Paul Krugman: The Temptation to Spend

As I've been noting recently, there's a lot of opposition within Japan to the Bank of Japan's policy of printing more money, and there's also a lot of pressure on the government to raise taxes.And that's not very different from what has been happening throughout the rest of the advanced world: Central banks that have pursued quantitative easing have done so despite political pressure, not because of it, and fiscal austerity has been imposed almost everywhere.

The funny thing is that when you ask for justifications for pursuing hard money and tight budgets in a depressed, low-inflation economy, the answers you get often start from the presumption that money printing and deficit finance are immensely tempting to politicians, so that you shouldn't dare let them get even a slight taste of these addictive drugs.