While Republicans are reluctant...

...to specify exactly where they would cut government spending, Conservatives in Britain take action:

The British government on Wednesday unveiled the country’s steepest public spending cuts in more than 60 years, reducing costs in government departments by an average of 19 percent, sharply curtailing welfare benefits, raising the retirement age to 66 by 2020 and eliminating hundreds of thousands of public sector jobs in an effort to bring down the bloated budget deficit.

This should have conservatives in America cheering. I'll bet the editors at the Wall Street Journal are already hard at work writing a piece called the "British Miracle."

But wait; what if liberal economists like Brad DeLong and Joe Stiglitz are right?

“Everything Keynes established about the primacy of maintaining demand at a steady pace is gone,” Brad DeLong, a liberal economist and blogger at the University of California, Berkeley, said mournfully.

“Europe obviously thinks it can focus on sound finances while the U.S. manages world demand,” he said in a telephone interview, “but unfortunately we are not doing that.”

Joseph E. Stiglitz argued that the British government’s plan was “a gamble with almost no potential upside” and that it would lead to lower growth, lower demand, lower tax revenues, a deterioration of skills among the unemployed and an even higher national debt.

“We cannot afford austerity,” he wrote in The Guardian.

Mr. DeLong and others on the left have long argued for more stimulus spending in the United States and abroad to lift growth, even if deficits rise temporarily as a consequence.

No worries. The Journal is writing a "British Mistake" piece just in case. You see, the Brits are raising taxes also:

Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne (above, right, with Prime Minister David Cameron) said a temporary tax on bank balance sheets would be made permanent. Many Britons, like Americans, are angry with big banks for their role in the world financial crisis. Mr. Osborne said the government would seek to extract “the maximum sustainable taxes” from financial institutions.

In June, Mr. Osborne also said that the value-added tax — a tax paid on most consumer goods in Britain — would increase in January, to 20 percent from 17.5 percent.

So the Journal is covered either way. If the spending cuts work to revitalize the British economy, the U. S. should follow suit. If the effort fails, well, the lesson is clear: you should never raise taxes.

That's how sophists work.