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There’s a great – and telling – juxtaposition in today’s PostPolitics. A story about corporations complaining that regulation and tax increases are hurting economic growth shares the page with a photo gallery of long-term "discouraged" unemployed people.
So on the one hand you’ve got the conservative talking point that you can’t raise taxes to reduce the deficit because it slows down the economy, and on the other hand you’ve got the unemployed people who conservatives don’t want to help because it would… increase the deficit.
Well, which is it? If the deficit is such an existential threat that it trumps any thought of stimulating our way out of a deep recession, then why can’t we raise taxes on the have-mores instead of cutting Social Security and other benefits for the "lesser people"? And if economic growth is more important than balancing the budget, then why can’t we extend unemployment benefits and spend more stimulus money where it will actually create jobs?
Don’t tell us that we have to sacrifice economic growth and Social Security to the balanced budget god, and that we can’t raise taxes because it would kill economic growth. Please just choose one ridiculous position and stick to it.
15 Comments
The great thing about being in “opposition” is that you need not present a coherent “counter” plan. It is enough to merely disrupt the plan in place.
It is the same for the opposition in Afghanistan. The taliban, al queda and other insurgencies just have to mess up whatever we try to do. No other strategy required.
I think that wingnuts are quite capable of holding two opposing positions at the same time. They have mental whiplash but it works for them.
There’s not a deficit crisis. In fact we are looking at deflation. The government can spend a lot more before they need to even consider raising taxes.
So why run a gimp economy? Wallstreet wants a gimp economy. They want to pour money into privatizing public infrastructure. That’s something that an increasing number of towns, cities and states will be forced to do as they go broke.
And of course, they want to loot Social Security. The notion that there is a deficit “crisis” is part of thier latest attempt to put granny on a cat food diet.
They know it is trashing the economy. They want to crash it, so we end up like greece and Russia, and they can seize our assets for a song like Russian oligarchs. Note they have gotten richer during this recession. It is called Yelsinization, and it is a worldwide phenomenon.
Your right, I know more then a few of them and they don’t seem to suffer from cognitive dissonance of any sort. I think it’s because they don’t at any level use reason to come to any of their positions. Instead, they merely glom onto whatever the reich wing media (FOX) Limbaugh etc. talking points are.
Great observation. They can hang out and eat caviar and wait for the rest of us to be selling our assets @ yard sales and smile in our faces and scope it all up for pennies on the dollar. Yes, the same crowd that advised Yeltsin’s Gov’t after the demise of the SU then is advising Obama today Larry Summers , et al.They are all nothing more then a a bunch of pirates in suits and ties.
Liberals do this on the issues of drugs and firearms all the time, perhaps we should get our own house in order?
The part where the rich take the property of average Americans is standard practice in every depression in American history. There are exactly no exceptions.
This is what Wall St did during the Great Depression. These so called “humans” aren’t fit for the human race. They’re beasts and predators always needing more, more, more, untill nothing’s left.
They’re gonna take everything from us without a second glance.
Obama and the K Street whores are handing us over to them on silver platter and laughing all the way.
If only we had a President with a New Deal for us. It sure ain’t this one.
Your right, Barry is sure having having a belly laugh at how he suckered all of us into thinking he was going to Change things in DC.
“Change You Can Believe In” = “All I have to do is get You to Believe ’til the election, and then I’ll never have to actually Change anything.”
Good grief, read what these guys are objecting to in the way of all those “reaching into virtually every sector of economic life” regulations:
In most cases, the proposed regulations, even before Congress and the President water them down, are almost too weak to matter. It’s as though they stop by this universe once in a while to complain about what’s going on in theirs’.
How so?
Indeed. The comparison to Russia, in particular, is quite apt. And our home grown fat cats are nothing more than corporate gangsters, just as they are in the former Soviet Union.
In my area, there’s not all that many low cost houses available despite record foreclosures. I have several friends still active in real estate, so I asked why, what happened? They all told me the same thing: you wouldn’t believe how many super wealthy people there are who come crawling out of the woodwork to pay cash for these cheaper houses (some of them a good deal bc they are pretty new and never lived in). There have been loads of bidding wars are the bottom of the market. If you can buy and hold for a while, you’ll make huge bucks in the long run. Most of us cannot do that, but these venal scum can and do.
Yep, I’ve also been hearing that the corporations anymore are very cash rich but still not hiring. There’s a reason for that, too. They want the workers so downtrodden and hungry that we’ll accept crap wages and crummy working conditions and next to no benefits, and that we’ll be grateful for the crumbs. I already have highly educated, highly experienced friends who working very demanding jobs (requiring a high level of expertise) for minimum wage and no benefits and being worked into the ground.
Make no mistake: there are no accidents here. This has all been planned. And Obummah’s just part of the deal.