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I’m just saying that right now might not be the best time to suddenly cut spending and taxes.
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There’s never going to be a good time to cut spending. We’ve had plenty of opportunities during booms over the past 30 years like the late 1990’s and during the housing bubble of 2004-2006 and we didn’t do it. We had the opportunity to balance the budget in 2002 with a 10% cut in government spending, we had the opportunity again in 2008 with a 20% cut in government spending and now we’ve gotten ourselves to a 40% cut in government spending. Obviously cutting government spending and balancing the budget will produce a short severe recession in the best case and a long depression in the worst. I won’t argue that cutting spending isn’t going to cause an awful lot of hardship because it will.
The point in doing it now or very soon is as the debt and deficit grow the fallout becomes worse and worse. You have the real possibility of government/economic collapse the longer you wait. A 10% cut back in 2002 would have sucked but certainly would have been survivable. Right now we can’t rewind what already happened but we do have the choice of facing the music and attempting to resolve debt in an organized way or we can wait until the Greece day of reckoning shows up here.
If you’re running a failing small business there comes a point in which you must cut your loses. Another month in business another 2 months in business isn’t going to fix things, why lose your house over it. We keep thinking well just one more economic growth spurt and then we can fix it. I don’t think we’re going to get that opportunity. We already wasted our chances, time to accept it.