Thread by @HBoushey

I talked to @kairyssdal @Marketplace about misplaced concern over #austerity—and why handwringing about deficits now will prolong the economic suffering of millions of Americans.

Now is not the time to pull back on spending.
marketplace.org/2020/11/16/wha…

A thread.

The risk of doing too little to support families & businesses will far outweigh the risk of doing too much

We need to continue to pump money into the economy if we are going to avoid a coronavirus recession that makes the Great Recession a fond memory heatherboushey.medium.com/beware-of-aust… 2/

The premature pullback in government support during the Great Recession is why it took a full decade to return to pre-crisis unemployment rates.

As the past decade has shown, austerity was not the answer then, and it surely is not now.
epi.org/publication/wh… 3/

And as @bencasselman & @jeannasmialek explain, "The consequences of another slow recovery would almost certainly fall disproportionately on low-income families, many of them Black and Hispanic.” nytimes.com/2020/09/24/bus… 4/

The fact is that the federal government does not work the same way family budgets work.

The federal government can borrow, and with interest rates at historic lows, the cost of paying back any borrowing we do today will be much lower. brookings.edu/research/feder… 5/

There was a need for substantially greater public spending before any of us ever heard of the coronavirus: to address pervasive economic inequality, to invest in human, physical, and intellectual capital. That need will be even greater in the virus’s wake. 6/

Shout out to #EGgrantee @JWMason1 for sharing this excellent analogy—

Government spending during a recession needs to be like turning into a skid: "When your tax revenue is falling, you need to pick up the spending.” /end