And thrived in the postwar economic boom.

The (still new) Conservative government is going to face five more years of people focusing on what looks to be rather mild austerity. We need an aphorism for a situation like this. Something like: "Concerns about austerity are concerns about monetary navigation".

To be fair, the cut in question was just returning spending to a normal, postwar level. I'll take a look at the rest of the paper after work.

Didn't FDR reverse the Great Depression and revive the economy by massively increasing government spending which led to a booming economy even before the war?

Didn't FDR reverse the Great Depression and revive the economy by massively increasing government spending which led to a booming economy even before the war?

No.

Fiscal adjustments probably had some impact on the recovery, mainly through the expectations channel a la Eggertson (2008). However, the Depression (and all post-war business cycles) have seen their recoveries as a result of more expansionary monetary policy a la Romer (1994).

There's also a lot of crap with NIRA artificially raising nominal wages and extending the Depression as a result.

Social Security is a cancer upon our economy and a testament to the government's lack of faith in the American people to wipe their own asses, and as far as I'm concerned if government spending was eliminated in that area we would be able to fund the government spending going on right now, without accumulating debt to China.

There's no reason to decrease the government's role in the economy as a major consumer, rather they need to slack off from a regulatory perspective and make changes to the market the same way everyone else does, by spending or refraining from spending.

The only way we would have the funds necessary for that without driving ourselves further in debt is to eliminate social security.