Politics Has Doomed Us

From Brian Beutler at TPM:

As the U.S. government and governments in Europe respond to the global economic slump with conservative austerity measures, it’s easy to forget that the overwhelming professional economic consensus is that depressed countries that can afford to should be doing the opposite — ramping up government purchases of goods and services and putting off the budget cuts and tax increases for a few years.

This isn’t even close to what’s happening. And as the space between what these experts think should happen and what global elites are actually doing grows, the experts’ forecast is becoming more and more pessimistic.

Nowhere was this gloominess more clearly worn than at a symposium hosted by the New America Foundation in downtown Washington Wednesday evening.

The event itself centered on an October paper called “The Way Forward” by Daniel Alpert, Robert Hockett, and Nouriel Roubini, which explained both the sources of U.S. economic woes, and what needs to be done to fix them. But the paper’s authors, and the expert panel they invited to discuss it with them, all agreed that American and European politics are so out of step with the proper diagnosis and treatment that the country is likely to hobble along for years — and could even experience another recession.

You can read the entire story at the link above.

9 December 2011