This time Jack Lew gave a speech on behalf of his handler, Goldman Sachs, requesting more deficit spending from Japan and Europe. Since then the Keynesian handwavers start repeating the line, none of them checking the facts.
Japan with a debt to gdp ratio of 200% has deficited another 42% of GDP since the crash, with nothing to show for the effort.
The USA and UK deficited an equal amount, but only brought debt to gdp up to the 95% level, they show some growth. But Spain was exactly in line, with an even higher amount of deficiting, 47% of gdp, and small debt to gdp, yet they performed miserably. France, with 92% debt, was only 1/4 short in the deficiting arena and actually performed better than Japan. Italy, 132% debt to gdp could do nothing.
Even within the USA, we see the same variance in result, Texas outperforming California consistently by 2%, and Illinois just barely getting out of trouble way late in the game. Yet all states participated in deficiting by DC.
All of the factors effecting growth swamp the deficit spending effect. Perhaps one exception might be Germany with low debt to gdp and low deficiting after the crash. Once the economic units are broken down to comparable size we find a 2% variance in performance mostly uncorrelated with any deficit spending.
As near as I can tell, none of the handwaver economists actually looked at the data, save one; Simon Lewis in the UK seems to have actually looked. Further, I would claim that very few economists come out of Keynesian school with any data analyis capability what so ever.
This is the usual typical handwaving by very badly educated economists, most of them in the USA.
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