The Holy Clerics of Moneytheism Are Infallible.

[evildevil]

Church of Capitalism Finds Your Heresy and Lack of Faith Disturbing.

The Wrongest Profession
How economists have botched the promise of widely distributed prosperity-and why they have no intention of stopping nowOver the past two decades, the economics profession has compiled an impressive track record of getting almost all the big calls wrong. In

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[hudebnik]

A number of economists, such as Paul Krugman, would take issue with the statement

"After the bubble burst and the financial crisis shook the banking system to its foundations, the great minds of the [economic] profession were near unanimous in predicting a robust recovery. Stimulus was at best an accelerant for the impatient, most mainstream economists agreed-not an essential ingredient of a lasting recovery."

In fact, economists for the most part thought the late-Bush-and-early-Obama stimulus packages were necessary and if anything inadequate. There were indeed deficit hawks in the private sector and the Republican side of Congress who prevented anything bigger, and who mysteriously persuaded the American people in 2010, with the unemployment rate still at 9% and T-bills earning under 0.5%, that the biggest problem facing the economy was no longer jobs but the Federal budget deficit. Some of this may have been driven by sincere fear of budget deficits, but I think a large fraction of it was driven by the Republicans' promise to make Barack Obama a one-term President by preventing the economy from recovering on his watch.

See my Web page on the history of budget deficits, particularly this graph of inflation-adjusted Federal debt over the past century.