Getting to know my Latin phrases. Or as they spell it in Flin Flon, frases.
Faciem durum cacantis habes.
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Another one that caught me i's.
Felis qvi nihil debet.
Happy [is] he who owes nothing.
It's funny how we preach this at the individual level - at least that's what happened in my family - but it doesn't extend to the government.
Weird how that works.
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We're told you can't predict with any certainty the direction of an economy yet when we spend isn't that what we're doing? Betting on some prediction?
Keynes himself probably didn't espouse big, expansionist, tax and spending policies for its own sake. Interesting discussion on him here.
Would Keynes support Modern Monetary Theory (MMT)?
I'm not positive how deficit spending got associated with Keynes; I'm guessing it's based on his recession/depression analysis (a recession or depression is the only time a government should run a deficit budget).
ReplyDeleteIn the US, I know it occurred when Republicanism shifted. Eisenhower instituted the steepest tax rates for the wealthiest Americans in history to pay for World War II and the New Deal social safety net. That rate crept down, as it naturally should, as we paid off war bonds. The next time we had a recession, the tax rates were not increased, though government spending increased. While Jimmy Carter had balanbced the budget again by the late 70's, Reagan slashed taxes and cut very little in the way of spending, which set the ball rolling for the insurmountable deficit we have today.
In a sense, Reagan ran a recession/depression economic policy during a time of relative prosperity, and the result was a bloated upper class nobility with all the money, a government in debt, and when a recession hit the middle and lower classes... there was nothing to do but cut government programs (which is the opposite of what should be done during economic recessions).
And that's how Reagan invented American homelessness. Wait... we were talking about Keynes...
Oh, my favorite Latin advice: Cave Canem
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