Tuesday, August 2, 2011
Quote of the day--still on the debt ceiling mess
"What Republicans have just gotten away with calls our whole system of government into question. After all, how can American democracy work if whichever party is most prepared to be ruthless, to threaten the nation’s economic security, gets to dictate policy?" --Paul Krugman, Nobel Prize-winning economist, writer and columnist for The New York Times. Link: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/01/opinion/the-president-surrenders-on-debt-ceiling.html?_r=2
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3 comments:
Sooner rather than later, our government needs to stop spending more money than it takes in. It should not take ruthlessness to take baby steps toward that necessary goal--but with Democrats obstructing anything resembling common sense spending limits there isn't much choice.
We agree on cutting spending but that's all. Your claim that "Democrats obstructing anything resembling common sense spending limits" shows you haven't listened to coverage of this story for the past few weeks. There were nearly agreements at least 3 to 5 times because the Dems caved and gave in on spending cuts, time and again. Boehner thought he had something workable each time, only to have the extreme Right Wing--Tea Party members mostly, if not completely, we're told--tell Boehner no and that he had to go back and get still more cuts.
There was and is no "common sense" in this agreement. We're in the worst recession in the past 80 years, economists are saying cutting spending the way they want is reckless, if not dangerous for the economy and so, our jobs, but common sense and intelligence be damned, we're going forward with cuts.
Wish us luck.
We're going to need it.
The cuts in the mainstream republican proposals are mostly illusory, and even then tiny compared to what we really need--they barely slow the rate of growth, and are far enough out that they are likely to be bypassed by the time the cut is supposed to happen.
There is no choice but to make deep, painful cuts. The only choice is when to make the cuts. We can delay the cuts, but at a cost of increasing the pain when they finally happen.
We don't have nearly enough politicians brave enough to tell the truth. Instead they try to tell their voters "I'll tax someone else, not you"--as if rich people just hoard money rather than investing it back into the economy, as if we have enough rich people to fix our problems, as if corporate taxes aren't passed on to consumers just like other costs.
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