Economic Analysis Filtered Through Analogy

Here is Brad DeLong offering us his best understanding of the "intelligence" behind the mob with pitchforks and torches who are in the street demanding fiscal austerity and ratcheted up interest rates:

Worrying about inflation and mounting government debt when the unemployment rate is at 10%, capacity utilization at 72%, and the U.S. government can borrow for 30 years at a real interest rate of 1.86% per year is like...

The winner so far is Ben Furnas: ...worrying about getting your furniture wet when your house is on fire.

My best entry so far is: ...telling a fire department that its first priority is to stop filling its firehoses with water and start filling them with gasoline.

This would be fun to watch if it were Mel Brooks' Young Frankenstein, but sadly this isn't fiction. Those fanatics with pitchforks and torches are real people, really misguided people, who are crying for the equivalent of blood-letting as the cure for financial disease. These fanatics may well kill the patient -- us! -- if they get their wishes fulfilled.

For those afficionados of the apt analogy. Here are some plucked from the comments to the above DeLong posting:

• Turning off the furnace in the middle of winter so the house doesn't get too hot in the summer.


• like fishing a Titanic survivor out of the North atlantic and giving them a cold bath because it builds characeter


• Setting your hair on fire so as not to have split ends.


• It's like worrying about paternity suits while you're being castrated


• Getting a vasectomy/hysterectomy the day after you and your spouse buy a five-bedroom house in a better school district.


• It's like urging larger holes be cut in the bottom of a sinking ship to get rid of all the water we're taking on.


• Eating out so you don't have to spend money running your refrigerator and range.


• Like not using a defibrillator because last month's electric bill was too high.