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For Immediate Release
Contact: Sam Husseini, (202) 347-0020; or David Zupan, (541) 484-9167

Austerity Politics

DOUG HENWOOD

WASHINGTON

DOUG HENWOOD
Editor of Left Business Observerth,
Henwood said today: "While the government can't run big deficits
forever, there's no great urgency to do anything in a hurry. Even on
official projections (which assume decades of near-depression rates of
economic growth), federal debt won't become a problem until well into
the 2020s. Alarmists are trying to create a sense of emergency to
justify cuts to Medicare and Social Security that would be cruel,
unnecessary, and deeply unpopular. If we find that we have a budget
problem 10 or 20 years from now, we could easily cut back military
spending and raise taxes on multimillionaires and the problem would
quickly go away. Our economy is still deeply sick -- and the countries,
like Ireland and Greece, that have cut spending to deal with their
fiscal problems, have found themselves with unemployment rates of 15
percent instead."

Henwood writes regularly at doughenwood.wordpress.com -- and his books include Wall Street.

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