Guy comes back from a brief reunion with family members huddled around a beach to find that, in a week of rollercoaster rides on the stock market, brought on by what
as we pause in our endless debate about how much to cut from our federal budget to discover that what we need is massive federal spending, the talk of the political folk is about whether
As our economy and, perhaps more, just collapses under the weight of the two terms we allowed that administration to control the presidency, preceded by a Congress the same party led to impeach the prior president while leaving more important issues to be ignored or decided by a fealty to ignorance, the mainstream press just begins to notice what has been so for at least the 15 years since the "contract with America" was endorsed by an electorate addicted to stupidity.
supposedly intelligent people [who] are horrified at the thought that, during a deep recession, government might try to help the economy by buying up-to-date equipment for the people who protect us from epidemics and infectious diseases, by hiring people to repair environmental damage on federal lands and by contracting with private companies to make federal buildings more energy-efficient.
That was 2009. The same year that even before his inauguration, the Presidentwas warned that this was a time to be bold, not tepid and that with an economy then falling at least $1 trillion under its capacity
Mr. Obama offers a $775 billion [stimulus] plan. And thatâs not enough.
and a few weeks later, still 2009---and on the same day as the Pearlstein column explained the English language to people obsessed with Laffer curves or something equally discredited---Paul Krugman observed that
most economic forecasts warn that in the absence of government action weâre headed for a deep, prolonged slump....Would the Obama economic plan, if enacted, ensure that America wonât have its own lost decade? Not necessarily: a number of economists, myself included, think the plan falls short and should be substantially bigger. But the Obama plan would certainly improve our odds. And thatâs why the efforts of Republicans to make the plan smaller and less effective â to turn it into little more than another round of Bush-style tax cuts â are so destructive.
So what should Mr. Obama do? Count me among those who think that the president made a big mistake in his initial approach, that his attempts to transcend partisanship ended up empowering politicians who take their marching orders from Rush Limbaugh
So cut the comedy, folks. Maybe it took Standard & Poor's two years (much less 15) to notice that
The political brinksmanship of recent months highlights what we see as
America's governance and policymaking becoming less stable, less effective,
and less predictable than what we previously believed
but, their track record of noticing problems only after every other person in the world sees them is legendary (and, of course,none of this has much to do with the liklihood of the country defaulting on, say, T-bills).
What's everyone else's excuse? The brief rant that appeared here last week, noting that in the face of evidence that the source of the nations' growing debt (putting aside the more obvious source from the loss of revenues during in a massively declining economy) was not the FDR-inspired "entitlement programs" but unfunded wars and prescription drug programs to help drug company campaign contributors, the Chief Bloviator of what passes for "Washington Wisdom" questioned his guests, by announcing as if it were fact, that
what really drives the debt, that's entitlement spending, it's been going on this way and was a ticking time bomb since the '60s [and] we're going to solve a political problem but not the underlying fiscal problem, which is what creates our debt
Keep talking, folks. You are doing a great job. Stupid is just plain stupid and treating the stupid as if they are "the other side" of a reasoned argument is not only foolish, it is destructive. See?