From the Huffington Post,

“For most Americans, a trip to London means drinking a few pints and maybe taking a picture of one of those guards with the hats. For Paul Krugman, it means critiquing the entire direction of Britain’s economic policy.

Krugman, the Nobel Prize-winning economist and left-leaning New York Times columnist, appeared on the BBC program “Newsnight” this Wednesday, jousting with two British deficit hawks over the U.K.’s austerity agenda.

The Brits — venture capitalist Jon Moulton and Conservative Member of Parliament Andrea Leadsom — argued that the British government has to reduce spending if the country is to dig itself out of the economic slump it’s been in. Krugman countered that such a strategy could cause Britain’s economy to implode — since, he said, the public and private sectors need to circulate money to each other in order for anyone to prosper.”

Prof. Krugman explains clearly here why the UK economy is not like a large credit card in a recent article entitled, “The Austerity Agenda”:

“The bad metaphor — which you’ve surely heard many times — equates the debt problems of a national economy with the debt problems of an individual family. A family that has run up too much debt, the story goes, must tighten its belt. So if Britain, as a whole, has run up too much debt — which it has, although it’s mostly private rather than public debt — shouldn’t it do the same? What’s wrong with this comparison?

The answer is that an economy is not like an indebted family. Our debt is mostly money we owe to each other; even more important, our income mostly comes from selling things to each other. Your spending is my income, and my spending is your income.

So what happens if everyone simultaneously slashes spending in an attempt to pay down debt? The answer is that everyone’s income falls — my income falls because you’re spending less, and your income falls because I’m spending less. And, as our incomes plunge, our debt problem gets worse, not better.

This isn’t a new insight. The great American economist Irving Fisher explained it all the way back in 1933, summarizing what he called “debt deflation” with the pithy slogan “the more the debtors pay, the more they owe.” Recent events, above all the austerity death spiral in Europe, have dramatically illustrated the truth of Fisher’s insight.

And there’s a clear moral to this story: When the private sector is frantically trying to pay down debt, the public sector should do the opposite, spending when the private sector can’t or won’t. By all means, let’s balance our budget once the economy has recovered — but not now. The boom, not the slump, is the right time for austerity.”