The IMF has a new paper out that confirms what I have long suspected–when a state with a depressed economy reduces spending, the spending cuts lead to sufficient contraction to result in the cancellation of savings for the state. How does it work? Let’s explore.
Continue reading “How Spending Cuts Make Debt Problems Worse”
Even I failed to anticipate that the end of February would approach and the president would make no serious effort at preventing the March 1 budget sequestration from taking effect. At the end of January, we noticed that, with sequester included, the United States was prepared to see an austerity package 1.9% the size of GDP in 2013, more austerity as a share of the economy than was seen in Britain in 2011 or 2012 (though not both combined). What’s important to note is that, despite Obama’s recent token effort to get congress to repeal or further delay sequestration, which accounts for $78 billion of the $304 billion in spending cuts and tax increases planned for this year, all of this is his fault and his fault alone. Continue reading “The Obama Austerity Package”
So Barack Obama wants to raise the federal minimum wage to $9.00 an hour from its current $7.25 level. Is this a good idea? Many bloggers and economists will argue that lower wages mean more jobs and that this relationship is mathematically fixed and a basic fact of economics. They will seek to paint a picture in which all serious or reasonable people agree that higher wages will hurt business or stifle growth. I intend to show their line of reasoning to be overly simplistic and to question this consensus.
I ran across an interesting hunk of data supplied by Paul Krugman that confirms what I have long suspected–American politics is no longer a contest between the progressive left and the conservative right; it is a mere feud between different conservatives. Let me show you what I mean.
Joe Scarborough, a former congressman and currently a co-host for the show Morning Joe on MSNBC, had Paul Krugman on his show the other day (you can view the clip in its entirety here). In the segment, Krugman gave what amounts to a standard Keynesian view of the global economic crisis–spending cuts damage growth, the stimulus package was insufficiently large, debt and deficits should be tackled only once growth has been restored, and so on. For those of us who check in with Krugman on his blog, they amount to the key set of Keynesian insights Krugman chooses to highlight. What is much more interesting is the opinion piece Scarborough wrote afterwards, in which he demonstrates that, like Jon Stewart, he is not an economist.
Benjamin Studebaker 