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As far as I understand the legal situation, it is not any different. But you don't really want to hear that, do you?
>It does.
Believing in fairy tales is not an excuse for murder.<
And hyperbole doesn't replace an argument.
>No, I do not see any problem with attacking the most stridently insane country of the lot.
When Germany starts acting less insane than the Netherlands, I will happily begin going after the Netherlands.<
Ad calendas graecas or so.
>My emphasis.
See the problem here?<
No.
>And every time they do that, the Bundesbank immediately goes to Frankfurter Allgemeine BildZeitung and shrieks and whines about how unfair everybody is treating Germany until it stops.<
But that, like the two resignations, is actually a sign of weakness and waning influence.
>The stimulus was much too small, certainly.
But I note that no American state has seen 34 % drops in government outlays, 15 % drops in nominal wages and unemployment percentages in the high 20s.<
As far as I understand the states and local governments have almost offset the federal stimulus with their balanced budgets requirements. and the resulting fiscal austerity.
Believing in fairy tales is not an excuse for murder. And hyperbole doesn't replace an argument.
Believing in fairy tales is not an excuse for murder.
The closest point of comparison to what the Troika is inflicting on Greece is Russia under Yeltsin.
That experience killed roughly 1 % of the Russian population. If Greece performs similarly, and there is no, a priori, any reason it should not, you're looking at somewhere on the order of fifty thousand preventable deaths.
Yeah, I call that murder.
- Jake Friends come and go. Enemies accumulate.
As far as I understand the [US] states and local governments have almost offset the federal stimulus with their balanced budgets requirements. and the resulting fiscal austerity.
And yet they are still doing measurably better than the Troika.
In other words, the Troika confidence fairie performs worse than a placebo stimulus.
Sadly, politicians far prefer spending during bad times than they enjoy saving during good times (try to convince the Swabian housewifes that taxes must rise during good times to increase the size of the budget surplus), which is likely why Keynesians has gotten such a bad reputation. Peak oil is not an energy crisis. It is a liquid fuel crisis.
It is true that ideally you would attempt to deter inflation whenever this is consistent with full employment. But under a floating FX regime and absent atavistic commodity pegs, nothing about having spent yesteryear prevents you from spending this year.
Yes, spending yesteryear may have created inflation. But it makes no sense to encourage deflation today just because because there was inflation yesterday. For the same reason it makes no sense to shoot a man in the back after he has been shot in the front, on the theory that "the average bullet velocity through his chest will be zero."
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