You did not put it to bed, because you are wrong.rEvolutionist wrote:Rubbish. Fuck I have to laugh at the way historical data can be interpreted one way over the other. Didn't 914 and I put all this nonsense to bed on RDF and the early days at Ratskep? I can't believe people still seriously argue this line.Warren Dew wrote:Smaller spending nipped the depression of 1920 in the bud. It would have done so here as well, had it been used.Tero wrote:Hey, the country needed a bailout after the Bush mess. Cutting spending would have put us in depression. Smaller Gubment for sure. Nothing left to tax.
You're listening to the guys who never advocate smaller spending. They say in bad times "government must spend more, because it can boost the economy and then cut back and even it out in the good times." Then in the good times they say, "government must spend more because times are good and we have plenty of money, and if we cut back now we'll bring back the bad times." The common denominator is always "government ought to spend more" -- because they are arguing from a political philosophy, not an economic one. If you read the articles by guys like Krugman and such, you'll find, if you read carefully, this sort of thing at the heart of his arguments - he thinks government should spend more because his goal is to have government spend and transfer wealth in a way that he thinks embodies social justice. He masks this political goal by casting it as economics.