Krugman on the necessity of running a deficit to build our way out of this Republican Dystopia.

[JohnWxy]

The real way to deal with the public debt (doubled by the Republicans during the Cheney administration) in the long term, is to rebuild our economy as quickly as possible. Investing in people is the best long term investment we can make for our economic vitality and our capacity to pay down the GOP's gift to the country: a public debt they doubled for a war to free Iraqi oil and which they then lit a fire under by creating the Deregulation Disaster of 2008.

Unless you want to prolong this disaster, this REPUBLICAN DYSTOPIA, you must spend to keep people working and money flowing. You will never see the banking community get you out of a depression by making loans to keep businesses and consumers afloat. In hard times banks always tighten credit. Of course, NOW they are extremely risk averse and tight with credit because of all the worthless toxic assets on their books (if only they had shown a little risk aversion when they were gambling their 'assets' off, we wouldn't be in this situation now!)__JW



http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/21/opinion/21krugman.html?ref=paulkrugman


But if we need to raise taxes and cut spending eventually, shouldn’t we start now? No, we shouldn’t.

Right now, we have a severely depressed economy — and that depressed economy is inflicting long-run damage. Every year that goes by with extremely high unemployment increases the chance that many of the long-term unemployed will never come back to the work force, and become a permanent underclass. Every year that there are five times as many people seeking work as there are job openings means that hundreds of thousands of Americans graduating from school are denied the chance to get started on their working lives. And with each passing month we drift closer to a Japanese-style deflationary trap.

Penny-pinching at a time like this isn’t just cruel (moreover: STUPID___JW); it endangers the nation’s future. And it doesn’t even do much to reduce our future debt burden, because stinting on spending now threatens the economic recovery, and with it the hope for rising revenues.

So now is not the time for fiscal austerity. How will we know when that time has come? The answer is that the budget deficit should become a priority when, and only when, the Federal Reserve has regained some traction over the economy, so that it can offset the negative effects of tax increases and spending cuts by reducing interest rates.

[Demeter]

1. The FIRST Step Should Be Shutting Down the Federal Reserve Banking Cartel permanently

Second step: Repudiate the dollar--start a new currency based on land, which the colonial government had until the Rothschilds made the King of England shut it down. And shut down the wars, cut the military back to defense only.

Third step: follow Chavez with the nationalization of any multinational that looks at the US cross-eyed.

Fourth step: restore the Constitution, habeus corpus, can the Patriot Actand all its ugly offspring.

Fifth step: March off the Supremes and any other dissenter to Gitmo. Return Gitmo to Cuba.

I'm feeling really cranky, today. Can you tell?

[GeorgeGist]

2. Dig, Baby, Dig ...

this clown won a Nobel Prize in Economics?

[rockymountaindem]

4. Any particular flaws in his thinking you'd care to point out? n/t

[Overseas]

3. K&R! //nt