Proving she’s smarter than liberals:
Chancellor Angela Merkel stood firm in rejecting any new German economic stimulus program even as the International Monetary Fund said the recession is worse than previously thought and called for measures to spur demand.
Merkel shrugged off calls for more spending despite a report by Germany’s leading economic institutes which will show tomorrow that Europe’s biggest economy may shrink as much as 6 percent this year — almost three times the contraction of 2.25 percent forecast by the government in January.
The coalition won’t expand its 82 billion euro ($107 billion) stimulus agreed under two separate programs, Merkel told reporters in Berlin today after a meeting with business leaders and economists.
“We shouldn’t talk about a third stimulus package,” Merkel said. “Instead we’ll let current measures take effect.”
The chancellor’s comments echo statements today by her finance and economy ministers underlining unity in the coalition over not stretching the budget more to pay for new stimulus steps.
The news story goes on to note how additional government spending may merely allow failing business to slack off and wait for the taxpayer to bail them out. In order to recover, the companies which can’t make it will have to die; the companies which need massive restructuring will have to do it; the economic decks have to be cleared in order for new businesses to step into the vacuum of the dead companies. We can’t spend our way out of this, boys and girls: the whole world is awash in debt and only the creation of entirely new, never-had-it-before wealth will allow us to discharge this debt and start growing again.
Hopefully, someone will program Obama’s teleprompter with Merkelism so that we, too, can get off the spend, spend, spend treadmill to economic death.
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