Master of the Obvious

Steven Rattner over at the People's Socialist Worker's Daily Financial Times observes:

It is always difficult to prove counterfactuals, such as the meltdown that would have occurred had Washington stayed on the sidelines when the crisis hit in 2008, as all the Republican challengers now argue – to varying degrees – should have happened. But we need not turn the economy into a laboratory. Economics is enough of a science for us to know that immediate harsh deficit reduction, with tightened monetary policy, would surely plunge us back into recession.