It’s 10 PM … Do You Know Where Your Children Are?
Jul 28, 2011 @ 8:10 PM
OH! Here they are:
Image courtesy of Wikipedia
How are all of you holding up while our leadership breaks down and the country hurtles toward fiscal disaster? Luckily I’m doing just fine:
NH
D, I hestitate to say anything because I am not a twenty-something, but here is Krugman on what I have been trying to say. He is NOT an alarmist about the debt ceiling. He has always been saying all along, that the Republicans are scaremongering: http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/07/14/delusions-about-debt-dynamics/
There is more to fear from the “deal” that is being struck than from the size of the debt. We have a large national debt because we have been through a recession. The way out of a recession is through government spending. This is not the time for austerity measures — this should have been made far more clear in the press than the scaremongering over the nebulous “threat” of default by virtue of not raising the debt ceiling. If it has taken until today for the NYT to write an editorial about the actual impact on the economy of massive government cutbacks, well, that is a failure of the press. A massive failure of not getting away from the shock and horror part of the story to the absolutely uncontested economic facts, i.e. that tax cuts to the rich do not create jobs, and that austerity measures in a recession or after a recession, plunge you deeper into recession, possibly into a great depression. What has been wrong with all the handwringing is that it has not covered and covered and covered this basic truth, so people are walking around talking about spending cuts like that’s a good thing. It’s absurd. That is not going to help, people, and Paul Krugman is only ONE of the world’s economists to say so, and to have said it for the past four years. The stimulus package was an example of govt spending, and the only thing wrong with it was that it needed to be about twice the size it was to make any difference. Sometimes the right thing is a bit counter-intuitive. “Common sense” ideas such as cutting back spending to reduce the size of the deficit do not make actual sense. There is plenty of historical data to support this. Only the press has not talked about it, until about yesterday (with the exception of Paul Krugman). So, no more handwringing over the debt. If you want to wring your hands, do it over the fact that no one understands basic economic principles, and that they are not put out there, front and center, to relieve the average person’s confusion. Which has been perpetuated by the Republican party for its own nefarious purposes.
Instead of talking about dates and deadlines, the conversation should always have been about what the size of the deficit means, IN CONTEXT, e.g. RELATION TO GDP, how can it be MANAGED. As commenter #9 says, in that Krugman blog post, “Any time you use a mathematical equation to prove your position, you probably lose 90% of reporters out there. But make a overly simplistic, scary-sounding statement like “America is the next Greece” and you’ve got their rapt attention.”
I think you are living in a world in which you have become alarmed about so many things, like climate change, so-called “terrorism”, etc., that the “alarm” response has become standard. The sky is not falling – the debt ceiling has been raised 102 times in 94 years, and it was never before tied to political or budget negotiations. The Republicans are playing a truly sinister and ideologically impure game.
Sorry for running so long. Go Barbara Lee, Berkeley Congresswoman! One of the few people to open her mouth and say some of this.