Antony_Davies

I am new to Austrian economics. I got all the way through undergraduate and PhD work and had never heard of Hayek, Mises, or Rand. When I finally heard the Austrian perspective, I was amazed -- using philosophical tools, the Austrians reach the same conclusions that I reached using econometric tools. I believe economics should be taught, at the undergraduate level, from an Austrian perspective. The graphs and equations that populate the standard undergraduate texts speak only to small subset of students. The Austrian approach, however, speaks to a broad audience and provides a solid intuitive understanding of economics that is very difficult to get from a picture.

My preference is 0, though I could live comfortably with the 1 to 10 range.

Think of borrowing and saving as moving consumption and income across time. When I borrow, what I am really doing is consuming now money I will earn in the future. When I save, what I am really doing is consuming later money I earn now.

When a country does this, it is transferring the consumption and income of the taxpayers across time. So, by accumulating $16 trillion in debt, what the US has really done is to take $16 trillion of consumption away from future taxpayers and give it to today's taxpayers. IMHO, that's an extreme example of taxation without representation.

I don't agree. Sometimes, the economy is like a tube of toothpaste. The government can push down on one end and all that happens is that the other end bulges. In this case, there is no question that the bailout saved jobs in Detroit and saved us the immediate pain of car companies and their suppliers and finaciers going bankrupt.

However, what the bailout ultimately did was to keep a large chunk of our scarce resources tied up in industries that have demonstrated their inability to use those resources in the best possible way. So, a decade or two or three from now, we're going to be right back to the dealing with the same problem because we didn't address the disease. We addressed the symptom.

Think of it as a law of conservation of economic pain. The government can't make the pain of wasted resources go away -- it can only shift the pain to the future.

What the US needs to do is something like the following (I've run the numbers, so what I'm about to say is approximately correct)...

(1) Cut federal spending by 10%. If you want to avoid cutting something (e.g., Social Security), then cut something else by more, but the total must come out to a 10% cut. (2) Hold spending constant (no adjustments for inflation) for four years. (3) At the end of year 5, we'll have a balanced budget. From that point forward, the growth in government spending must not exceed the growth in real GDP.