You've heard that an incredibly influential economic paper by Reinhart and Rogoff (RR) - widely used to justify austerity - has been "busted" for "excel spreadsheet errors" and other flaws.

As Google Trends shows, there is a raging debate over the errors in RR's report:

Even Colbert is making fun of them.

Liberal economists argue that the "debunking" of RR proves that debt doesn't matter, and that conservative economists who say it does are liars and scoundrels.

Conservative economists argue that the Habsburg, British and French empires crumbled under the weight of high debt, and that many other economists - including Niall Ferguson, the IMF and others - agree that high debt destroys economies.

RR attempted to defend their work yesterday:

Researchers at the Bank of International Settlements and the International Monetary Fund have weighed in with their own independent work. The World Economic Outlook published last October by the International Monetary Fund devoted an entire chapter to debt and growth. The most recent update to that outlook, released in April, states: “Much of the empirical work on debt overhangs seeks to identify the ‘overhang threshold’ beyond which the correlation between debt and growth becomes negative. The results are broadly similar: above a threshold of about 95 percent of G.D.P., a 10 percent increase in the ratio of debt to G.D.P. is identified with a decline in annual growth of about 0.15 to 0.20 percent per year.” This view generally reflects the state of the art in economic research *** Back in 2010, we were still sorting inconsistencies in Spanish G.D.P. data from the 1960s from three different sources. Our primary source for real G.D.P. growth was the work of the economic historian Angus Madison. But we also checked his data and, where inconsistencies appeared, refrained from using it. Other sources, including the I.M.F. and Spain’s monumental and scholarly historical statistics, had very different numbers. In our 2010 paper, we omitted Spain for the 1960s entirely. Had we included these observations, it would have strengthened our results, since Spain had very low public debt in the 1960s (under 30 percent of G.D.P.), and yet enjoyed very fast average G.D.P. growth (over 6 percent) over that period. *** We have never advised Mr. Ryan, nor have we worked for President Obama, whose Council of Economic Advisers drew heavily on our work in a chapter of the 2012 Economic Report of the President, recreating and extending the results. In the campaign, we received great heat from the right for allowing our work to be used by others as a rationalization for the country’s slow recovery from the financial crisis. Now we are being attacked by the left — primarily by those who have a view that the risks of higher public debt should not be part of the policy conversation.

But whether you believe that the errors in the RR study are fatal or minor, there is a bigger picture that everyone is ignoring.

Initially, RR never pushed an austerity-only prescription. As they wrote yesterday:

The only way to break this feedback loop is to have dramatic write-downs of debt. *** Early on in the financial crisis, in a February 2009 Op-Ed, we concluded that “authorities should be prepared to allow financial institutions to be restructured through accelerated bankruptcy, if necessary placing them under temporary receivership.” Significant debt restructurings and write-downs have always been at the core of our proposal for the periphery European Union countries, where it seems to us unlikely that a mix of structural reform and austerity will work.

Indeed, the nation's top economists have said that breaking up the big banks and forcing bondholders to write down debt are essential prerequisites to an economic recovery.

Additionally, economist Steve Keen has shown that “a sustainable level of bank profits appears to be about 1% of GDP”, and that higher bank profits leads to a ponzi economy and a depression. Unless we shrink the financial sector, we will continue to have economic instability.

Leading economists also say that failing to prosecute the fraud of the big banks is dooming our economy. Prosecution of Wall Street fraud is at a historic low, and so the wheels are coming off the economy.

Moreover, quantitative analyses provides evidence that private debt levels matter much more than public debt levels. But mainstream economists on both the right and the left wholly ignore private debt in their models.

Finally, the austerity-verus-stimulus debate cannot be taken in a vacuum, given that the Wall Street giants have gotten the stimulus and the little guy has borne the brunt of austerity.

Steve Keen showed that giving money directly to the people would stimulate much better than giving it to the big banks.

But the government isn't really helping people ... and has instead chosen to give the big banks hundreds of billions a year in hand-outs.

(Obama's policies are even worse than Bush's in terms of redistributing wealth to the very richest. Indeed, government policy is ensuring high unemployment levels, and Obama – despite his words – actually doesn’t mind high unemployment. Virtually all of the government largesse has gone to Wall Street instead of Main Street or the average American. And “jobless recovery” is just another phrase for a redistribution of wealth from the little guy to the big boys.)

If we stopped throwing money at corporate welfare queens, military and security boondoggles and pork, harmful quantitative easing, unnecessary nuclear subsidies, the failed war on drugs, and other wasted and counter-productive expenses, we wouldn't need to impose austerity on the people.

Indeed: