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Originally Posted by SebC
Pretty much every first world country went bigger on stimulus this time and it worked. Unemployed stayed low, the harm to individuals and the economy was minimized. But it caused a bit of inflation and turns out that voters really hate inflation. So now all the incumbent governments are getting turfed, and the lesson for politicians is that even though stimulus worked economically, you're better off with austerity politically. Next recession we'll probably screw it up with austerity because voters collectively didn't recognize that their governments actually did a a great job and we'd rather have a small percent of the population starve in unemployment that spread the pain around with inflation.
Also $55.6B in 2010 is $76.6B in 2024 dollars. Not that I care. That was also stimulus spending that happened thanks to Liberals and NDP threatening non-confidence over Harper's initial austerity plans, and it was a good deficit to run.
I have a much greater objection to the structural deficit Harper created by cutting the GST, which was economic nonsense that used up our "fiscal powder" to buy votes. Hrm...  |
This is the thing. People talk about optic moves (and the GST holiday is certainly that) but by and large the Liberals, like Biden, like a lot of European countries, made decent policy choices under the circumstances. Austerity moves would behave 100% been the wrong thing to do.