What president believed in his heart and soul that austerity was the answer to pull America out of its economic mess? Herbert Hoover. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying Hoover wasn’t a great man, he was just a shitty president. The work Hoover did in feeding millions of people during the Great War and afterward is a shining example of the good in humanity. Even the work Hoover did as a mining engineer was amazing. However, as a president, Hoover sucked ass.
But now as we are STILL in an economic mess brought on by mismanagement of the economy by Wall Street and the previous Republican administration, there is talk about stopping spending and balancing the budget. Paul Krugman writes:
For the last few months, I and others have watched, with amazement and horror, the emergence of a consensus in policy circles in favor of immediate fiscal austerity. That is, somehow it has become conventional wisdom that now is the time to slash spending, despite the fact that the world’s major economies remain deeply depressed.
This conventional wisdom isn’t based on either evidence or careful analysis. Instead, it rests on what we might charitably call sheer speculation, and less charitably call figments of the policy elite’s imagination — specifically, on belief in what I’ve come to think of as the invisible bond vigilante and the confidence fairy.
Remember this as this debate heats up, Republicans have no — NO — moral or political right to make policy after they so totally fucked up the world during the first decade of this new century.