MSNBC contributor Joy-Ann Reid took Barack Obama’s oft-repeated “balanced approach” to the economy — tax hikes combined with spending reductions — and went him one better. She calls for more taxes and more spending.

“When you look at the economy and the fact that it isn’t growing more strongly, we’ve been trying to force ourselves to do austerity,” Reid claimed on “Meet the Press” Sunday, according to NewsBusters.

Reid added that she was upset that the country didn’t engage in “smart spending and smart tax increases,” according to NewsBusters. It would take both, she asserted, for the president to fix the economy.

I’m not quite sure where she gets the idea that the United States has been austere in its spending. Indeed, although President Obama often touts a balanced approach in his speeches, in practice it’s been long on tax increases and short on spending cuts.

NewsBusters quoted Reid’s “Meet the Press” appearance as follows:

I don’t think that there’s any objective facts that could really help the President with this particular Congress. I mean, I think some people have described the current Republican Party as sort of post-policy because really they’re so fixated on opposing Barack Obama that I’m not sure there’s any objective set of facts that could change the calculus of how he’s able to deal with them. I think what we have is a Republican Party that needs to decide that it has to actually govern, that just opposing Barack Obama is not enough.

And when you look at the economy and the fact that it isn’t growing more strongly, we’ve been trying to force ourselves to do austerity which has not worked in Europe, which has actually harmed the European economy. And so without being able to do a robust agenda from Washington that does smart spending and smart tax increases the way we did in 1993 when Democrats alone, without a single Republican, passed that omnibus budget bill in ‘93 that actually got 90 percent of the way toward the fiscal balance we achieved in the ‘90s, without being able to do sane policy in Washington, you can’t expect interpersonal relationship improvement to change the economy.

Reid’s biography in TheGrio, where she serves as managing editor, indicates that she “is a graduate of Harvard University, where she majored in visual arts with a concentration in documentary film.” It lists no education, training or experience in economics. NewsBusters noted that Reid worked on the president’s 2008 presidential campaign.

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