How to Kill a Recovery – NYTimes.com

Another prescient, forewarning article from Paul Krugman at the New York Times…

I’m starting to feel really powerless that so many smart people are being ignored by the opportunistic folks in Washington…

There was a time we respected the thoughts of a Nobel Prize Winning Economist…

There was a time when we wanted the smartest, best educated people to run the country…

I’m afraid that time has passed….

Instead it’s being run by ruthless politicians more concerned with short term political gains and helping their Corporate and wealthy contributors than with doing their job as elected officials and guardians of the public good….

And the American people elected these fools…

Because too many people felt powerless and didn’t vote…

But I always remember, the famous quote from Edmund Burke:  “All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men (and women) do nothing.”

The clear and present danger to recovery, however, comes from politics — specifically, the demand from House Republicans that the government immediately slash spending on infant nutrition, disease control, clean water and more. Quite aside from their negative long-run consequences, these cuts would lead, directly and indirectly, to the elimination of hundreds of thousands of jobs — and this could short-circuit the virtuous circle of rising incomes and improving finances.

Of course, Republicans believe, or at least pretend to believe, that the direct job-destroying effects of their proposals would be more than offset by a rise in business confidence. As I like to put it, they believe that the Confidence Fairy will make everything all right.

But there’s no reason for the rest of us to share that belief. For one thing, it’s hard to see how such an obviously irresponsible plan — since when does starving the I.R.S. for funds help reduce the deficit? — can improve confidence.

Beyond that, we have a lot of evidence from other countries about the prospects for “expansionary austerity” — and that evidence is all negative. Last October, a comprehensive study by the International Monetary Fund concluded that “the idea that fiscal austerity stimulates economic activity in the short term finds little support in the data.”

And do you remember the lavish praise heaped on Britain’s conservative government, which announced harsh austerity measures after it took office last May? How’s that going? Well, business confidence did not, in fact, rise when the plan was announced; it plunged, and has yet to recover. And recent surveys suggest that confidence has fallen even further among both businesses and consumers, indicating, as one report put it, that the private sector is “unprepared to fill the hole left by public sector cuts.”

Which brings us back to the U.S. budget debate.

Over the next few weeks, House Republicans will try to blackmail the Obama administration into accepting their proposed spending cuts, using the threat of a government shutdown. They’ll claim that those cuts would be good for America in both the short term and the long term.

But the truth is exactly the reverse: Republicans have managed to come up with spending cuts that would do double duty, both undermining America’s future and threatening to abort a nascent economic recovery.

via How to Kill a Recovery – NYTimes.com.