…

 

'Why don't our politicians and media get this? Because an entire deficit-cutting political industry has grown up in recent years -- starting with Ross Perot's third-party in the 1992 election, extending through Peter Peterson's Institute and other think-tanks funded by Wall Street and big business, embracing the eat-your-spinach deficit hawk crowd in the Democratic Party, and culminating in the Simpson-Bowles Commission that President Obama created in order to appease the hawks but which only legitimized them further.

 

Most of the media have bought into the narrative that our economic problems stem from an out-of-control budget deficit. They're repeating this hokum even now, when we're staring at a fiscal cliff that illustrates just how dangerous deficit reduction can be.

 

Deficit hawks routinely warn unless the deficit is trimmed we'll fall prey to inflation and rising interest rates. But there's no sign of inflation anywhere. The world is awash in underutilized capacity As for interest rates, the yield on the 10-year Treasury bill is now around 1.26 percent -- lower than it's been in living memory.

 

In fact, if there was ever a time for America to borrow more in order to put our people back to work repairing our crumbling infrastructure and rebuilding our schools, it's now.

 

Public investments that spur future job-growth and productivity shouldn't even be included in measures of government spending to begin with. They're justifiable as long as the return on those investments -- a more educated and productive workforce, and a more efficient infrastructure, both generating more and better goods and services with fewer scarce resources -- is higher than the cost of those investments'

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-reich/why-we-should-stop-obsess_b_2155489.html

 

Response:

Four Reasons Why Big Government Is Bad Government