It's also possible the US is entering it's own "Austerity".
Which has generally been a bad idea:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Austerity:_The_History_of_a_Da...
For those that do, it's fine.
Even the IMF, who pushed for austerity
* https://www.brettonwoodsproject.org/2009/07/art-564828/
admitted that it can kill growth:
> This paper investigates the relation between growth forecast errors and planned fiscal consolidation during the crisis. We find that, in advanced economies, stronger planned fiscal consolidation has been associated with lower growth than expected, with the relation being particularly strong, both statistically and economically, early in the crisis. A natural interpretation is that fiscal multipliers were substantially higher than implicitly assumed by forecasters. The weaker relation in more recent years may reflect in part learning by forecasters and in part smaller multipliers than in the early years of the crisis.
* https://www.imf.org/en/Publications/WP/Issues/2016/12/31/Gro...
* https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/aer.103.3.117
You'd think they'd learn their lesson, but nope: post-COVID they were pushing austerity again.
People are excited for other people to suffer:
> A federal prison here in Florida’s rural Panhandle lost much of its roof and fence during Hurricane Michael in October, forcing hundreds of inmates to relocate to a facility in Yazoo City, Miss., more than 400 miles away.
> Since then, corrections officers have had to commute there to work, a seven-hour drive, for two-week stints. As of this week, thanks to the partial federal government shutdown, they will be doing it without pay — no paychecks and no reimbursement for gas, meals and laundry, expenses that can run hundreds of dollars per trip.
[…]
> The shutdown on top of the hurricane has caused Ms. Minton to rethink a lot of things.
> “I voted for him, and he’s the one who’s doing this,” she said of Mr. Trump. “I thought he was going to do good things. He’s not hurting the people he needs to be hurting.”
* https://archive.is/https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/07/us/flo...