Obama's Dangerous Cure for the Federal Deficit: A Deeper "double-dip" Recession

[Better Believe It]

Where's the Revolt? Obama’s Dangerous Cure for the Federal Deficit
by Roger Bybee
July 8, 2011

As of this moment, it appears that President Obama's debt-ceiling proposal—raising it in exchange for budget cuts that are six times as large as new revenue raised—will effectively define his presidency as being less concerned with the jobs crisis than the budget deficit.

If accepted by the Republicans and Obama’s own party, the deal put forth by Obama in a meeting on Thursday will likely mean a "double-dip" recession. In short, the debt-ceiling deal would result in the layoffs of many thousands more government workers, setting off ripple effects that will drown thousands of small businesses (e.g., restaurants, car-repair garages, hardware stores).

With the official unemployment rate at 9.1 percent and the more accurate U-6 rate (which includes part-timers looking for full-time jobs and those who've given up looking for work) at 16 percent, Obama is almost certainly killing off the very shaky recovery he has been touting.

While Obama can claim to be making a strong stand against deficits, this unfortunately will not deeply impress the jobless and their families. Moreover, Republicans will work mightily to hang rising economic misery around his neck in 2012.



Please read the full article at:

http://www.inthesetimes.com/working/entry/11599/obamas_fatal_cure_for_deficits_a_return_to_deep_recession/

[DJ13]

1. Double dip my ass

It could trigger a depression.

[patrice]

2. If we aren't/can't prosecute the banksters, we're going to try to starve some of the weaker

ones out. I hope we starve the right ones!!!

[girl gone mad]

3. k & r

Neoliberalism is evil.

[PATRICK]

4. There always were 3 choices

All could be simply presented to the American people. All are rationally mutually exclusive even if you argue about their merits.

Do nothing. Gridlock. Hope it was like the Clinton era. Draw down the wars because it becomes impossible to fund or manage them. Both sides jump to their ideological corners and argue- getting the people frustrated and mad even if we are at least not doing anything too harmful

Pay off the debt which means rely on taxing where it does least harm and the most good. Reducing spending in such packages is less clear than gridlock, less pure and practical. The pain exists here and even more personal the blame. The people get frustrated and angry at both parties and $^%$#@#$ bi-partisanship in screwing the country over. Paying off the debt is destructive at each and every level of argument and reality and can't work if the debt money is funneled into locked coffers, many of them foreign(can we ever say Red China again?) and kills growth.

In stimulus, maybe with progressive taxation of locked away wealth, the people get real money to bleed back into the soil. Things grow, debts get paid without killing growth, money actually means something for human life again. it works in theory and practice and sacrificing the fakery and tyranny of money can even renew the wealthy scams and myths of the past.

Any combination of these things guarantees failure, confusion and further proof that only the greening of the spending classes works while doing the commons any good. The combination now chosen by presidential default is spending cuts and little taxation change, an awesome descent into intellectual and economic darkness so unsupported and willful as to give pause to apoplectic victims of the insanity big sell. When they awake in Hell they will want to share pain in ways that will discomfort our political nutjobs.

[XemaSab]

5. It scares me that Boehner is the same color as Obama

:scared: