Is all this economic news making you as nuts as it's making me? Honest to Pete ... the craziness of House Republicans taking absolutely no responsibility for stonewalling and attacking every single effort of the President to do ANYTHING and then blaming him as solely responsible for the tanking economy just makes my head spin.
Here's some analysis from "Think Progress" that makes my point:
No. We're not. And we're not going to as long as those crackpots are in charge of congress.The public sector has been steadily shrinking. According to the conservative theory of the economy, when the public sector shrinks that should super-charge the private sector. What’s happened in the real world has been that public sector shrinkage has simply been paired with anemic private sector growth. This is what I’ve called “The Conservative Recovery.”
Conservatives complain about the results because the President is a Democrat named Barack Obama. But the policy result is what conservatives say they want. Steady cuts to the government sector, offset somewhat by private sector growth. The reality is that this dynamic sucks, and we ought to be forcefully trying to avoid public sector layoffs knowing that workers are also customers for the private sector. But we’re not.
They're like the guy who murdered his parents and then wanted sympathy because he was an orphan. They are gleefully murdering the economy because they're less worried about the moving the country forward than they are moving Barack Obama out of the White House. They are living out Rush Limbaugh's 2009 "I hope he fails" mantra. But here's the deal. If "he" fails, "we" fail. The country fails. Families fail. People suffer.
If Solomon could figure out which was the true mother by who was willing to let the child be ripped in half and who was willing to compromise for the child's sake, shouldn't we be able to tell which is the true patriot by who's willing to have this country be ripped apart by economic ineptitude and who's willing to compromise for the nation's sake?
C'mon people. Wake up.
11 comments:
The "crackpots" have only been "in charge" (of the House) since January.
As much fun as it is to jump into the blame game; the majority isn't buying into it anymore.
Spare me, JM. The blame here is NOT equally apportioned. The Republican House tried to drive the country over the edge on the debt limit, and deeply damaged the economy as a result. In the Senate, thanks to record Republican filibusters, no legistlation passes without a supermajority of 60. Mitch mcConnell has stated explicitly his goal isn't the welfare of the country, it's beating Obama in the next election.
The GOP's own operatives are aghast at what's happened. Sensible Republicans actually DO believe in country first, not party. But sensible Republicans are no longer in control.
The fallacy that both parties are equally to blame is an invention of a craven media--and swallowed only by the gullible or willfully mislead.
What IT said. It's the same mentality that gave us years of the fiction within the Episcopal Church that "both sides" were insisting on their-way-or-the-highway and doing a tug-of-war with what +Frank liked to call "the diverse center."
Sensible Republicans (like my dad) are NO longer in control of the GOP ... just like actual Anglicans are no longer in control of the Orthodite Schismatics.
And sadly but not surprisingly, some of them are the same people. (Check out the recent New Yorker feature on Clarence Thomas and his Tea Party Wife, for example.)
See also:
http://inchatatime.blogspot.com/2011/09/todays-picture-worth-1000-words.html
Yes I saw the chart reflecting the stark increase in spending since 2006.
Whether you want to spared or not, the roar coming from the majority is to fire everybody.
Unfortunately, the drive by the Tea Party is "Onward - To the Past!"
The Randian ideal sounds wonderful on paper, as long as you keep reality and human beings out of it completely. It isn't new, even in America, as it was the basis of the Robber Baron era. It makes a few people very rich, and everyone else dependent - a serf nation.
The article IT links to is the best I've read on the current situation.
@Mark... that's the funny thing about ideologies; they always look better on paper than they do in practice.
@uffda51... in my humble opinion, the article in combination with the comments to it best desribe the current situation. You take out the screaming heads and you see a genuinely discouraged populace.
I think the best thing anyone who supposed to be in leadership could do at this point is admit failure. Just a little honesty would go a long with the general public. Just one person to say "Hey y'know what, we thought this would work, but it didn't. We under-estimated the severity of the current crisis and we're sorry. We're going to have to come up with a different strategy, but we need some time to talk it through first so we don't make the same mistake of ramming bills through before careful consideration of the potential consequences."
@IT... I apologize for my slur about being spared. Like so many others these days, sometimes my frustrations are taken out on people instead of problems.
True, but some ideologies look absolutely disastrous in practice, like the Tea Party's Randian/Libertarian ideal.
I cannot believe that anyone - anyone - truly believes that we would be a stronger nation of stronger people by creating a plutocracy. I don't believe that anyone can honestly say that they believe that, given abolition of labor and wage laws, our nation and it's people would prosper, because it's saying that you can trust employers to pay their employees their real worth and those employers are always wise enough and always put the general welfare ahead of personal greed.
The only people who can proclaim such a belief have never considered what it would mean for them personally - how far do you trust your employer to treat you well? - and those who expect to be richly rewarded by the New Robber Barons enriched by abolition of wage and labor laws.
The grinding, Dickensian world created would make it kinder to just go ahead and kill anyone not already independently wealthy.
I would like to see an entire overhaul of governance, as well, but it would be foolishness to trust to human nature and give greater freedom to squeeze personal profit.
I have to admit that I am fortunate in that regard (the boss treating me well). I discovered years ago that working for public companies wasn't the way to go so I have been (praise the LORD) employed a private corporation for the past 8 years... in the building industry, mind you.
When the collapse began, the owners immediately dumped all their "toys". Eventually, the had no choice but to lay off 80% of the staff, but that was only after they had stop drawing salaries themselves and had run out of other things to cut.
That being said, I haven't been unscathed; our household went from upper middle class to bankruptcy in what seems like a blink of the eye.
Is their anger? Sometimes still, but not nearly as much as there was a couple years back.
There is however, more doubt. I honestly don't see how we, as a country, are going to pull out of this when everyone (at least appears) to be playing some weird testosterone-pissing match. I can't even listen to any of these so-called leaders talk anymore... and that's really depressing.
I know.
It is - with a certain detached humor in place, of course - an interesting study in the way interior world and ideology can overshadow the objective world.
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