Utter folly

Paul Krugman does not mince his words :

"The point is that we could actually do a lot to help our economies simply by reversing the destructive austerity of the last two years. That’s true even in America, which has avoided full-fledged austerity at the federal level but has seen big spending and employment cuts at the state and local level. Remember all the fuss about whether there were enough “shovel ready” projects to make large-scale stimulus feasible? Well, never mind: all the federal government needs to do to give the economy a big boost is provide aid to lower-level governments, allowing these governments to rehire the hundreds of thousands of schoolteachers they have laid off and restart the building and maintenance projects they have canceled.


Look, I understand why influential people are reluctant to admit that policy ideas they thought reflected deep wisdom actually amounted to utter, destructive folly. But it’s time to put delusional beliefs about the virtues of austerity in a depressed economy behind us."

Read : http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/20/opinion/krugman-pain-without-gain.html?_r=1&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss.

Is he completely right ? I don't know - dead bodies generally cannot be revived. But slashing them up most certainly is not the solution.

The austerity policy is a delusional folly and an utter failure. John Sixpack pays until he is blue in the face, and the only ones who profit from it are the banks.

As usual.