Wednesday, April 27, 2011

Austerity in the UK...just aching to come to America.

Only problem is, the result has been to slow UK's GDP growth down to less than 1% (0.5% during Q1-2011).


See, the problem is, conservatives in the UK are at odds with their objectives: they're not sure if they want to rein in inflation, or increase job growth.  Somehow, they expect job growth to result from austerity, to which Paul Krugman keeps repeating the same point: contractionary policies are contractionary.


And as we all know, Republicans were successful in getting over $40B in cuts for the rest of the FY 2011, and are now about to wage a battle to cut even more from the 2012 budget.  (Austerity is already here!)  Of course, Republicans will say next year, that the reason why the US economy double-dipped, is because they didn't cut fast and deep enough.  And debt and spending as a percentage of GDP will continue to worsen.

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