David Atkins and Digby have a well-done tag-team take-down of the ‘austerity mavens’ up at Hullabaloo. A couple of teasers to whet your taste-buds…Here’s Atkins, riffing on Justin Lahart’s Wall St. Journal post “Unemployment Rate Without Government Cuts: 7.1%“:

…People who know the first thing about public policy laugh at the bipartisanship fetishists and the people who insist that “both parties have gotten too extreme.” The facts are pretty one-sided here. They suggest that if anything, the President and the mainstream Democratic Party in the United States are too far to the right and too beholden to the austerity mavens, and the Republicans are living on a extremist conservative moon base with Newt Gingrich…

Then Digby, persuasively concluding after presenting several compelling charts demonstrating that state austerity policies (esp. CA) have been a disastrous drag on the economy :

If the federal government continues to refuse to help out the states financially — especially a state as large as California, whose economy is actually bigger than Spain’s, it’s hard to see how it doesn’t drag down the entire country….I realize that Europe and the US face different problems. But one of the problems they have in common is a daft belief among policy makers in austerity during a depression As California goes even further into hardcore austerity mode, I’d expect some unpleasant side effects to the US economy as a whole.

Not a good week for the austerity crowd, what with France, Germany, England and now this Digby-Atkins take-down.