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Saturday, April 20, 2013

The Faith of Political Economics... and the Republican Budgets




Which Economics do you believe in? Which do you pay to?

If you prayed to the god of austerity and cutting budgets based on the famous - now infamous - Reinhart and Rogoff paper of 2010, which demonstrated that countries with debt at 90% of Gross Domestic Product experience dramatic slowing of economic growth, your god has been blown out of the waters rather than dividing them and allowing us to pass between......

It's everywhere. Check the BBC:
Reinhart, Rogoff... and Herndon: The Student Who Caught The Profs
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-22223190
"I don't think jobs were destroyed because of this but it provides an intellectual rationalisation for things that affect how people think about the world," says Daniel Hamermesh, professor of economics at Royal Holloway, University of London.
"And how people think about the world, especially politicians, eventually affects how the world works."
I am not in favor of high debt.

The reason I swore never to vote for another Republican again was the inability of the Republican Congress in George W. Bush's second term to say no to any sort of spending, as well as the gross delusion of accepting the cost of Iraq and Afghanistan "off the books" so to speak.
(Greece is a country with high debt and slow growth, but Greece's situation did not come about in the manner described by the Reinhart-Rogoff paper.)

However, Economics describes present economic events. That's all it does.
It has no "laws".
Most of our political economics is Faith, quaint beliefs like "One should run a government like a household." or other maxims from a simpler time complicated upon a spreadsheet.
And when they makes mistakes, you and your children go without a roof over your heads and put food off to some time in the future.

The Republican budgets, as exemplified by the Ryan proposal, are based on an ancient Faith of a vengeful God, angry at the elderly and poor...
because "Economics teaches us thusly!!"

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