Wall Street Sharks Have Lost Everything, and Now They're Coming After Us

[Why Syzygy]

Wall Street Sharks Have Lost Everything, and Now They're Coming After Us
By Robert Kuttner, The Washington Post. Posted February 24, 2009.
Gutting Social Security and Medicare to pay for the sins of Wall Street is a perverse idea.
~snip
The Peterson Foundation is joined by leading "blue dog" (anti-deficit) Democrats such as House Budget Committee Chairman John Spratt of South Carolina and his counterpart in the Senate, Kent Conrad of North Dakota. The deficit hawks are promoting a "grand bargain" in which a bipartisan commission enacts spending caps on social insurance as the offset for current deficits.

President Obama's economic advisers devised today's White House fiscal responsibility summit to signal that the president takes the deficit seriously and to lay the groundwork for such a bipartisan deal. Originally, Peterson was slated to be a featured speaker.

But Capitol Hill sources say that Democratic congressional leaders were skeptical of the strategy. The summit has been reduced to a lower-profile, half-day event; Peterson will attend but no longer has top billing, and Obama reportedly is lukewarm about the idea of a commission.

Obama should indeed be wary of such a plan, and official briefings on his first budget suggest that he will drastically reduce the deficit by 2013, but without going after social insurance.
~continued
http://www.alternet.org/workplace/128511/

[Veritas_et_Aequitas]

1. Cutting spending is exactly what hindered our recovery in the Great Depression.

FDR wanted to be friendly with the Republicans, too. Great deal of good it did him then. :sarcasm:

[Warpy]

4. Right, until he steamrolled them

recovery was delayed. Unfortunately, it takes riots for things like that to happen. There were riots then. We have yet to see them because people are still stunned, paralyzed by shock and disbelief.

The good news on the horizon is that the GOP tax cuts are all due to expire after next year, increasing the revenue stream without Congress having to step in an raise taxes in an election year, even though that's exactly what they need to do.

The real beast that needs to be tamed in this country is the Pentagon. Until and unless their bloated budget is addressed and cut at least in half, this country has no hope of long term recovery.

[TBF]

2. K&R nt

[KharmaTrain]

3. The Last 2 Years Have Been One Massive Fleecing

It started the day the repugnicans lost control of the House and Senate. No longer were the treasury doors wide open...and there now were eyes with subpoena power to start snooping. The Abramoff case started opening eyes to the wholescale graft that was happening between K Street and the regulators, Katrina showed us how wasteful, corrupt and dysfunctional the boooosh government had become and it's been a downhill slide ever since.

Initially it was boooshies buddies trying to make "one more killing" while the getting was good. Anyone with half a brain about the markets knew it was way overvalued and once the bubble burst it would be hard to stop the fall.

Money was diverted from the infrastructure and channeled into corporate pockets...and many along Wall Street as well. The concept was "what was good for business is good for America"...and the biggest victim were social programs and infrastructure. The goal here is to stimulate an economy that generates revenues that will lead to bigger revenues coming into the treasury. The dollars that go out to social programs come back in far more ways than tax breaks to the rich.

I believe President Obama is saavy enough to understand where there are needs to spend and where...and when to cut and where. It's not a neat and clean game here. There's plenty of leftover boooshie lard that can and should be cleaned out and the hopes are by 2013 the economy has re-aligned and with more people working more money comes into federal coffers that can cut defecits. That's how it was done in the 90's...but the GOOP refuse to admit that.