wall st journal

Mr. Obama just whacked the economy with a roughly $160 billion tax increase in 2013 that he says will do no harm, but he wants us to believe that $85 billion in spending cuts will trigger a recession. The sequester shaves the equivalent of about 0.25% of GDP when offsetting it against the extra money the feds are spending on Sandy relief.

After World War II federal spending fell from 42% of GDP to 14.8% in two years, yet the private economy and employment roared back to life.

vs reality

government spending fell by $56 billion dollars from 1944 to 1947. GDP was just over $200 billion in 1944. Today such a cut would be equivalent to $3.4 trillion, or 132 percent of government expenditures.

While the private sector did pick up much of the slack, the downturn from 1945 to 1946 alone was far more severe than the current recession.

In the current recession, real GDP fell 3.8 percent peak to trough. By comparison, real GDP fell 10.9 percent from 1945 to 1946, did not begin to rise until the fourth quarter of 1947, and still did not reach 1945 levels until the third quarter of 1950.

Employment figures show a similar story. From 1945 to 1946, combined employment in nonfarm payrolls (the standard measure of employment at the Bureau of Labor Statistics) and the armed forces fell by 6.7 million, or 13.0 percent. By comparison, from the peak in December of 2008 to the trough in December of 2009, nonfarm payrolls fell 6.1 percent