Cato has published a full page ad from a swarm of serious economists who aren’t jumping on the stimulus bandwagon:

Notwithstanding reports that all economists are now Keynesians and that we all support a big increase in the burden of government, we do not believe that more government spending is a way to improve economic performance.

 

More government spending by Hoover and Roosevelt did not pull the United States economy out of the Great Depression in the 1930s. More government spending did not solve Japan’s “lost decade” in the 1990s. As such, it is a triumph of hope over experience to believe that more government spending will help the U.S. today. To improve the economy, policy makers should focus on reforms that remove impediments to work, saving, investment and production. Lower tax rates and a reduction in the burden of government are the best ways of using fiscal policy to boost growth. Below you’ll find some recent Cato work on “stimulus” packages.

Click through.  Read.  Show it to your friends at the water cooler.

This entry was posted by by Mitch Berg on Wednesday, January 28th, 2009 at 7:51 am and is filed under Business, The Economy and The Markets, Socialism American Style. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.