Noah Kristula-Green fact-checks a study used by Republicans to "prove" that austerity juices GDP:
[Alberto] Alesina has indeed found cases where reducing spending was followed by economic growth and reduced deficits. The problem: he found very few cases. More specifically he found 9 examples out of 107 attempts to reduce spending.
Jared Bernstein tackles the same subject:
I’ve been pretty aghast to hear claims that large cuts would immediately generate job growth … when the opposite is almost surely the case. You can make this a lot more complicated, but when you’re as far below capacity as we are—when so many people are unemployed, e.g.—it’s really quite simple arithmetic. Government spending feeds right into GDP growth and cuts subtract from it.
Now, when you’re at full capacity, it’s different.
The Dish 