But very interestingly they ran a cartoon on the same page (As of 12:09pm on Tuesday the 25th) of this:
i.e., a cartoon showing us why following the advice of the deficit scolds is a really, really bad idea! As Paul Krugman pointed out many months ago:
The deficit threatens economic recovery, we're told;
*snip*
The long-run budget outlook is problematic, but short-term deficits aren't -- and even the long-term outlook is much less frightening than the public is being led to believe.
*snip*
It has been obvious for at least a year that the U.S. government would face an extended period of large deficits, and projections of those deficits haven’t changed much since last summer [piece was written in Feb 2010]. Yet the drumbeat of dire fiscal warnings has grown vastly louder.
*snip*
the large deficit the federal government is running right now isn’t the result of runaway spending growth. Instead, well more than half of the deficit was caused by the ongoing economic crisis, which has led to a plunge in tax receipts, required federal bailouts of financial institutions, and been met — appropriately — with temporary measures to stimulate growth and support employment.
In other words, where do all of these deep and terribly serious concerns about the deficit come from? The US very badly needs to spend lots and lots of money to get the unemployment situation under control. The deficit is a very low-priority problem that can wait several years.
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