Farewell. The Flying Pig Has Left The Building.

Steve Hynd, August 16, 2012

After four years on the Typepad site, eight years total blogging, Newshoggers is closing it's doors today. We've been coasting the last year or so, with many of us moving on to bigger projects (Hey, Eric!) or simply running out of blogging enthusiasm, and it's time to give the old flying pig a rest.

We've done okay over those eight years, although never being quite PC enough to gain wider acceptance from the partisan "party right or wrong" crowds. We like to think we moved political conversations a little, on the ever-present wish to rush to war with Iran, on the need for a real Left that isn't licking corporatist Dem boots every cycle, on America's foreign misadventures in Afghanistan and Iraq. We like to think we made a small difference while writing under that flying pig banner. We did pretty good for a bunch with no ties to big-party apparatuses or think tanks.

Those eight years of blogging will still exist. Because we're ending this typepad account, we've been archiving the typepad blog here. And the original blogger archive is still here. There will still be new content from the old 'hoggers crew too. Ron writes for The Moderate Voice, I post at The Agonist and Eric Martin's lucid foreign policy thoughts can be read at Democracy Arsenal.

I'd like to thank all our regular commenters, readers and the other bloggers who regularly linked to our posts over the years to agree or disagree. You all made writing for 'hoggers an amazingly fun and stimulating experience.

Thank you very much.

Note: This is an archive copy of Newshoggers. Most of the pictures are gone but the words are all here. There may be some occasional new content, John may do some posts and Ron will cross post some of his contributions to The Moderate Voice so check back.


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Wednesday, July 27, 2011

Better instead of bigger

By Dave Anderson:



Expansionary Austerity is a bad joke.



Kash at Street Light passes along the "success" of the British experiment in Expansionary Austerity:



Gross Domestic Product (GDP) grew by 0.2% in the second quarter, according to the Office for National Statistics, down from 0.5% in the previous quarter.


The think tank the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) was also critical of the level of growth. "Last June, the OBR [Office for Budget Responsibility] predicted GDP would grow by 2.6% in 2011, but even if the economy gets back on track in quarters three and four this year, it will barely reach 1.2%," said IPPR director Nick Pearce.


It's not mysterious: when you raise taxes and cut government spending, growth slows. And when you do that during a very fragile and weak recovery, you can push your economy back into recession, or at best, choke off growth almonst completely. That's exactly why, as has been extensively written about both here and elsewhere, austerity during a time of economic weakness is not a good way to beat a budget deficit, and will be largely self-defeating.



Dave Kurtz at Talking Points Memo raises the relevant point of the entire kabuki kamikaze debt ceiling debabcle:




Harry Reid's plan as advertised: $2.7 trillion
CBO projection: $2.2 trillion



John Boehner's plan as advertised: $1 trillion
CBO projection: $710 billion



Reid still wins, by a large margin. You can see why many Republicans aren't smitten with Boehner's plan.



But forget those figures for a moment. Here are the two numbers I'd really like to see: forecasted GDP under each plan and projected unemployment under each plan. That's a much sounder basis on which to evaluate these plans -- and the whole austerity craze -- than just ... whose is bigger.




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