link here to article
I'm not sure that they are our two most dangerous economists but they are more effective than a lot of the right wing nuts that appear on TV. Reinhart's husband is a honcho at the conservative Hoover Institute at Stanford. Rogoff is a conservative who said that he voted for McCain because he is a great American. (I wonder what he thought during the Arizona primary when McCain changed his opinion on almost everything that he had ever believed in order to win over the Tea Party crowd in Arizona which had opposed him.) Nevertheless, Reinhart and Rogoff have lots of support for their ideas. Expansionary austerity has become the accepted approach to the recession in much of Europe as well as in the US. Most economists agree that governments have to get their fiscal houses in order, but they also understand that economic growth has to be part of the solution to the debt problem,and that short term cuts in government spending will shrink GDP and make the debt to GDP number even larger. Reinhart and Rogoff have not paid much attention to the Japanese experience with a balance sheet recession when fiscal contraction led to higher debt to GDP ratios.
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