According to USA TODAY, President Obama said Saturday there is no “quick fix to our economic problems,” but that his administration is working with industry to try and create jobs. “The truth is, we didn’t get into this mess overnight, and we won’t get out of it overnight,” Obama said in his weekly radio address. “It’s going to take time.”
During the “W” administration, insider Republicans told each other: “We are going to put any future Democratic administration in a position where there will be no money to spend.” The Watchdog heard this again and again from Republican acquaintances.
And they did, through cutting taxes largely for the rich, expanding Medicare prescription subsidies without raising taxes, and by putting us into the Iraq War while remaining mired in the Afghanistan War and not funding either through new taxes. As a result the Clinton Era tax surpluses were purposefully turned into the “W” era huge deficits.
As soon as they got control of the House of Representatives in 2010, Republicans blocked Obama Administration efforts to continue to generate new jobs. The result: The economy is on the brink of a double dip deep recession which will put more people out of work and increase the annual deficits and, in turn, the national debt.
Had we given President Obama another half-trillion recovery act last year that he sought, the nation would be well on its way to recovery. But we didn’t!
How tragic for us and our children.
The basic anti-government Republican strategy for the last 20 years or so has been to “starve the beast” meaning, to so deprive the government of income via tax cuts, unfunded programs, and wars, that eventually cutting government would not be an option but a “necessity”.
So here we are today with the Republicans, who created our huge national mess, becoming the deficit hawks, hawking the “chicken little” mantra that the government is crashing, run for your lives! All this with the weeping walrus tears for the hardships that this “tragic necessity” might entail for some of our more vulnerable citizens who, we cannot help without seriously endangering our entire economy.
This is exactly what the British government told the Irish peasants during the great famine of 1844-47, and for the same dogmatic ideological (religious) reason based upon the, then fairly new, totem pole religion of laissez-faire capitalism. That this fundamentalist economic dogmatism survives to this day is only understandable in terms of an enlightened and well financed self interest of the few, versus the ignorance of the many.
We have a very weird culture in the US where economics and politics are preached and practiced as religions. The “invisible hand” of Adam Smith is actually “seen” as the hand of God moving throughout history to accomplish his or her hidden purposes. “Ours is not to question but only believe”. It is, of course, a false god and a false religion which means that millions of us, who purport to believe in Judaism or Christianity, have another god that we believe in and worship, and often with more zeal than our Saturday and Sunday pew religions. We are are therefore guilty, not only of error but of Idolatry.
The most popular religions today offer a seamless blending of them all. It works beautifully. But the religion of equating and blending true and false gods, religion with politics, economics with worship, becomes total falsehood, and dangerously false. Error has consequences. The intentional, “Starving the beast of government” is just one example of many.
Anybody convinced Republicans are the bad guys and Dems the good ones–or vice-versa, is wasting his vote. The polarization of American politics so paralyses the intellect, so resembles in its effect the old “divide and conquer” strategy that I suspect it’s deliberate. It takes people of intelligence and education and literally makes them stupid.
Note that “Anonymous” above is so bent on blaming the current economic fix we’re in on Republicans he/she overlooks the part played by the sub-prime mortgage biz –in which Dems had their greedy fingers. Not to suggest Republicans are innocent of the same blame game. The point is, we have lost objectivity.
“Anonymous” hints at this vaguely by a murky comparison between politics and religion. The one requires dispassion; the other belief and blind faith. We seem to have mixed them up.