Coming Up In 2010: All About The Deficit

Don't most economist agree that you don't take austerity measures during tough economic times? I thought the Gov't was supposed to be the spender of last resort. If the Gov't isn't spending, and private sector isn't spending, how the heck are we going to get our of this?

Now let's get this clear. Hoyer says "Next year the focus will be jobs and fiscal responsibility," House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer told TPMDC in a briefing Thursday"

But TPM says "2010:All about the deficit" Now I don't know about you, but something doesn't correlate.

I think they're talking about our long-term fiscal deficit (entitlements, defense budgets, etc), not the short-term one which is needed to counteract low demand.

You guys might be right about this influencing progressives to stay home in 2010 (I personally don't understand this, since HCR will be the biggest progressive reform in a generation, and it's likely that Energy Reform will happen too). But for 2012, this puts the President in a better position to keep moderates in his camp.

...since HCR will be the biggest progressive reform in a generation,

In any passable-through-an-actually-existing-Congress form, it's despised by progressives. Jane Hamsher and the FireDogLake crew are planning to primary anyone who votes for it -- a position also held, strangely enough, by the Club for Growth.

I think that HCR even in the attenuated form presently before Congress will pull enough independents to offset the single-payer-or-I-stay-home vote.

Deficit reduction, not so much.

What about Don't Ask Don't tell, Employee Free Choice Act, Energy and Education policies and programs and return the Senate to Majority Rule! Not mention about getting Obama Team in place with some judges appointed and war crimes investigations! Hell, Congress has to reform the banks, credit card companies and audit the FED!

Steny Hoyer's #1 priority in everything he says is Steny Hoyer. He has done this sort of thing before, make bold assertions about what "Democrats" will do that are little more than his own wishlists. So, big grain of salt here.

I don't doubt that the Administration will push in this direction, though. It's not "even if we have to pick fights with progressives." That is the main desire, and "deficits" the strawman excuse for the fights. Picking fights with the left makes Obama look good - at least, that's what the White House people seem to think. In the funhouse mirror world of DC it's probably true. They don't strictly care if Democrats lose the House and/or the Senate. This is the Clinton playbook. I think they'll discover, though, that we're in a different game.

who would have thought it would be the democrats to gut the social security program

obama worse then bush ,has signed on for a one term presidency to use his skills and abilities to steal the SS trust fund for wall street.

nothing will prevent it as the truth of what obama is has been exposed...

the best shill corporate america has ever had.

this country is being split into the wealthy and everyone else.
10 years from now personal freedoms and individual rights will make north korea of today look like paradise.

"Those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it." Steny, Rahm, the President and the rest of the Blue Dog Democrats should look back to 1937 when FDR took bad advice and worried about deficits in the middle of the Depression. We need MORE government spending RIGHT NOW, because businesses are not opening their wallets to spend.

Would someone please dig up the video of Darth Cheney on MTP saying "Ronald Reagan proved deficits don't matter" with that creepy smile on his face? Please? And remind the republics that they had many chances to deal with deficit reduction while they were in power but they didn't. So STFU. Now.

Okay, enough with all the cynicism bluster that's been going on around here. It is a simple fact of political life that Democrats/liberals/progressives actually try to govern, while Republicans/conservatives try to blow up government in the name of the people. I don't agree with everything that President Obama has said and done, but I think he's better than anyone else right now. I put it to all of you who have lambasted the man here and elsewhere on the Web: he has only been president for approximately 11 MONTHS, not a few years. Remember that before either the conservatives or liberals attack him as a "failed president." As for Congress, there are 535 of them-it makes herding cats seem like a dream for Hoyer. Believe it or not, a good many members do know what's going on in their districts and in the country, and are trying to find effective ways to help. (I go to college in a relatively hard-hit part of Wisconsin.) Still others seem to think that they echo the wishes of the people by blocking anything that comes their way. Politics is a dirty, messy, compromise-prone activity, but the current leadership has the ability to try and pass some sound recovery policies. Sure, jobs may be at the core of Hoyer's comment, but as long as that's backed up by adequate federal muscle in the short term, it will pay off in the long term.

Finally, I have to say it here-PATIENCE IS A VIRTUE!! The New Deal didn't help overnight! We Americans seem to have fallen into a dangerous trap of believing that either a policy/idea has to work within four months or it's a bad idea. This is a patently dangerous line of thinking. Macroeconomics takes more than four months to change. This does not mean that I'm insensitive to the problems of the unemployed in this country, because I want them back to work just as much as anyone. I'm saying that now is the time when we, as a country, need to say goodbye to the drunken, heady days of the 1980s-to-mid 2000s boom, realize that we are truly a post-industrial society, and begin acting as such. Until that day, I fear that we will enter a dangerous decline of decadence and rot in our thinking.

We're fucked.

John