{"id":6187,"date":"2011-08-02T21:11:41","date_gmt":"2011-08-02T21:11:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/?p=6187"},"modified":"2011-08-02T21:11:58","modified_gmt":"2011-08-02T21:11:58","slug":"keynesian-caterwauling-over-debt-reduction","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/keynesian-caterwauling-over-debt-reduction\/","title":{"rendered":"Keynesian caterwauling over debt deal"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The dominant meme in the MSM is that the spending cuts in the debt deal will hurt the economy by stripping it of government stimulus, rather than help the economy by providing businesses with some hope for a lowered or at least stable tax burden.\u00a0 The New York Times <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2011\/08\/01\/us\/politics\/01econ.html?scp=2&amp;sq=binyamin%20applebaum%20debt&amp;st=cse\">cites as evidence <\/a>for this depressive effect of government cuts lowered sales at Northrop Grunman:\u00a0<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Northrop Grumman, a major military contractor, is a case in point. The company said Wednesday that second-quarter sales were depressed by the confusion in Washington.<br \/>\n\u201cUncertainties surrounding the debt ceiling and future defense budgets caused our customers to move more slowly and spend more conservatively,\u201d the chief executive, Wesley G. Bush, told analysts. \u201cWe did not see the recovery in spending that one might have expected.\u201d<br \/>\nThe deal on the table on Sunday, however, is likely to include reductions in defense spending.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Well of course an industry that is directly dependent on government procurement is going to contract when government buys less from it!\u00a0\u00a0 Far more important to the economy are those many more businesses that do not feed at the government trough; it is their estimate of future taxes and spending that we should care about.\u00a0 And the last stimulus package certainly didn\u2019t produce very impressive results.\u00a0 That it was poorly designed\u2014aimed at preserving the jobs of public employees rather than allegedly jump-starting private growth\u2014hardly excuses its lackluster performance; its designers have only themselves to blame if the stimulus was misdirected.\u00a0 Of course, stimulus supporters can always argue that we don\u2019t have a baseline control group to judge it against\u2014that things would have been worse without it.\u00a0 But that empirical uncertainty works in the other direction as well: one could as easily argue that without excessive government spending, the economy would\u2019ve picked up before now.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The dominant meme in the MSM is that the spending cuts in the debt deal will hurt the economy by stripping it of government stimulus, rather than help the economy by providing businesses with some hope for a lowered or &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/keynesian-caterwauling-over-debt-reduction\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":50,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6187"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/50"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6187"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6187\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6190,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6187\/revisions\/6190"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6187"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6187"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6187"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}