The cardio diet of deficit reduction – a modern tale

[girl gone mad]

Sorry, I had to butcher it to meet the posting guidelines.

The cardio diet of deficit reduction – a modern tale
By Edward Harrison of Credit Writedowns
http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2010/06/the-cardio-diet-to-deficit-reduction-%E2%80%93-a-modern-fable.html

Everybody in the west knows the fabled effectiveness of weight-loss dietary programs designed around intense cardiovascular regimes which burn huge amounts of calories. The people who work hard, doing as much cardio as possible lose weight. Those that pump iron may get muscular, but they aren’t working as hard and they don’t lose weight, they gain it. The moral of the story? When it comes to losing weight, cardio works, weights don’t.

Yet life is more complex than that. In the real world, cardio workouts alone aren’t the failsafe way to weight loss. If you work too hard, you burn too many calories and your body eats your muscle which slows your metabolism down and makes you gain weight.

(snip)

Deficits, Spending and Taxes

Think of this as a tale of government spending and deficits. The longer-term goal is to reduce deficits as one would reduce weight. There are two ways to go about this. One is to cut as much spending as possible, the equivalent of a highly focused cardio regimen and its calorie burning intensity. The second is for the government to create jobs to increase GDP and the tax base while strengthening the competitiveness of the economy as one might pump iron to gain strength and muscle, increasing the metabolic rate. Clearly, if one over-trains by pumping iron and eating too much, one gains weight just as wasteful spending misallocates resources and increases the deficit. But, there are risks to cardio over-training which causes muscles to atrophy, slowing the metabolism and increasing weight where the economic analogue comes in the form of depression, the dead-weight economic loss of healthy companies’ insolvency, tax loss from high long-term unemployment, and ultimately higher deficits.

It looks like we’re in for a lot of cardio across the entire developed world and not enough strength training. My prediction is serious weight gain and serious muscle loss. I now believe GDII is coming and I will have a lot more to say about this in an upcoming post.

http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2010/06/the-cardio-diet-to-deficit-reduction-%E2%80%93-a-modern-fable.html">more. . .