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.

For more information, contact at the Institute for Public Accuracy:
Sam Husseini, (202) 347-0020; or David Zupan, (541) 484-9167