9. We've already cut $1.5 trillion in spending.
The Federal government has already cut $1.5 trillion in spending over the next 10 years, and we're seeing the effect of those cuts in lost growth and lost jobs. That brings non-discretionary government spending down to its lowest level on record (as a percentage of GDP).
10. And now the sequester's coming.
And now comes the sequester. This program of mandatory spending cuts, if not repealed, will cost another 1 million to 1.4 million lost jobs, depending on whether you use the Bipartisan Policy Center's estimate or the CBO's.
That's more than a year's worth of sluggish job growth, erased. It would also rob an estimated 0.7 percent from estimated GDP expansion, and could conceivably even plunge us back into recession.
11. Deficit hysteria was a hoax ... and it's passing.
Former Tennessee Governor Phil Bredesen, who's part of the deficit-hawking crowd, gamely acknowledged what we've been saying for so long: deficit mania is a calculated hoax. Or, as Bredesen put it, an "artificial crisis."
For a long time, it worked. Despite all evidence to the contrary, mainstream press outlets have continued to insist that the Federal government has a "spending problem" and that our most urgent economic need is to lower the government deficit. This deficit hysteria was the product of a decades-long anti-government and anti-tax jihad financed in large part by billionaire Pete Peterson, which drew in all of the Republican Party, along with leading Democratic luminaries like Bill Clinton.
Now the fever may be breaking. A recent headline in the Los Angeles Times read "U.S. debt woes are not so dire, experts sa y." Those experts have been saying that for a long time. It may have finally become permissible to report that fact, just as it finally became permissible to report that the stated reasons for invading Iraq were false.
Not a moment too soon.
12. Spending cuts don't cure recoveries, they kill them.
The entire premise was flawed from the beginning, and now we have irrefutable evidence. Austerity economics -- the thinking behind the deficit craze -- has been thoroughly discredited by the relentless unfolding of reality.
Great Britain's impending triple-dip recession is the direct result of that country's deficit-driven austerity policies. Europe's economic agony is also driven by ill-time deficit policies. The claim that "businesses won't hire because of uncertainty about government spending" was disproven by December's jobs numbers, when hiring actually increased during a time of uncertainty over the "fiscal cliff."
And inflation, a specter which deficit-mongers have long used to justify their policies, is arguably too low right now.
13. It's irresponsible for the government not to borrow right now.
As Matt Yglesias notes, the government can actually borrow money right now at negative interest rates. Investors will actually pay the government to keep and use their money for a while. (I disagree with Yglesias when he says we should borrow instead of taxing; we should do both, at least at the highest income levels.)
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