No.
Regards,
Shodan
On when to make cuts:
But that’s a chicken and egg question – do we wait for economy to get better and then make cuts or cut today to enable conditions for economy to recover.
Let’s get through this quickly – the amount of public debt today cannot be made to correlate, mathematically to a reasonable incremental increase in economic activity. What I mean is this – at the rate debt is being increased over a time (a factual debt increase trend) simple mathematical models show that economic activity cannot reach the frequency and amplitude over the same period of time needed so that people say – now we can cut. It’s simply impossible. Many people still have that belief and the story of that belief is like any other – if it didn’t happen yet it is only because we are not waiting long enough.
I don’t mind people trying things but it seems to me that the idea of getting out of trouble via debt has run out of options. I don’t see why wouldn’t Democrat try and cut spending. At this point it’s no longer a cut it’s just closing at least one out of 100 holes.
On why economy is lagging:
That’s an old school economics and it may have worked before. The thing is when you speak of “aggregate supply” you are talking or imagining durable goods and services. But guess what, what US economy is in right now is an a situation where "aggregate supply” of debt has increased beyond ability of “aggregate demand” to take it in. The only way to bring into balance available debt and ability to take the debt in is to cut the debt spending.
I was talking about this in the other thread about the value of money and debt – what I see is that most people are thinking about today’s financial complexities with glasses of the old paradigms. And they are clutching to them with somewhat ideological vigour.
On who’s doing what about economy:
Obama’s economic plan is sorely missed. In fact, it’s non-existent. Period.
Cite?
Since the latter is nonsense, it’s really an egg and then chicken kind of thing - you know, something for which we actually do have lots of evidence.
This is really just gibberish.
We have perfect real world examples of the effects of different policies on growth and debt. You can look at the 80’s, 90’s and 2000 for a very nice naturalistic A-B-A design. You can also look at the effects of austerity in Europe. The evidence is crisp and clear.
How so? What criteria and what evidence do you have to support this belief?
This also makes no sense.
Ah, so old models just don’t work because they’re old. Sure.
The only way to not be familiar with Obama’s economic plan is to studiously avoid finding out about it. You’re certainly in [del]good[/del] a lot of company there.
http://www.macrotrends.org/1381/debt-to-gdp-ratio-historical-chart
The only chance you have is to stop debt increase. And even then, the burden of existing debt makes it near impossible.
The level of ignorance displayed in this thread is mind-boggling. Discretionary federal spending is down, not up. The budgets of important agencies like the State Dept. and FAA have been declining in relative terms even before the sequester, and are often judged as inadequate.
One of the larger cuts to be made in the sequester program is a 2% across-the-board payment reduction to hospitals, doctors, etc. serving Medicare patients. Some such cut might be appropriate, but reducing payments to private-industry health professionals hardly fits the right-wing stereotype of laying off Beltway drones who suckle at the taxpayers’ teats.
I’d ask those who blame the deficit on left-wing spending programs to demonstrate their knowledge by commenting on graphs like this one.
This is my problem with the demand-side argument. We might as well hire millions of government workers to dig holes and millions more to fill up the holes. We would all be rich because now more people could afford concerts, restaurant meals, and maid service, lifting them up, etc.
It’s the broken window fallacy and a basic reason why the free market works: The private sector does a better job of allocating resources (and jobs) than central planning bureaucrats.
But anytime we talk about cutting government, we talk about the effects of lower demand in the economy. That’s very possible, but it will always be true and spending will never come down.
That’s not the broken-window fallacy. It’s the strawman fallacy. You can have government doing useful things too, ya know. Highways, dams, airports, bridges … heard of any of them?
Besides, all the empirical evidence of history shows that Keynes was right and the supply-side ideologues are wrong. Or else we’d have had all that job creation they talked about sometime over that last 12 years. When do you think that shit is going to kick in?
Yet another straw man. Nobody has said that public sector jobs aren’t subject to reductions.
For the thirteen thousandth time, the idea of furloughing government workers who have valuable work to do just to deal with a manufactured budget crisis is stupid. It’s stupid because that means valuable work doesn’t get done, AND it has an impact on the economy. It’s already been shown in this thread that the government is laying off teachers, police, and other “non-bureaucrat” type government employees at a rate that is basically as fast as the private sector is creating jobs. Again, as an example, laying off teachers when classrooms are crowded is doubly stupid because it slows down the economy AND makes schools worse.
Yes, because digging and filling holes has the exact same boost for the economy as building bridges, investing in new technologies and research and keeping food safe and water from being poisoned.
I haven’t noticed any left-wing spending program blame.
And I would agree that the biggest impact - from the graph at the link you posted - are made by Bush cuts. Not only that they were detrimental to the overall dynamic of US economy and debt it can also be shown that all the wealth accumulated via Bush cuts contributed steeply to wealth inequality.
I hope we can agree that one can be against further debt AND for expiry of Bush cuts.
Graphs don’t prove causality. If they did, I think banana consumption in Tanzania could be shown to increase adultery in Venezuela.
Macroeconomics is complicated, but I don’t think you can refute Keynesian with random exaggerations like “only chance … near impossible.” I’ll agree that deficit reduction is an important medium-term goal, but the path forward is not to stab ourselves in the eye.
Among workers in sex clubs, don’t the masochists get higher pay than sadists for comparable skill levels? I wonder how much of extra pay to government workers is needed just to compensate them for being subject to inane right-wing ridicule. 
I’d just like to see one cite showing that a decrease in gov’t spending leads to a better economy. Every cent the gov’t spends, borrowed or not, ends up in someone’s pocket (mostly Americans’). Taking that away takes money out of people’s hands that would otherwise be spent. As stated above, discretionary spending is hardly a problem and SS can be solvent for decades with minor tweaks. Healthcare spending is the major burden on us and will be until someone comes up with a clever idea to lower costs.
Negotiate prices for drugs?