Friday, May 01, 2009

What The Other Fifth Of The Country Is Watching

(alt. video link)

Stolen Wealth shared from ShortsandPants.

(title: cf.)

Posted by bjkeefe at 7:38 PM
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1 comment:

Adam said...

Apparently the 1/5 of the country was... uhh... maybe... had a point about Obama's spending being unsustainable?

Although they kind of make the headline and lede graf make this sound like this is something only Wall St. greedheads are interested in, that notorious conservative mouthpiece the New York Times's second most e-mailed story today is Signs that Borrow-and-Spend Policies Aren't Sustainable: Worries Rise on the Size of U.S. Debt.

Of course this didn't run in section A and as the first sentence makes clear the worriers are all on Wall St, but apparently some other people cared as its the second most e-mailed story: "The nation’s debt clock is ticking faster than ever — and Wall Street is getting worried."

I wrote a blog post about how the Tea Partiers were misguided in their choice of symbolism in the name of what they were doing and when they did it on Tax Day because it made it seem like they were all steamed over paying taxes which wasn't really the substantive complaint... it was about spending. But I mean... if they were slightly misguided then the insanely inappropriate, dismissive and worst of all just highly unfunny repeated bashing of them as "teabaggers" really missed something substantive: there's kind of a big problem with Obama's budgets, and not just for this year due to the stimulus, but for the next 10 years due to all those entitlements for things like "free" health-care and education. I made a graph based on the Congress's own projections of debt a few weeks ago showing that while Bush had fucked things up pretty bad in 8 years Obama had more or less outdone him in 3 months.

And people are talking about anyone who points this out like they're insane. Now debt is getting expensive, and I'd like to point out that contrary to the NYT's assertion this is not merely "crowding out private investment." Sorry, Charlie, but when you're on pace to blast away your own maximum allowable cap on total debt held that says something to your debtors, and it's not "We're a good credit risk."

I've been watching the cable news quite a bit recently--even Olbermann-- since I've been trying to figure out who has more of an agenda these days. First of all, on Fox O'Reilly is a fucking Obama apologist, I dunno if you've watched any of his shows, but whenever a conservative comes on the show and complains he says something like "don't have enough info yet and it's too early to judge." Hannity is a damn fool and worse he's a pedantic fool. Glenn Beck is an interesting case; he's not particularly educated but if you actually watch the whole show you'll see that the quotes taken out of context are almost always given inside a context of... you know, "I'm not an expert... I'm a recovering alcoholic... It seems to me... Am I wrong that..." but when you edit out all the hedging and qualifying and deferrals to actual experts yea, you can make him sound like a fascist. Of course, I'm growing more and more convinced that Olbermann is a fascist as any deviance from the party line that not just Obama, but every single Democrat is more or less infallible and that the Republicans, now holding onto a slim majority in the judicial branch as their only real power, are still to blame for everything.

Listen, I don't claim that FOX News is not a right-wing mouthpiece, but the right-wing has no power anymore. What's frightening to me is that while most Americans don't buy FOX News is telling it straight, when talking about Obama, I think that lots of people are willing to give Obama a wide berth of credulity, even when reported on by networks that are clearly in the tank for him just as bad as FOX was for Bush. If not worse. I mean for Chrissakes... if FOX News hadn't been owned by an ideologue whose other properties were all media organization but Halliburton how credible would their Iraq War reporting have been, and what would the public outcry have been? But now GE is going to be a huge beneficiary of Obama's green largess with monopoly money and everybody thinks that's business as usual... nothing to see here, folks.

Sorry if this is more partisan and not as cordial as our usual exchanges but to me this could presage an economic collapse that will make the crash of '08 relative to the crash of '11 look like the crash of '87 relative to the crash of '08. Chrissakes, while Obama has proved surprisingly competent on many things I didn't think he was going to do well on, I simply can't abide his completely irresponsible budget schemes for the indefinite future that he got passed using a temporary economic downturn as a smokescreen for a permanent yet unsustainable spending increase. At this point I'd welcome 50% income taxes on the wealthy if it were the only way to close the deficit gap somewhat because I'm afraid that in 2011 when reality finally kicks Obama in the head which nobody in the MSM or the public is willing to do that it might be via a massive, secondary economic collapse as nobody in the world will put actual wealth behind the monopoly money we intend to spend over the next 10 years.

That's not FOX News indoctrination, that's in the NYT, the Congressional Budget Office projection, and it's reality. I mean... when was the last time you read this quote in a NYT story about W running up deficits: "In some ways, ballooning deficits should not matter. Deficits are a useful way for governments to use public spending to stimulate the economy when private demand is weak." So the NYT believes in Reagonomics now? Or is it Obamanomics?

This isn't about pork, this isn't about the stimulus, this isn't about Obama's diplomacy or torture memos, this is about the U.S. having a budget that you know... doesn't collapse before the voters are made aware of what's going on.

10:30 PM, May 04, 2009

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