The revolt has begun. Yesterday a petition with 2.3 million signatures opposing the Obama Budget’s cuts to social insurance programs was dropped off at the White House. A rally was also held representing a coalition of interest groups committed to opposing the cuts as a Democratic President pressed on with his plans to attack the signature achievements of the New Deal and Great Society

Treasury Secretary Lew goes to Berlin. Mr. Lew encourages Europeans to reduce their austerity measures because they are ruining their economies. He wants Europeans to spur their demand or spending. That is a good suggestion.

It is helpful to get a bead on austerity, its impact on poor people, its overall pattern of poverty creation, and its degradations by looking across the pond to where austerity unbounded has had time to metastasize into law, and actual changes in people’s lives. Polly Toynbee of The Guardian warns about these cuts, set to start on April 1st, or Monday, because the media have not publicized them.

No one proclaimed the “age of Austerity” louder than the Tories of Britain and their Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne.

Speaker John Boehner might want to take a word of advice from Speaker John Boehner because according to him there is no immediate crisis. In an interview with ABC News Speaker Boehner admitted that, contrary to much of his and his party’s rhetoric, there actually is not a debt crisis.

Okay, that’s not exactly what Robert Samuelson said, but pretty close. He actually told readers:

What frustrates constructive debate is muddled public opinion.

Last Friday President Obama signed the sequester order officially launching America’s latest austerity program. Austerity has yet to produce jobs or growth in any country it has been tried in. In fact, austerity is becoming one of the few certainties within economic policy making – the certainty of losing growth if the policy is adopted. And now we get to learn the lesson everyone else now knows the hard way.
But even in the “across the board” cutting program it seems the poor are going to get the worst of it.

Tomorrow budget sequestration begins. The “unthinkable” gun-put-to-head law that Congress passed to force itself to compromise has, not surprisingly, not lea to compromise. Instead it has led to the gun going off and now a weak American economy will face austerity cuts, a program that has led to further weakness in every economy it has been tried in.

We are now a week away from the “sequester” another round of austerity cuts. Cuts that will take place despite the overwhelming evidence that all austerity programs do is make a bad situation worse. Even the IMF, bastion of Neoliberalism, has revised itself and said austerity was actually a bad idea reporting that economists underestimated the euro-for-euro effect of cutting government budgets. While the initial expectation was that cutting a euro from the budget would cost around 50 cents in lost growth, the actual effect was closer to 1.50 per euro. Big miss.

Democratic government works swell, as long as it excludes those filthy commoners.