As the latest reports indicate that the U.S. economy is slowing down and the intellectual foundation for austerity economics has been discredited, Congressional Democrats are pushing back against President Obama’s austerity budget. Democrats in the Senate and even more in the House no longer see the logic in austerity cuts to social programs such as [...]

Academia remains incredulous as evidence accumulates that the Reinhart-Rogoff paper that underwrote much of the intellectual justification for austerity economics omitted important data and contained severe Excel errors. Some are calling it a technical knockout of austerity economics, handing victory to the anti-austerity faction of economists. Economic debates rarely end with a T.K.O. But the [...]

A paper by Kenneth Rogoff and Carmen Reinhart entitled Growth In A Time Of Debt became the intellectual backbone for the austerity movement/plutocrats and their apparatchiks in Washington and elsewhere. Now a graduate student has discovered a major excel error in Rogoff and Reinhart’s research which skewed the data to support their thesis and found that when that error was corrected their data actually supported the contrary view.

The revolt has begun. Yesterday a petition with 2.3 million signatures opposing the Obama Budget’s cuts to social insurance programs was dropped off at the White House. A rally was also held representing a coalition of interest groups committed to opposing the cuts as a Democratic President pressed on with his plans to attack the [...]

Speaker John Boehner might want to take a word of advice from Speaker John Boehner because according to him there is no immediate crisis. In an interview with ABC News Speaker Boehner admitted that, contrary to much of his and his party’s rhetoric, there actually is not a debt crisis. Martha Raddatz: Is [President Obama] [...]

Last Friday President Obama signed the sequester order officially launching America’s latest austerity program. Austerity has yet to produce jobs or growth in any country it has been tried in. In fact, austerity is becoming one of the few certainties within economic policy making – the certainty of losing growth if the policy is adopted. [...]

Tomorrow budget sequestration begins. The “unthinkable” gun-put-to-head law that Congress passed to force itself to compromise has, not surprisingly, not led to compromise. Instead it has led to the gun going off and now a weak American economy will face austerity cuts, a program that has led to further weakness in every economy it has [...]

We are now a week away from the “sequester” another round of austerity cuts. Cuts that will take place despite the overwhelming evidence that all austerity programs do is make a bad situation worse.  Even the IMF, bastion of Neoliberalism, has revised itself and said austerity was actually a bad idea reporting that economists underestimated [...]

Despite winning re-election on not cutting Social Security and Medicare and pushing back on plans for austerity President Obama still apparently wants those cuts. President Barack Obama said he wants to reach a “big deal” on the budget that will cut the nation’s deficit without slashing spending on education and research that is needed to [...]

Call it a victory for Military Keynesianism theory as today’s dreadful GDP numbers seem to be a result of a drop off in military spending. The U.S. economy posted a stunning drop of 0.1 percent in the fourth quarter, defying expectations for slow growth and possibly providing incentive for more Federal Reserve stimulus. The economy [...]

One part of the “fiscal cliff” deal that received little attention was the expiration of the middle class payroll tax cut. The tax increase occurred immediately and hit workers right in the paycheck. While the lower classes may not drive the economy their spending does have influence: A payroll tax increase of 2 percentage points has [...]