The Australian government will release the Fourth Intergenerational Report today with much fanfare, scaremongering and lies. Our boofhead Treasurer has been doing the rounds of the media outlets giving his evangelical sales pitch on how scary the future is unless we cut the fiscal deficit now and get the balance back in surplus as soon as possible. These intergenerational reports are really a confection of lies, half-truths interspersed with irrelevancies and sometimes some interesting facts. There is very little economics in these reports. What parades as economic analysis is just the usual neo-liberal mainstream nonsense that currency-issuing governments have run out of money and fiscal deficits are dangerous. The Treasurer is selling the Report on the grounds of “intergenerational theft” (the classic anti-fiscal deficit argument about mortgaging our future grand children’s future). Apparently, this justifies large cuts to the fiscal deficit now in order to turn it into a surplus so that our future generations are left with no debt. The real intergenerational theft though is embodied in a current fiscal strategy that leaves around 45 per cent of our teenagers unemployed, underemployed or NEET (Not in Education, Employment or Training) and hacks into public infrastructure provision as a strategy to create fiscal surpluses now. With private spending subdued at present and the external sector also draining expenditure from the economy relative to its income, trying to impose fiscal austerity now in the name of defending future prosperity is a grand lie and will ensure that the future prosperity is undermined.

Wasn’t Chuck Norris the muscle-bound guy with big guns and stuff who blasted the hell out of people and causes a lot of havoc? Well, apparently, he thinks he knows something about macroeconomics. In an article in the right-wing conservative media outlet WorldNetDaily (February 22, 2015) – Ready for a new U.S. Constitutional Convention? – Norris reveals what a knucklehead he really is. The article seems like an exercise in how many scary words, phrases and metaphors about government fiscal policy a writer can get into each sentence. Once you get over that there is nothing of substance left. Mr Action Man clearly needs to do some weights and leave the economics commentary to those who know even more than the slightest thing about it. American politics is once again come around to the more or less regular Balanced Budget Amendment (BBA) cycle. This is a regular comedy event that occupies Congress and all the commentators for a while as they reveal how little they know about the consequences of their grand plans for American prosperity. If they ever took it seriously it would be a disaster for the US economy and the people that depend on it.