" A strange time for a deficit panic"

Mathew Yglesias at "Think Progress" makes the case against Deficit Hysteria by looking at the rather starkly low interest rates on government borrowing instruments:

Deficits can impede economic growth. No borrower is safer than the government. So when the government wants to borrow a lot of money and investors start charging it a high interest rate, the borrowing costs for everyone else go up. This “crowds out” lots of potentially useful economic activity. A business expansion that’s profitable at a 5 percent interest rate may be far too risky to invest in at a 7 percent interest rate. But as you can see here on the right, the interests rates being charged by the market to lend money to the US government are low and falling...

Note that 10-year interest rates were never below 3 percent at any point during the Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush, Clinton, or W. Bush administrations. So why is this on the agenda now?

So why is there a "deficit panic" when the impact of deficits on federal borrowing vs. availability of low-interest investment capital is nil?  And how does cutting the deficit - especially with an emphasis on cutting spending to balance the budget  - produce economic growth and jobs ?   Of course it doesn't.

"BoehnerCare"

"(Attacking deficits and cutting spending) wouldn't square with the way we normally think about economic activity in a depressed economy," (according to) Andrew Samwick, a former chief economist on President Bush's Council of Economic Advisers... When the economy suffers from a lack of demand, as it does now, Samwick explained, most economists think increasing spending is the more effective way to generate that demand and get things moving again.

Why has the opposite view begun to take hold?

In part, Samwick argued, it's thanks to the efforts of congressional Republicans, who want budget cuts and lately have hammered home the view that government spending has stymied growth. "You have the Speaker of the House talking about job-killing government spending," said Samwick, now a professor of economics at Dartmouth College. "But they have not been tasked with making clear exactly how the government is killing jobs."

Republicans have suggested that government spending creates an expectation that taxes will have to go up, and the resulting uncertainty crimps hiring. But Samwick said that if that were true, the same trend would have led businesses to hold off on making investments in machinery--something that's not happening.  (Yahoo News via Mother Jones.)

But, despite the lack of evidence or a coherent explanation, a new Bloomberg poll finds that 55 percent of Americans believe that focusing on cutting spending and reducing taxes is the the most likely path to recovery and job growth, as opposed to more government spending to stimulate the demand that is slack in private markets.

 Andy Kroll at Mother Jones concludes:

Republicans have hammered away with their cut-and-grow mantra so much that they've convinced a majority of Americans to believe the unbelievable. You've got to hand it to Republicans: They may be wrong, but they are convincing.

While the country suffers.

Update: Simon Johnson, former chief economist for the International Monetary Fund has more HERE on what is becoming increasingly obvious to anyone who isn't under the influence of the GOP's fiscal Kool-Aid:  "(F)iscal contraction — cutting spending or raising taxes, or both — will immediately slow the economy..."