Robert Reich on CTV's Question period: 'Austerity economics does not work'

?The people who create jobs actually are the vast middle class and the poor whose spending creates incentives for companies to expand and hire,? Reich said.
?The wealthy and corporations are not the job creators. They don?t need any more wealth. They don?t need any more tax cuts to give them incentives to create jobs.?

It doesn't really matter - we're not in austerity economics, we're in pre-election economics.

The Harper government is only cutting spending so it can hand out some tax breaks before the election next fall, not out of any concern over fiscal matters.

And yet, unemployment is at a it's lowest rate since November 2008 and we're inline to balance the budget.

U3 unemployement is low. That only means that new jobless claims are falling off. This does not mean that U6 total unemployment is down.

U6 is reflected in the Labor Force Participation Rate - which is the percentage of the US labor force who are employed.

Right now that figure is declining.

From the US Dept. of Labor:

http://data.bls.gov/timeseries/LNS11300000

LFPR.PNG

According to the US government the total unemployment figure is higher today than it was in November 2008.

And that's the US government data set I'm using.

OTI was talking about Canada.

But Reich did say:

Read more: http://www.ctvnews.ca/politics/canada-m ... z3K0T0G5nO

The Lieberals never did that before "I'll kill da GST!"

Austerity economics MUST work.

That's why the European socialists have imposed it on Greece, Cyprus, Italy, Spain, and etc.

The Lieberals never did that before "I'll kill da GST!"
Of course they did, they all did, doesn't make it right though.

Considering that austerity economics have done nothing to eliminate corporate welfare or end government favouritism for the banks and stock exchanges that are almost entirely responsible for creating all the economic crises of the past thirty years I'd say that austerity is just another chimera, another illusion created by the Smartest Guys In The Room. Austerity thinking does everything it can to harm those least responsible for the problems (the middle class and poor) and does absolutely nothing to prevent the ones most like to cause the problems in the first place (the wealthy and politically connected) from engaging in their trademark greedy malice. It's just more bullshit being sold by the ultimate salesmen. The "scum" on welfare get cut off but the ones behind the curtain don't see any interruption in the flow of taxpayer dollars into their pockets. Same rotten old scam that it's always been since humans invented money.

I don't see the problem with 'austerity' given that these days it means not spending more than you take in for tax revenue.

No, it's a lot more than that. The trite little "you wouldn't do that with your own chequebook, would you" comparison that is applied to government spending is just a unique bit of nonsense tactically applied by austerity supporters to appeal to simpletons. Government over-spending can be really bad but it's also historically provable that government under-spending and to-the-bone cutting can be nothing less than catastrophic. The current recession was made that much worse by applying austerity to it. It's now provable that in the US and Britain especially the economy remained stagnant much longer than it should have because strategic government spending at certain pressure points was curtailed by austerity advocates. In comparison, places like Canada and Germany did not engage too deeply in austerity and didn't suffer the same effects as the US and Britain did.

Austerity is and always was, and always will be too, a failure of the imagination. Today it's also the front and centre desire of those with an anti-government agenda to push for more privatization even though, just like austerity itself, privatization of government services is also almost always a failure. In Alberta the only successful privatization was that of the liquor stores, because there was no need to have a unionized government employee with a ridiculously high public sector worker wage selling retail alcohol to people. In the gas and electric utilities privatization was a debacle, with no cost-savings ever experienced by the customer and really just a spiralling-up of prices occurred. Same with your geniuses in Texas and California that pulled off the Enron heist, and then moved on to prime profits (all at the taxpayers expense) with the growing American private prison industry.

Nope, same old scam. Nothing new to see here at all, except for the surreality of the ultimate failure in thought being repackaged and resold over and over again by the best salesmen imaginable to the most gullible audience imaginable.

I still see it as nonsensical to think that government spending is the fountainhead of any economy.

If we are going to designate an act as bad, shouldn't we actually see said act in action first?

Austerity economics has never actually been applied to an economy. Cash grabs from sectors of an economy have been branded as 'austerity', but, as stated, it has never been applied to an entire economy.

Call me when 'austerity' is applied to the common Joe, the government, and the corporation, alike and in equal measure.

In times of Economic crisis, it is.