Delong: Western Governments are Missing a Once-In-A-Lifetime Opportunity to Fix Their Finances

Brad DeLong:
Why is the US economy still depressed?

[G]overnments are not responding to market signals: financial markets are telling them that they have a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to advantageously pull spending forward from the future into the present and push taxes back from the present into the future. But, because of the ideology of austerity, they are not taking advantage of this opportunity.

Also, just now

We’re running the most contractionary fiscal policy in the postwar era, and probably for longer, at a time when the case for an expansionary one could not be stronger...