Zing! We have a winner.
Okay, so the RW "centrist"economic ignoratti were all excited about their (utterly insane) new theory that cutting government spending increases GDP. And since some European governments had responded to the collapse of the global economy by cutting government it was known as an article of faith that the government cutting nations would see economic rebounds.
As the whole world kind of found a bottom and enjoyed the natural "dead cat bounce" these bozos pointed to countries like Ireland as "economic miracles" showing that austerity is constructive and pro-growth.
(For the record, reducing deficits probably is constructive and pro-growth in a strong economic uptrend, like the 1990s where anything that keeps interest rates lower than they would be otherwise is stimulative. So stimulative that the last time we balanced the budget happened to coincide with pets.com having a market cap of like a billion dollars... but that's another story. Anyway, cutting government in today's environment is like just calling in air-strikes on your own cities... insane and predictably destructive.)
Okay, so then the economic data became too voluminous for even the RW "centrist"economic ignoratti to shrug off. The economies of the austerity nations were getting creamed and Europe is currently in a recession.
So the "serious people" did what all religious fanatics do when confronted with inconvenient facts, which is to move the goal-posts and/or deny they ever said that thing they were screaming through a megaphone.
So the new serious argument is... drum-roll... The nations they proclaimed "austerity miracle" nations only a short time ago didn't actually cut government very much and that's why their economies are failing. Yowza! Where have we heard this before.... oh, right. That the Bush jobless Presidency was because he didn't cut taxes enough.
Krugman demonstrates that government really was cut and these bozos are just making shit up, as usual.
But the killer response to the new "there's not actually any austerity" argument came from one of Krugman's readers, in the very first comment to the post:
http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/05/11/austerity-safety-nets-and-spending/#more-30756
Zing!
