...Unemployment — especially long-term unemployment — remains at levels that would have been considered catastrophic not long ago, and shows no sign of coming down rapidly. And both the United States and Europe are well on their way toward Japan-style deflationary traps.
In the face of this grim picture, you might have expected policy makers to realize that they haven’t yet done enough to promote recovery. But no: over the last few months there has been a stunning resurgence of hard-money and balanced-budget orthodoxy.
Yes, that's the other bad news to come out of the weekend. The G-20 has handed us a protracted recession -- Paul Krugman calls it a Long Depression -- as their gift of narrow thinking. Going back to Hoovernomics is not what the world needs at this point. Why did they do it?
The hard-liners often invoke the troubles facing Greece and other nations around the edges of Europe to justify their actions. And it’s true that bond investors have turned on governments with intractable deficits. But there is no evidence that short-run fiscal austerity in the face of a depressed economy reassures investors....
... It’s almost as if the financial markets understand what policy makers seemingly don’t: that while long-term fiscal responsibility is important, slashing spending in the midst of a depression, which deepens that depression and paves the way for deflation, is actually self-defeating.
So I don’t think this is really about Greece, or indeed about any realistic appreciation of the tradeoffs between deficits and jobs. It is, instead, the victory of an orthodoxy that has little to do with rational analysis, whose main tenet is that imposing suffering on other people is how you show leadership in tough times.
And who will pay the price for this triumph of orthodoxy? The answer is, tens of millions of unemployed workers, many of whom will go jobless for years, and some of whom will never work again.
To his credit, Obama held out as long as he could, and then agreed to a three-year effort at deficit cutting. What this "orthodoxy" represents is not a triumph of fiscal responsibility but a petty and perilous adventure in conservative backlash. It may well guarantee a conservative Washington -- White House and Congress -- after 2012.
There is wiggle room.
President Obama and Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner had consistently advocated a measured approach to debt reduction that would not stymie growth and lead to a double-dip recession.
The United States, however, joined other countries at the summit meeting, which was met by protests and several hundred arrests, by endorsing a goal of cutting government deficits in half by 2013 and stabilizing the ratio of public debt to gross domestic product by 2016. Canada’s prime minister, Stephen Harper, had proposed the targets, backed by Germany and Britain.To assuage objections from the United States, Japan, India and some other countries, the timetable was couched as an expectation, rather than a firm deadline. The G-20 joint statement explicitly stated that Japan, which is heavily dependent on domestic borrowing, was not expected to meet the targets. ...NYT
Over here, though, the death of Robert Byrd means wiggle room has diminished.
