While many conservative "thinkers" and credibility-challenged economists predicted that Britain would see modest growth this year following the implementation of austerity, anyone with a shred of common sense and an interest in empirical reality saw this coming.
Britain has gone back into recession.
(Reuters) - Britain's economy has fallen into its second recession since the financial crisis after a shock contraction at the start of 2012, heaping pressure on Prime Minister David Cameron's government as it reels from a series of political missteps. [...]
With local elections taking place on May 3, there could hardly be worse timing for Wednesday's news from the Office for National Statistics that Britain's gross domestic product fell 0.2 percent in the first quarter of 2012 on top of a 0.3 percent decline at the end of 2011.
And I'll repeat for the umpteenth time something we have regularly expressed here -- what the British government has done over the past four years is exactly what the Republicans here in American wish to do. They want to impose massive cuts to social programs during a time in which our economy simply cannot take the shock.
All available evidence tells us that austerity is a failure, tantamount to pissing into the wind, yet the men who have taken up leadership positions in the Republican party are among austerity's biggest proponents.
I suppose we have nothing to worry about. Should Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan succeed, we can all sustain ourselves on rice and beans.