it's us richard wolffe economist and visiting professor at the graduate program for international affairs at the new school university and author of numerous books his most recent democracy at work a cure for capitalism richard welcome back thank you tom this. seemingly arbitrary maybe you can explain the rationale for it. maximum budget deficit european countries can have a three percent flies in the face of automatic stabilizing mechanisms that all of these countries have where if they go into recession then automatically they have things like on employment insurance and all the people who were paying taxes into the government are now taking tax money out of the government and so of course you're going to have budget deficits go up was this just like a crazy idea in the first place yes i think so i think that the whole notion of an automatic fix level denies the inevitable flexibility the inevitability of new developments that no one who wrote these rules ever for saw and that it....