Austerity measures have they ever saved an economy?

Public spending is private income, so how does cutting public spending help the economy? Please be specific.

Wow, Jon.That's surprisingly liberal of you, if you don't mind me saying so. I largely agree, of course.

Do I keep mixing you up with someone else? Weird. Ok, I'll try to remember next time (and figure out who the hell I'm thinking of!)

Austrian economics has not only failed in every possible way, it's not only been revealed as a pseudointellectual fraud, but its sole appeal is to people who can't do any math. Certainly it does, in the same way that the man who owns the marketplace earns a portion of the business conducted there. The government makes roads, mints coin, maintains civil order - all necessary preconditions for the transaction of business. Even libertarians have to admit the existence of a government for the purpose of defending property rights, at the very least; to do so requires the monopoly of force so there's your police, your armies, etc. None of that stuff is free. Like I said, Austrian economics is for people who can't do math. $100 - $35 + $70 = $135; the government budgetary policy where the government spends a deficit - let us roughly refer to this as "Keynsian", though it's not, not exactly - actually leaves Joe Public $35 richer. Why? because Joe Public is who provides the goods and services the government buys with the money. Government spending is public income.

So, in fact, your own position is that Austrian economics has never succeeded or even convinced anybody to use it. You're free to say no at any time to the US government, and the way you do that is by moving to another country and renouncing US citizenship. There's a "marketplace" of nations, each competing for your business, and if you don't like the way business is done in one country, there are hundreds of others. But if you're going to continue to live within the envelope of security and community established by US laws and the US monopoly on force, then you have to pay your America bill. Otherwise you're stealing, same as stealing cable. I'm not. You're the one ignoring numbers. Specifically, you're the one ignoring that when the government spends money, it spends it for Joe Public's goods and services. So Joe Public is taxed $35 on his $100, but the govenment's deficit spending puts an extra $35 in his pocket ($70 - $35.)Your math is completely wrong, because you assume that when the government spends money, it "spends" by taking that money and dropping it into a black hole. But that's nonsense. When the government spends money, it spends it at businesses owned by Americans. It spends it on salaries to pay Americans. It spends it on services provided by Americans. Public spending is private income. To have a government persistently in surplus means that you're advocating for a system where people transfer their wealth to a government pile that keeps getting larger and larger. Why should anyone do that? And how does that square with your notion of a "smaller government"? Forget "accounting", you don't even know how to add and subtract. Um, no, I'm an atheist. But I'm also very much a collectivist, because it's just a matter of biological reality that human beings, like our evolutionary cousins, are a collectivist species. Sorry, it's just the way we are. To pretend otherwise is just another example of how Randroids like yourself completely ignore physical reality.

If the contractor bills $600 for a government hammer, he gets $600 for a government hammer. Why do you think he's only getting $20?(Government requisitions don't really work like that anymore, but it's true that the government frequently pays more for things due to laws about what the government can buy. For instance, there's a law that says that if the government buys something it has to be made in the US.)

Um, all of them. Then where does slavery come from? Nothing could be more "capitalist" than the buying and selling of people, right?

Yeah but... it doesn't.I mean I know what you think you're talking about, but there's a lot less waste in government appropriations than you'd know from the media. People overestimate the amount of government waste by about two orders of magnitude. And the waste overwhelmingly takes the form of overpaying vendors, so that "wasted money" goes into the pockets of whoever is providing government services. It's not just being thrown into a hole. Well, obviously it does. Where else would it go? Into a hole? If it's just being moved from one agency to the next - say, my wife's department at Walter Reed needs a box of pens, so they pay the General Services Administration for the box of pens - viewed from the perspective of the Federal Government in total it's a wash. It's not really "spending" any more than it's spending when you go to an ATM and transfer $40 from your checking account to your wallet.

Do I? What if he invests it in Treasury bonds? Investment doesn't always mean "employment." Why would it? Well, ok, but if that machine had already been manufactured and was sitting in a warehouse waiting to be sold, how does his "investment" in it employ anybody? It seems like your own example of a business investment is one that, at the margin at least, doesn't employ even a single additional person.You're not very good at this, are you? I'm curious, RobS, who sent you to an evolution site with stale glibertarian talking points? You're clearly just parroting things you heard second-hand, because you're not even getting the points right. That is, of course, what they say about socialism.

You're going to have to be a lot more specific about what you think "government waste" entails, because if I continue to guess at what you mean by "moving $600 to spend $20" I'm just going to confuse you even further.What other people usually mean by "government waste", what they're usually using the "$600 hammer" to illustrate, is that the government "wastes money" by paying vendors far, far more than the going market rate. I.e. I can buy a hammer at Home Depot for $20, but if the government wants a hammer, the hammer vendor winds up being paid $600.There's various reasons that this isn't true anymore (and, technically, wasn't ever true), although its still true that if the government wants to buy something that the GSA doesn't keep in stock, they usually have to go through a time-consuming requisitions and bid process instead of just sending someone to the Home Depot, but that has a lot to do with laws meant to ensure that when the government spends money, it spends it at American businesses that employ American workers.You have this notion that somehow the government pays $600 for a hammer, but somehow the vendor only gets $20 and the rest disappears into the ether, somehow. Trying to unpack your meaning seems, so far, only to have resulted in you getting a completely wrong idea about what I'm trying to tell you, so let's stop for a minute and instead of guessing at what I think you think is going on in the government, why don't you explain what you actually mean by "government waste"?

A Humvee isn't like a Ford Focus, right? You can't just use off-the-shelf parts. The outfit that makes the headlights makes them only for the US government, they have to meet a very specific set of (expensive) specifications, and they don't expect that the Army needs a million of them, so they can't take advantage of the economy of scale.It's not waste, per se - the headlights for a Humvee really are that expensive. There's no market rate because there's no "Humvee headlights" market outside of the US Army. (The Hummers civilians can drive have different headlights because its actually a different vehicle, as I'm sure you're aware.)The housing thing, I have no idea about. But just because you were billed for that doesn't mean that's what it costs.There's just not all that much waste, not as much as everyone seems to think. It's less than .1% of the Federal budget. Americans in polls regularly estimate that the percentage of waste goes as high as 50% - just absurd.

Why wouldn't a good businessman prefer a solid, low-risk investment?And why should we base tax policy on the hope that our businessmen will be good businessmen? Doesn't the fact that Wall Street ruined our economy by making bad bets on housing prices indicate that, in most cases, our top businessmen aren't actually very good at it? How about the fact that, averaged together, managed mutual funds have no better return than the market as a whole? That certainly suggests that the Investor Class is just guessing, and some of them do better than others just by luck.Why should I believe that a businessman is any less likely to be an idiot than anybody else? Please be specific. The only thing I'm qualified to do is recognize when the stuff you're saying is dumb. And it is - you've not thought through any of this at all. You might want to go back and work on your math before you graduate to logic. For instance: what is 100 - 35 + 70? You understand that you're talking to me at an Evolution Vs. Creation debate website, right? The notion that someone might disagree with me is something I've faced before, believe me. Hell, I'm married. To an actual woman and everything.Trust me, I've been disagreed with. If you're looking for someone to pat you on the head and call you a special snowflake, you've come to the wrong place and you're talking to the wrong guy. You're apparently looking for condescension and patronization. I prefer to show my opponents the respect of grappling with their ideas in an honest and direct way.I'm neither a conformist nor a neoclassicist. I told you already - I'm a collectivist.

Lost?Where does it go? Please be specific. Is it burned? Lost at sea? Dropped in a hole?

But certainly according to the billions of dollars that responded to the S&P downgrade by investing even more in government bonds.Hey, I could be wrong, but I thought you were for the wisdom of the market and against top-down dictation by know-it-all elites. Well, then let's also specify a good bureaucrat, or a benevolent dictator. Let's further assume that Santa Claus will come and deliver everyone their heart's desire. With such assumptions we can prove anything we like, but what relevance will it have to the real world? This collectivist believes that we shouldn't let our desire for delivering comeuppance, or our fears of moral hazard, allow our economy to descend into a liquidity crisis that threatens the ability of any and all corporations to make payroll and pay their invoices. I have no love of bailouts, I assure you. But the TARP bailouts passed by Bush were a necessary evil. (What wasn't necessary was free money handed out with no interference in executive bonus contracts, but what do you expect from libertarians?) I know it just looks that way because I know more than you. Man, you're hitting all the bingo spaces, aren't you? I think "confusing household accounting with nation-sized economics" is square B21. If you tell me that EPA regulations strangle businesses, I think I'll win an Outback Steakhouse gift card.The biggest difference, of course, between the management of the American economy and the management of the Crashfrog household is that, in the Crashfrog household, our debts are not denominated in a currency that we ourselves are empowered to print.That actually matters quite a bit. That's not to say that the solution to all problems is to print money, but monetary policy is a very powerful tool in the toolbox of a central bank, and it's one that has no parallel to sitting around the kitchen balancing a checkbook.

Addition by zero is not the same as subtraction. Public spending is private income.