With the natural disaster in the US now in its clean up stage the discussions have turned, in a predictable way, to “how will the US pay for this especially when it has huge deficits and debts and has to fall off a fiscal cliff anyway to stop the sky from falling in” – and narratives like that. Remember when Hurricane Irene struck in 2011? The resurgent Republicans tried to push through bills, which would have required matching cuts in other federal spending. The other Sandy reminder is that when the chips are down who do we all turn to? Government. What do you think would have been the current state, if the Republican contender was President and followed through on his promise to scrap FEMA and put emergency relief in the hands of the private sector, which apparently does things better? Chaos at best is the answer. The fact is that the federal government will be able to provide whatever financial assistance is required beyond private insurance payments. The only constraint that might hamper the recovery is the availability of real resources, which can be brought to bear. Further, it seems that the whole fiscal crisis beat up, even with the terms of the mainstream paradigm, is a beat-up, courtesy of some spurious work done by the Congressional Budget Office, that much-quoted, but seemingly, errant organisation.

Sometimes I read things and consider either I live in a parallel universe or the writers do. I always conclude the latter. There is an increasing number of articles and commentaries coming out which aim to re-write history in favour of the writer’s reputation or that of his/her mates. Revisionism, which includes the practice of personal reincarnation is rife at present. Everybody seemed to predict the crisis. Even those that clearly in their own writing didn’t have a clue that the trouble was coming predicted it. As part of this process, key organisations that should be learning from the crisis such as the BIS are demonstrating that they are in an educational void. They have become just another propaganda machine. And so the crisis continues as ignorance is elevated to higher levels.

I went for a walk at lunchtime through a main shopping area where I am working today. In the past you saw Sale signs twice around twice a year – post Xmas and mid-year. The advertised discounts at this time were modest except for some enticement items that might have been discounted by 30 per cent or so. You may check this out going through archives of Catalogue AU. You rarely saw Closing Down/All Stock must go signs. You rarely saw massive discounts – such as 80 per cent off and the like. Times have changed and there seems to be a permanency to these sales and the discounts are huge. Previously well-to-do shopping strips are now slowly being punctuated with empty shops so the Sale/Closing Down signs are now interspersed with For Lease signs. And Australia is meant to be going through a one-in-a-hundred years mining boom and the Government tells us we are doing so well that they have to undermine aggregate demand by running a surplus to give the economy room to grow even more. The problem is that our political leaders are in denial and continually bombard us with lies to perpetuate their ideological stances which work against the well-being of the majority of citizens. It is clear that the system is failing and that means we have a choice. The problem is that we first have to identify that we have that choice.

The International Labour Organization (ILO) released its Global Employment Trends for Youth 2012 report today (May 22, 2012). It is harrowing reading and I will consider it later in the week. It tells us that youth unemployment is rising and will be unlikely to see any improvement until at least 2016. The ILO recommend a raft of government initiatives which would require budget deficits to expand. But, of-course, the dominant political narrative is to cut deficits in the false belief that this will engender growth. Exactly the opposite is happening and for good reason. I came across an article from 1982 today which tells us why austerity is dangerous and damaging. It also conditions us to understand that budget deficits are neither good nor bad but policy choices can be.

How bad is it going to get? That was the question that the UK Guardian asked the head of the UK Office for Budget Responsibility in an interview last week. It was in relation to the likely fallout if Greece defaults and leaves the Eurozone. He replied that the UK would be irreparably damaged. The fact is that Greece has already defaulted. The other fact is that if they do leave the EMU (which would be the best strategy) the impact on currency-issuing nations such as Britain can be managed away by sensible fiscal policy. For those who are predicting deep gloom the culprit is not the possible actions of Greece or any Eurozone nation but rather the irresponsible pursuit of austerity among sovereign nations. The reason Britain has a double-dip recession is all down to the decisions its own government have made. Organisations like the OBR support the flawed decisions with poor forecasting. Taken together this malaise reflects a mainstream macroeconomic framework that is incapable of providing policy advice which will deliver sustained prosperity to the population. The same flawed theoretical framework spawns the ever-growing hysteria about what will happen if Greece exits. The mania is reaching proportions similar to those a few years ago when rising budget deficits were predicted to cause huge hikes in interest rates and/or hyperinflation. All these forecasts fail because they are made by those who do not understand how the system works.

Last night’s Federal Budget in Australia proved once again how dominant the macroeconomic myths are in policy development. You can read my pre-Budget comments – Budget 2012: a recipe for disaster – and apart from the 2011-12 deficit being larger than the Government planned as a result of the slowing economy undermining its estimated tax revenue (in other words, the Government was overly optimistic in its forecasts last year) I would not have written much different after seeing all the Budget documents. It remains the largest fiscal consolidation attempted in one fiscal year (equivalent to 3 per cent of GDP) at a time that GDP is growing around 2.5 per cent.and I cannot see private spending growth picking up to fill the gap. Outcome – a movement towards recession. Conclusion – poor fiscal management. But the Budget Papers that the Government releases are always interesting reading and one day I plan to trace the evolution of the shifts in macroeconomic ideology through the way the papers are presented (format, tables, and narratives). There you learn what the economists in Treasury think and the ideas espoused are generally applicable to the international debate given that the tentacles of the dominant paradigm of the day spread widely. In Budget Paper No 1, Statement 4 – Building Resilience Through National Saving we are provided with a demonstration lesson of how a fiat monetary system does not work and a classic depiction of the way the mainstream narrative deceives the citizens.

The ABC News today reported that – Newcastle hosts frisbee championships – which means the national frisbee championships will be in my town this week and I will be around. Apparently the championships involve “flinging a frisbee between players on a pitch similar to a football or soccer field” and then “catching the disc in the endzone”. I suggest the Australian Prime Minister take up the sport. It seems an innocuous pastime and she surely couldn’t be any less skilled at it than she is at managing the economy. Her speech yesterday in Perth certainly established she has no understanding of macroeconomics or if she does, then she is deliberately misleading us. Her Finance Minister was also fully engaged in the misinformation exercise about the state of the budget. But then she is in solid company. The German Bundesbank has made public statements telling nations crippled by self-imposed fiscal austerity to forget about growth and balance their budgets. The ugly German stereotype is unfortunately reinforced by these sort of public interventions. And, finally, we have the genius who yesterday was advocating widespread cuts in welfare entitlements today out in the Op Ed pages suggesting that countries who exert their sovereign rights over multinationals are committing suicide despite the particular country in focus having real GDP growth rates that most other nations envy. Its all in a day of neo-liberal madness.