Robert Reich : Consumer spending (70 percent of the economy) is flat or dropping because consumers are losing their jobs and wages, and don't have money. And businesses aren't hiring because they don't have enough customers

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Republican candidates are all calling for major spending cuts starting as soon as possible. This is the best recipe for Economic Catastrophe. Because Government Spending is what can boost the economy.

Republican Economic Ignorance can do great harm to the American Economy and paralize any hope of recovery.

Huffington Post
The Austerity Death Trap
October 19, 2011

By Robert Reich
Chancellor's Professor of Public Policy, University of California at Berkeley; Author, 'Aftershock'

The Austerity Death Trap

Some excerpts :

But even without these hair-brained Republican plans, we're heading in their direction anyway. Unless Republicans agree to a budget deal before the end of the year (don't hold your breath), the temporary payroll tax cuts and extended unemployment benefits we have now will end.

The result will be the most stringent fiscal tightening of any large economy in the world.

Together with ongoing cuts at the state and local government level, the scale of this fiscal contraction would be almost unprecedented.

It will come at a time when 25 million are Americans looking for full-time work, median incomes are dropping, home foreclosures rising, and a record 37 percent of American families with young children are in poverty.

To call this economic lunacy is to understate the point.

And if you think 2011 is bad, you ain't seen nothin' yet.

Even if you're a deficit hawk this is nuts. Instead of reducing the ratio of debt to the size of the overall economy, this strategy increases the ratio because it causes the economy to shrink.

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