Robert Reich: How Austerity Is Ushering in a Global Recession

[Better Believe It]

How Austerity Is Ushering in a Global Recession
by Robert Reich
August 16, 2011

Not only is the United States slouching toward a double dip, but so is Europe. New data out today show even Europe’s strongest core economies – Germany, France, and the Netherlands – slowing to a crawl.

We’re on the cusp of a global recession.

.... chalk up a big part of Europe’s slowdown to the politics and economics of austerity. Europe – including Britain – have turned John Maynard Keynes on his head. They’ve been cutting public spending just when they should be spending more to counteract slowing private spending.

The United States has been moving in the same bizarre direction. Cutbacks by state and local governments have all but negated the federal government’s original stimulus, and no one in Washington is talking seriously about a second. The pitiful showdown over increasing the debt limit has produced the opposite: a Rube-Goldberg-like process for capping spending rather than increasing it, and a public that’s being sold the Republican lie that less government spending means more jobs.

Read the full article at:

http://robertreich.org/post/9014405465

[midnight]

1. K&R Here is a long depressing music video to prove what

it is doing in America:http://my.firedoglake.com/ubetchaiam/2011/08/16/who-you-calling-poor/




So while it appears as though the government is making headway on the ‘poverty guideline’ based on CPI-U, it really isn’t. Why? Because the minimum wage from the $3.35 of 1981 SHOULD be $8.85 NOT $7.25 using the same CPI-U as HHS uses in calculating the ‘poverty guidelines’

And if it did, then the difference between the minimun wage job and the ‘poverty guidelines’ would be the difference between $10,890 and $18,408, $7,518.

And $2,658 in 1981 works out to be $7,029 according to the inflation calculator SO HHS IS ACTUALLY LOSING GROUND IN CALCULATING POVERTY GUIDELINES !!

So where is the President and all the liberal/progressive pundits on this issue?

[Ship of Fools]

2. Seriously! Since so many major industrialized countries are ALL going in the same

direction, austerity, IS THERE SOMETHING THEY'RE NOT TELLING US?


1. Fukushima is WAAAY worse than what we've been lead to believe -- Oklahoma, anyone? and what private insurance company in their RIGHT MIND insure thousands/millions of potential cancer vics?
2. Water shortages
3. Oil shortages
4. Population explosion (9 billion by 2025?)
5. Imminent alien invasion
6. Asteroid impact in 5-4-3 ...
7. All of the above

[tblue]

3. I sense that Reich is pleading with Obama

just begging him to go stimulus instead of austerity. Just trying to get his attention. As part of Clinton's successful job-creation record, Robert Reich is one Obama should listen to, if not hire right now.

[The2ndWheel]

4. "when they should be spending more to counteract slowing private spending"

Since it's all interconnected, this is why we'll never deal with our environmental predicament. It's why the economy, with its ever increasing human activity, which exists within the environment, although we damn sure think and act like it's the other way around, isn't sustainable. At least not if we have to share the planet with the rest of life.