As John McCain used to say, it’s time for a little straight talk. Here’s mine: Americans don’t care about the deficit. That’s not to say that the public won’t be angry if the country goes broke, defaults on its loans or gets swallowed up by China. But poll after poll shows that Americans care far more about lowering the unemployment rate than lowering our national deficit and debt. The views of the public happen to be directly at odds with the political and media class in Washington, who are practically foaming at the mouth these days while urging the Obama administration to get “serious” about cutting popular and long-establishment entitlement programs, like Social Security and Medicare.
Obama's budget rejects the steep cuts advocated by Republicans and his deficit commission. But the president is still playing on the GOP’s turf by emphasizing cuts instead of jobs.
The Egypt pro-democracy movement has much more in common with the grassroots, bottom-up Obama campaign than the Bush admininistration's barrel of a gun “freedom agenda.”
One example of the public point of view: in a CBS News poll immediately after the 2010 election, which supposedly resulted in a Tea Party mandate, 56 percent of Americans ranked the economy and jobs as their top priority for the new Congress, while only 4 percent named the deficit. In mid-January, CBS News and the New York Times once again asked: “Which of the following do you think is the most important thing for Congress to concentrate on right now?” Forty-three percent of Americans chose job creation, compared to 14 percent for the federal budget deficit. Perhaps the administration possesses polling showing that moderate Republican soccer moms in Cincinnati prioritize the deficit above all else, but the rest of the country does not.
Yet the only thing anybody in Washington wants to talk about are cuts, cuts, cuts. As I wrote yesterday, it’s astonishing that at a time of 9 percent unemployment, neither party is laying out a roadmap for how to put people back to work and lift the country out of its economic morass. Someone is going to get punished in 2012 for this. Don’t say we didn’t warn you!
My colleague Chris Hayes laid out the case against deficit-mania in a Nation article last year entitled, “Deficits of Mass Destruction.” Wrote Chris:
Nearly the entire deficit for this year and those projected into the near and medium terms are the result of three things: the ongoing wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the Bush tax cuts and the recession. The solution to our fiscal situation is: end the wars, allow the tax cuts to expire and restore robust growth. Our long-term structural deficits will require us to control healthcare inflation the way countries with single-payer systems do.
In his press conference today, Obama said that our current deficit is the result of “a series of decisions over the past decade.” What he didn’t say—and should have—was that it’s almost entirely George W. Bush’s fault. Bush inherited a record surplus and passed on to Obama a record deficit—the product of giant tax cuts for the rich in 2001 and 2003, a needless war in Iraq and an aimless quagmire in Afghanistan, a drastic expansion of Medicare designed principally to benefit the health insurance industry, and an economic crisis spurred on by reckless speculation and non-existent regulatory enforcement. Yet by appointing a conservative Republican and a corporate Democrat to head his deficit commission, Obama empowered the deficit hawks who wrongly claim that both parties are equally to blame for the current deficit, and who disturbingly advocate cuts to Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid as the only “responsible” long-term solution. Already the conventional wisdom in Washington posits that Obama’s budget did not cut enough. At Obama’s press conference today, only April Ryan of American Urban Radio asked the president whether such cuts would imperil the country’s path to economic recovery.
Where is the alternative economic vision? As Paul Krugman noted yesterday, the president “has effectively given up on the idea that the government can do anything to create jobs in a depressed economy. In effect, although without saying so explicitly, the Obama administration has accepted the Republican claim that stimulus failed, and should never be tried again.” Obama can spend all the time he wants talking about the deficit and working with Republicans to try to lower it, but if his administration continues to be AWOL on job creation, it’s not hard to figure who’ll get the blame for ignoring what the public so clearly wants.
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1. posted by: pontificus at 02/15/2011 @ 5:07pm
I fully agree. You, pontificus have been one of the few commentators here who recognize the folly of Obama's money supply strategy. I am not sure if it is going to get as bad as the Wiemar Republic but soon people are going to be amazed at the price of food in this country. Much of the rest of the world are already concerned about hunger and starvation. You can expect the official statistics for U.S. families with low-food security (no one actually measures hunger anymore) will dramatically increase due to Obama's hyperinflation and his continuing Bush-era waste of corn production on idiotic fuel schemes. Obama is doing all the wrong things and America under his watch, I am afraid, will not meet the coming crises. I know there are people here who think we Americans can meet any challenge and I agree we are among the most resilient people on the planet. But America and the world have never faced a break-down of the free trade empire on the scale we are facing today. Globalism turned on its head is a mega disaster. And instead of stepping on the breaks, Obama is accelerating.
Speaking of stupid policies, Obama is currently having Bernanke purchase US debt with printed money, because nobody else will buy it. The price of silver has nearly doubled in the last year as the dollar loses value. The cost of living will skyrocket, and the poorest will pay the price. So much for "progressivism". Hyperinflation will hurt the poor most of all.
"Americans don't care about the deficit. That's not to say that the public won't be angry if the country goes broke, defaults on its loans or gets swallowed up by China. But poll after poll shows that Americans care far more about lowering the unemployment rate than lowering our national deficit and debt. "
Okay Ari, if we're looking for where you go wrong, we can stop right there. Your presumptive reasoning is that deficit spending creates jobs. The problem is, it doesn't. As soon as the borrowed money runs out, the jobs end, and we're stuck with the same unemployment rate, and a big debt to boot. That's almost precisely the experience that Roosevelt's Treasury Secretary expressed. Here we are, 70 years later, and you folks still haven't learned that lesson. You "progressives" want to advance policies that failed 70 years ago. There's nothing "progressive" about that.
Obama is a corporatist pursuing the global imperial policy of austerity. He is not of the left and by now, Berman, you should recognize that.
Obama is bringing great harm to the Democratic party, to the progressive cause, and, of course, the Nation, as he is in his various wars around the world.
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