Obama's New Treasury Secretary Pushes Austerity That Spreads Global Misery

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http://www.alternet.org/economy/obamas-new-treasury-secretary-pushes-austerity-spreads-global-misery



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But America has its own variant of this insanity and Lew is one of our most self-destructive austerians. Like Schäuble, Lew is a lawyer. As Obama’s OMB Director, Lew prepared a budget and a rationale for that budget that was an ode to austerity. I demonstrated this in detail in a prior column.

Lew was also one the group of Obama aides noted for their protection of Wall Street’s interests who led the effort to inflict austerity and begin to unravel the safety net through what they called the “Grand Bargain” (actually, the Great Betrayal).

Obama’s decision to send Lew, the great proponent of self-destructive austerity, to Europe to urge them to end their self-destructive austerity exemplifies the incoherence of the administration’s financial policies. The fact that Obama is simultaneously proposing the Great Betrayal – its sixth form of austerity that Obama has agreed to inflict on our Nation since 2011 – produces a level of incoherence, incompetence, and hypocrisy so epic that it is likely to cause economists to act like manic depressives bouncing between wild-eyed gales of laughter and crying jags.

Putting two lawyers together to discuss macroeconomic policy also leads to discussions that cause economists’ jaws to drop in shock. If you understand economics you may wish to put on a neck brace before reading the next passage lest its incoherence cause whiplash.