The impact of "starving the beast" on unemployment

Think Progress: "If government payrolls were the same today as they were back in 2009, the unemployment rate would be significantly lower, standing at 8.4 percent, instead of the current 9.1 percent."

Krugman does the math - deficit hysteria doesn't add up

In the wake of the S&P downgrade, the Nobel Prize-winning economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman looks at the numbers behind the deficit hype:

Amid all the debt hysteria, it’s worth taking a look at the actual arithmetic here — because what this arithmetic says is that the size of the deficit in the next year or two hardly matters for the US fiscal position — and in fact the size over the next decade is barely significant.