Tag: yep

There is no intrinsic contradiction between providing additional fiscal stimulus today, while the unemployment rate is high and many factories and offices are underused, and imposing fiscal restraint several years from now, when output and employment will probably be close to their potential.

Douglas Elmendorf, director of the Congressional Budget Office
Please print out in the largest font convenient and post along with a similarly dimensioned sign saying Money is not real

The Unemployed can Go Die in the Streets

In which thebroadermarket summarizes a theoretical, GOP-derived wonderland that we here at Lemkin refer to as “Go Die in the Streets”:

Thus, one is left with a situation in which the unemployed would find few opportunities for work, while simultaneously seeing their social safety net dry up. Meanwhile, the lucky employed would see the security of their labor jeopardized at the expense of allowing the financial marketplace to continue to operate relatively uninhibited. I am not one prone to hyperbole, but this just seems like a raw deal.

Read the whole thing

I am prone to hyperbole. But that would be shrill.

In the first phase, the financial crisis, the government screamed, and did everything it could to rescue the economy. In the second phase, when the financial crisis became a demand crisis, the public screamed, and the government did quite a lot – though not enough – to help. But as the demand crisis reveals itself as a persistent jobs crisis – the third phase – we’re getting used to it, and Senate Republicans are turning their attention to the midterms, [and] we just settle into a new, awful, and unnecessary normal.

Ezra Klein, explaining the current state of affairs. All I have to add is: Yep.

southpol:

The Third Depression:

We are now, I fear, in the early stages of a third depression. It will probably look more like the Long Depression than the much more severe Great Depression. But the cost — to the world economy and, above all, to the millions of lives blighted by the absence of jobs — will nonetheless be immense.

And this third depression will be primarily a failure of policy. Around the world — most recently at last weekend’s deeply discouraging G-20 meeting — governments are obsessing about inflation when the real threat is deflation, preaching the need for belt-tightening when the real problem is inadequate spending.

I’d agree with all that Krugman says above (and in the editorial), but take small issue with this part:

In the face of this grim picture, you might have expected policy makers to realize that they haven’t yet done enough to promote recovery.

I think the GOP leadership realizes all too well that not enough has been done. They have chosen to use the crisis for short-term political gain. There is no other explanation for the withdrawal of unemployment benefits. None. They just want to maximize pain to the citizens out there that may be inclined to vote come 2010 and, more urgently from the GOP perspective, in the 2012 follow-on when they could well be poised to take power in both branches.

Then, of course, they’ll fix it all with a rigorous program of tax cuts for the wealthy. Which is touched on in the closer:

And who will pay the price for this triumph of orthodoxy? The answer is, tens of millions of unemployed workers, many of whom will go jobless for years, and some of whom will never work again.

Yep.

…now that the enviros have embraced a GHG tax or its cap-and-trade equivalent as the way to deal with global warming, conservative support is nowhere in sight. They’re all too afraid of Grover Norquist.
Remember this the next time a conservative explains how we ought to voucherize public education. The minute that happens, the conservatives will come back and decide that we need to means-test the vouchers. That done, they’ll attack the remaining program as “welfare.”
This is not a group of people it’s possible to do business with.

Mark Kleiman on the ever-moving goalposts that “sensible people” must forever be chasing after.

I’m relieved to see that [Bill] Kristol draws the line somewhere –I would have thought his line would be “leading an armed coup,” and even then I wouldn’t be totally confident Kristol would side with Obama over the offending general.

Jonathan Chait on the Stan McChrystal rhubarb.

When I wake up in the morning, I feel just like any other insecure 24-year-old girl. Then I say, ‘Bitch, you’re Lady Gaga, you get up and walk the walk today.’

Lady Gaga in Rolling Stone (via glitterandgaga)
I say exactly the same thing to myself every morning. And then some stuff about oatmeal. But I start with this.