Spending cuts are a bad idea right now

The experts agree.

Something anyone who has a functioning brain knew to begin with.

NYT:

The prospect of further reductions worries forecasters. Jerry Webman, chief economist of OppenheimerFunds, wrote in an analysis that while the cuts were not huge this year or next, “they are nonetheless contrary to what would be expected in a fragile economic environment.”

In separate interviews, Joel Prakken, chairman of Macroeconomic Advisers, a forecasting firm, and Laurence H. Meyer, its co-founder and a former Federal Reserve governor, called the reductions “job-killing spending cuts” — playing on repugicans’ mantra against “job-killing tax increases.”

“At the very least,” said Mark Zandi, chief economist of Moody’s Analytics, Congress should renew for another year two measures that expire after 2011 — payroll tax relief for employees and extended unemployment compensation — as Mr. Obama has proposed. If either expired, Mr. Zandi said, that could shave roughly a half-percentage point from economic growth next year.

Repugicans are resistant. And Democrats are too cowed to counter much, given polls that show many Americans believe Mr. Obama’s 2009-10 stimulus package did not work, despite studies to the contrary.

A Democratic Congressional adviser, granted anonymity to discuss party deliberations, said: “We’re at a loss to figure out a way to articulate the argument in a way that doesn’t get us pegged as tax-and-spenders.”

The message has got to get out that it is the repugicans who are the 'tax-and-spenders' ... they always have been since their inception, even their saint ronny raised taxes 11 times while he raped the nation.