Yeah, it's discouraging to beaten down intellectually on anything, Ken, but a little comforting coming from friends with few peers on this board. They know more about economics than Krugman and more about good journalism than those who award Pulitzer Prizes.
Conservative Right positions are front and centre in America, from taking control of the mechanics of the Republican Party, eroding support for the rights of women and minorities, including voter ID laws to exclude, and abortion to contraception to Nativity scenes on the governor's lawn.
Not to say there's anything wrong with this except they're all about control, white control of coloured, male control of women, rejecting a gathering ethos of modernity of the last 200 years. Bigotry to say so? Hardly. Naming things changes things. It how we come to grips with them.
To get back to the thread, what to make of this, first couple paragraphs today from a very good Treasury Secretary under Clinton who began paying down the debt with surpluses but---crucially--it was at the right time of the business cycle.
"Why public investment really is a free lunch
By Lawrence Summers
"The IMF finds that a dollar of spending increases output by nearly $3
"It has been joked that the letters IMF stand for “it’s mostly fiscal”. The International Monetary Fund has long been a stalwart advocate of austerity as the route out of financial crisis, and every year it chastises dozens of countries for their fiscal indiscipline. Fiscal consolidation – a euphemism for cuts to government spending – is a staple of the fund’s rescue programmes. A year ago the IMF was suggesting that the US had a fiscal gap of as much as 10 per cent of gross domestic product.
"All of this makes the IMF’s recently published World Economic Outlook a remarkable and important document. In its flagship publication, the IMF advocates substantially increased public infrastructure investment, and not just in the US but much of the world. It asserts that when unemployment is high, as it is in much of the industrialised world, the stimulative impact will be greater if investment is paid for by borrowing, rather than cutting other spending or raising taxes. Most notably, the IMF asserts that properly designed infrastructure investment will reduce rather than increase government debt burdens. Public infrastructure investments can pay for themselves."
But the IMF wouldn't know, would it? Nah. Or FT responsible for publishing it. It's not a real newspaper, eh?
