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Deficits don't matter, but only when...
#1
The right wingers can spend on their pet projects, or reduce taxes on their financiers..

Quote:Despite characterizing themselves as the party of fiscal conservatism, Republicans are planning on pushing through a legislative agenda under President-elect Donald Trump that will cause the deficit to balloon. These include an important method for repealing the Affordable Care Act, namely a budget resolution that will add $9 trillion to the debt by 2026. The actual Affordable Care Act repeal will eliminate more than $1 trillion in revenue that had been acquired through taxes included in the bill in order to maintain a balanced budget. Finally, Republicans are considering passage of a spending bill in excess of $1 trillion to complete unfinished Cabinet budgets, one that is expected to include allocations for expensive Trump proposals like a wall on the U.S.-Mexican border. “One of the things that we’re focusing on is getting people back to work, is economic growth,” House Speaker Paul Ryan said to reporters on Tuesday. “You can’t ever balance the budget if you don’t get this economy growing.” In 2011, though, Ryan had said, “The country’s biggest challenge, domestically speaking, no doubt about it, is a debt crisis.”
Deficits don’t matter (again)! Paul Ryan promotes Congress’ upcoming spending binge - Salon.com

This got it exactly backwards. Now we're close to full employment and the same people who warned that the US was turning into Greece in 2010 are rejoicing in the coming Trump reflation which will hugely increase public deficits. 

That should have been done when the economy was in a slump, after the financial crisis, but of course the likes of Ryan were dead set against that warning of impending doom.
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#2
Austerity in a depressed economy is a bad idea, even the IMF has come around to this:

Quote:The supposed justifications for austerity were always, Quiggin writes, “absurd on the face of things”. The theory that government spending crowds out private sector investment never withstood scrutiny. As he points out, “the painfully evident fact that there is already plenty of room for private expansion, in the form of unemployed workers and idle factories, is simply ignored”.

The IMF – historically the world’s foremost cheerleader of austerity – admitted that it was based on a false prospectus: these policies do more harm than good. Simon Wren-Lewis of Oxford University said that the issue was not whether attempts to reduce the deficit had damaged the economy, but “how much GDP has been lost as a result”. Amartya Sen said that while austerity “deepened Europe’s economic problems, it did not help in the aimed objective of reducing the ratio of debt to GDP to any significant extent”. Richard Portes at London Business School says that even the UK’s sluggish growth under the Conservatives is down to the “semi-covert” backing away from George Osborne’s initially brutal plans, which would have done even more harm..

Paul Krugman wrote that in the post-crisis economy “the government does everyone a service by running deficits and giving frustrated savers a chance to put their money to work … deficit spending that expands the economy is, if anything, likely to lead to higher private investment than would otherwise materialise”. All this has led Joseph Stiglitz to remark that it’s “remarkable there are still governments, including here in the UK, that still believe in austerity”.
Even the IMF says austerity doesn’t work. It’s the zombie idea that will not die | Phil McDuff | Opinion | The Guardian
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