and if that happens, no one is going to be up against a wall.

Obviously people don’t get this democracy shtick too well.

We can all imagine what we like, we can imagine that bad things will not happen, we can imagine that up is down, right is left, war is peace, and lies are truth, and where has that lead us? Time and time again.

Really, what were you thinking?

Think Man, think!

After all this is not so crazy. Haven’t we had other expansionary deficit reductions like 80s Ireland and 90s Canada whose example we can follow? Oh wait.

In any case, Keynesians are safe. They can always borrow the neo-liberal riposte, ‘Sure things are bad (good) but if we had less (more) government, things would be even worse (better)’.

At GeoffM; You really would find it instructive to read say, the Treatise on Money, to find out what Keynes thought about monetary management in ‘normal times’. His advocacy of fiscal demand management was 1) a response to the hopelessness of BofE policy in the 30s 2)a reaction against the weak explanatory tools CB had 80s ago.

With these two things out, we can confidently assume that ‘normal’ times would have seen the Keynes of the Treatise not the General Theory.

No. Because the desire and wishes of the anointed ones to control our lives is psychological / religious in origin. The economics of Keynes provide a justifying narrative. The fact that it is discredited bullshit and has been shown to be so over and over again, logically and empirically matters not a jot.

first, the construction “only government spending can get us out of such recessions” is too strong. More weak: when interest rate is at zero point and the private sector is running a big surplus and unemployment is high, government spending can help a lot.

You want to test that idea by seeing if fiscal contraction pushes us back into recession. But what if we merely experience more years of low growth and high unemployment? Then you have to know what the unobserved counter-factual (what would have happened under slower and milder fiscal contraction) would look like, and you don’t. Or, conversely, say we do slip back into a recession, you might find some on your side of the fence arguing that we’d still have been even worse off, had we not got a grip on public finances. Or, should we miraculous experience good economic growth (perhaps because China and Germany start importing more) people will still say that we grew despite fiscal contraction .

this is the respect in which economics is not a science: we can’t run experiments.

They were wrong then and their offspring today are wrong now.

But it won’t shut them up. Never does. Socialists (why bother with the euphemism Keynesians, since real Keynesians don’t advocate deficit financing at the top of the cycle as their disciple one Gordon Brown indulged in) just believe in tax, spend, waste and squander – for all time.

Yes