#NPR : #Voters , #Economists Agree: #Austerity Not The Answer

Update 5/15:  Stories about tax collection shortfalls in California can in my mind be traced back to the GOP blocking stimulus plans by the Federal Government.  Similarly, in Wisconsin, Governor Walker cutting support for schools and limiting what communities could do caused the Wisconsin economy to shrink beyond what we could have imagined.  Bailing out of high-speed train projects did not help. 
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Interviews -

Martin Wolf, chief economics commentator for the Financial Times, told weekends on All Things Considered .

Mark Blyth, a professor of international political economy at Brown University.

Christina Romer was once President Obama's top economic adviser.

The program is +11 minutes .... spot on, great story .... voters better get it here in the U.S. or we will be in serious trouble.  The TeaParty is trying to push us off a cliff!

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The Trouble With Austerity
Many believe Germany's austerity plan will ultimately fail in Europe. Mark Blyth, a professor of international political economy at Brown University, tells NPR's Raz that austerity hasn't worked at all and that it was quite predictable that it wouldn't work.
"You can't cure debt with more debt," Blyth says. "If everyone tries to pay back the debt all at the [same] time, all you end up doing is shrinking the economy."

When you shrink the economy, you end up reducing the amount of taxation that you can collect — thus the amount of debt you can pay back. Over time, this causes the debt-to-GDP ratio to get worse rather than better, he says.

"All of the countries that have [gone] on austerity programs over the last two years — they now have more debt rather than less," he says.

If Europe sticks with its austerity regime, Blyth says those countries will not recover. He calls the euro zone a "doomsday device" because its massive banks are full of bad assets and incredible vulnerabilities.

"What they've built is the gold standard," he says. "And the last time we tried to run a gold standard in a democracy in Europe in the 1920s and 1930s ... it didn't end very well."

WI 1848 Forward: #NPR : #Voters , #Economists Agree: #Austerity Not The Answer : #47% #99% #ows vs #1% #Elites #Koch