I hope that some of our current economist/journalists who have attempted early and often to save us from ourselves fiscally will put together an anthology of their pieces titled "We Told You So, But You Just Wouldn't Listen, Would You?"
Some day in the not too distant future, as we huddle over oil drum fires under crumbling overpasses, by their flickering flames we can read aloud the ignored advice and warnings of writers like Paul Krugman, Robert Reich,and so many others.
Our children will tug at our sleeves and ask, "But Mommy and Daddy, if the smart people said cutting spending in a recession was bad, why did all the silly people do it anyway?"
And we will look in their puzzled little eyes while opening the last can of Friskies Grilled Chicken Gizzards with Cheese, and say, "I don't know Tiny Tina. Deficits were these big scary things that were going to come in the middle of the night and eat us, so we all thought why not just eat ourselves first and avoid the wait? Made sense at the time, I guess."
But let's take a sneak peak right now at one of the pieces of this future volume from Robert Reich: The Sequester And The Tea Party Plot
Today's tale of common sense ignored is, as mentioned above, from Robert Reich.
After laying the foundation for the Tea Party's role in our current dysfuctional madness, Reich moves along to what should be the Presidential response:
What is the President’s response? He still wants a so-called “grand bargain” of “balanced” spending cuts (including cuts in the projected growth of Social Security and Medicare) combined with tax increases on the wealthy. So far, though, he has agreed to a gross imbalance — $1.5 trillion in cuts to Republicans’ $600 billion in tax increases on the rich.
The President apparently believes Republicans are serious about deficit reduction, when in fact the Tea Partiers now running the GOP are serious only about dismembering the government.
And he seems to accept that the budget deficit is the largest economic problem facing the nation, when in reality the largest problem is continuing high unemployment (some 20 million Americans unemployed or under-employed), declining real wages, and widening inequality. Deficit reduction now or in the near-term will only make these worse.
There is more, but I can only print a excerpt. I encourage you to read the entire post. It also appears at HuffingtonPost with over 2,000 comments.
Now, what are we to do? Not just the Tea Party, but our own party and the President are in thrall to austeiry mongers and deficit cutters despite the fact that the outcomes will be predictably bad and devastating to us all, both collectively and individually, at least if you are a part of the 99%.
Can we somehow gather the strength to band together and stop the madness? Can we tell our Democratic Party to stand up and act like Democrats? Do we have the combined will to somehow end the stunned docility and acceptance of our fate many seem to have fallen into? Or do we just run with the herd into the chutes of the abattoir?