G.O.P. Sets Up Huge Target for Budget Ax

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/04/us/politics/04fiscal.html?_r=1&hp

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: barry levine 
Date: Tue, Jan 4, 2011 at 10:09 AM
Subject: re: G.O.P. Sets Up Huge Target for Budget Ax
To: letters@nytimes.com


To the Editor:

  In 1936 as FDR faced his first presidential re-election campaign, Washington was seized with a fever for balancing the budget.  Surely deficit spending had achieved its goal of ending the Depression!  History's verdict was blunt and swift. Unemployment surged, the economy relapsed and Roosevelt spent his whole second term digging out from that folly. Deficit spending to stimulate an economy in crisis incurs the responsibility to pay that debt down in the good times. It does not require us to remove the stimulus when unemployment is still at crisis levels.

Barry Levine