Austerity Works

If the plan is to make a recession into a Depression:

The past is a foreign country we like to think wasn't as smart as our own.

But if reality television wasn't proof enough, the financial crisis should put the lie to this intellectual narcissism. While the U.S. has muddled through its Great Recession, the euro zone is still mired in its new Great Depression -- and this despite 80 years of hard-won knowledge that should have made such a slump a barbarous relic.

The latest GDP numbers for the euro zone were brutal as usual. The 17-nation economy contracted for the sixth consecutive quarter in the beginning of 2013 -- longer even than in 2008-09 -- as it fell 0.2 percent from the fourth quarter of 2012. The entire bloc is either in a long recession, a new recession, or almost so. Indeed, Greece, Portugal, Spain and Italy continued their neverending slumps; Cyprus, the Netherlands, Finland and France fell into new slumps (and Slovenia likely would have too if it had reported numbers); while Austria, Belgium, and Germany only just avoided new slumps by growing 0.1 percent in the first quarter. Add it all up, and euro zone GDP is still 3.4 percent below where it was in 2007 -- compared to U.S. GDP growing 3.2 percent over that period, as you can see below in the chart from the Wall Street Journal.

Guess what: More austerity and less monetary stimulus were pretty horrible ideas (emphasis mine).

No fucking shit!  Keynes figured this shit out almost 80 years ago.  But conservatives are so damn dumb that not only do they not understand the theories Keynes espoused, they think the theories are stupid.  We've got a real world case to study right now, and they still don't get it.  Now, one of the most prominent austerians is arguing that Keynes is wrong because he was gay.  God Bless America, conservatives are stupid assholes. In the end, their problem is that they are trying to make an economic moral argument, but Depressions are amoral.  They destroy the wealth of the rich while crushing the souls of the poor, and conservatives want to make sure that "bad" folks get what's coming to them.  Hey dumbasses, it doesn't do any good to punish everybody just to make sure a few folks get what's coming to them.  Just watch the Germans.  They want to make sure the folks in the south get punished, but really it is just destroying the savings of the Germans themselves.  All those German bank deposits were loaned out to the countries to the east and the south, so the austerity just ends up making sure the Germans have to bail themselves and everybody else out after the suffering goes on long enough to get the sadists in the conservative world off.  But conservatives here want to bring the show to the U.S.  Idiots.