Economists on the Budget Freeze

Here’s how one economist responded to President Obama’s idea of a spending freeze, which is likely to be a major topic of his State of the Union speech.

A spending freeze? That’s the brilliant response of the Obama team to their first serious political setback?
It’s appalling on every level.
It’s bad economics, depressing demand when the economy is still suffering from mass unemployment. Jonathan Zasloff writes that Obama seems to have decided to fire Tim Geithner and replace him with “the rotting corpse of Andrew Mellon” (Mellon was Herbert Hoover’s Treasury Secretary, who according to Hoover told him to “liquidate the workers, liquidate the farmers, purge the rottenness”.)

That economist is Princeton professor Paul Krugman, winner of the 2008 Nobel Prize in Economics.
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Federal Debt is Not Analagous to Household Debt!

It’s late and I’m tired, but another TV pundit once again used the example of the family budget to assert that the federal government ought to have to live within its means in exactly the same way that the American family does.  This time it was David Gergen on some PBS or ABC show.  I can’t remember, because I wasn’t really watching.  Someone else had turned it on, and I just heard it.
I am so sick of this analogy.  It simply doesn’t work for a number of reasons:
1) It’s based on a false premise.  Most American households carry debt, be it a mortgage, student loans, car payment, credit card debt or something else.  Ideally this is planned and the family can keep up with payments, but far too often that is not the case.  So many people live paycheck to paycheck.
Continue reading