Special Bulletin (ITYS Edition)

We interrupt my vacation to bring you this special bulletin. Seriously, I'm on vacation but I was listening to Fareed Zakaria's show (GPS) as a podcast while I was walking down the beach. I can't get it out of my head so here we go.

Here's the relevant ITYS (I Told You So) posts on Get the Flick.

Abandon Hope

"Please note that I’m quoting from the Wall Street Journal. I’m biased, but I try to be fair. The UK’s economy is just limping along -- just like ours has except they are experiencing a lot more social pain. Does this sound like a road we want to go down? " 

Remember the UK?

"Do you remember that we (Get the Flick readers) are supposed to be watching the economic policy of austerity in the United Kingdom? To see how it’s working out because the Republicans want us to do the same thing?"

And finally, here's what I heard from Fareed Zakaria and his guest, Anatole Kaletsky, economics columnist for Reuters.

Global Public Square -- January 6, 2012 transcript.

"ZAKARIA: What can we learn from what is going on in Britain? Because you have - you are now into a year or so of the real, the austerity program really taking place and, you know, on the one hand there are people who say, look, John - George Osborne and David Cameron say, we had to do this. We had to get serious, we had to get our fiscal house in order and, yes, it is going to be painful. There are other people who say, look, the British economy has contracted more than it did during the Great Depression.

KALETSKY: Well, that's a great question, because I agree with the gist of your question, this been big theme of mine for the last two years. If you look at the amount that Britain has managed to reduce its deficit in the last three years, it's actually less than the reduction in deficit in the United States. The United States purely through economic growth without any tax hikes or significant public spending cuts has actually managed to be more successful in controlling its deficit and debt than Britain has with an austerity program, which is really second only to that in Spain and possibly Italy, among the major economies in the world. So, I think Britain is a very good object lesson for the United States of the danger of doing too much to soon in terms of trying to cut deficits." 

(Emphasis added)

I encourage you to read the entire section of the transcript (so you can read an opposing view).

We now return to our regularly scheduled vacation

Don Brown
January 10, 2013