Attention All Obama Administration Fiscal Gurus!

Please see this excellent current example from the National Review of why Keynesian economic spending/taxing does not work.  This is why the federal government needs to stop your reckless spending and cut our taxes!

Greece badly needs to do something about it public finances, and it’s trying, but things are not working out too well, as Der Spiegel reports:

The austerity measures that were supposed to fix Greece’s problems are dragging down the country’s economy.  Stores are closing, tax revenues are falling and unemployment has hit an unbelievable 70 percent in some places.  Frustrated workers are threatening to strike back. . . . The government’s draconian austerity measures have managed to reduce the country’s budget deficit by an almost unbelievable 39.7 percent, after previous governments had squandered tax money and falsified statistics for years.  The measures have reduced government spending by a total of 10 percent, 4.5 percent more than the EU and International Monetary Fund (IMF) had required.

The problem is that the austerity measures have in meantime affected every aspect of the country’s economy.  Purchasing power is dropping, consumption is taking a nosedive and the number of bankruptcies and unemployed are on the rise.  The country’s gross domestic product shrank by 1.5 percent in the second quarter of this year.  Tax revenue, desperately needed in order to consolidate the national finances, has dropped off.  A mixture of fear, hopelessness and anger is brewing in Greek society. . . .

Barely any of the country’s industries can keep up with international competition in terms of productivity, and experts expect the country’s gross domestic product to fall by 4 percent over the course of the entire year.  Germany, by way of comparison, is hoping for growth of up to 3 percent.

Under these circumstances, the other part of the equation for Greece would normally be a sharp devaluation, but with the country trapped in the euro, that’s not possible.  The answer?  For Germany and the other economically healthy eurozone countries to quit the common currency and leave the rump euro free to find a much lower level.

But that doesn’t seem imminent, so:

The entire country [Greece] is in the grip of a depression.  Everything seems to be going downhill.  The spiral is continuing unabated, and there is no clear way out.  The worse part, however, is the fact that hardly anyone still hopes that things will improve one day.

The country’s unemployment rate makes this trend particularly clear.  In 2009, it was 9.5 percent.  This year it may rise to 12.1 percent and economists expect it to reach 14.3 percent in 2011.  Those, though, are only the official numbers, which were provided by Angle Gurria, secretary general of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).  The Greek trade union association GSEE considers those numbers far too optimistic.  It considers 20 percent to be a more likely figure for 2011.  This would put the unemployment rate as high as it was in 1960, when hundreds of thousands of Greeks were forced to emigrate. . . .

Menelaos Givalos, a professor of political science at Athens University, has appeared on television, warning viewers that the worst times are still to come.  He predicts a large wave of layoffs starting in September, with ‘extreme social consequences.’[i]

[i] Stuttaford, Andrew.  “Scylla, Meet Charybdis.”  The National Review.  19 August 2010.  Web.  19 August 2010.  <http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/244208/scylla-meet-charybdis-andrew-stuttaford>.