Fk The Deficit. People Got No Jobs. People Got No Money

[kpete]

Obama and Ohio and the Great American Sinkhole
By Charles P. Pierce
at 4:47PM

The president gave a speech in Ohio today. So did Willard Romney. I didn't see either one, but Jonathan Alter, whom nobody can ever accuse of being unfriendly to the president's cause, went on MSNBC and roasted the speech over a slow flame. He found it "long-winded," and called it "one of the least successful speeches" he'd ever heard the president give, although Alter also pointed to this line, at the beginning of the speech, when the president firmly pinned the state of the economy he'd been handed in 2009 on the disastrous reign of C-Plus Augustus:

"Not only are we digging out of a hole that is 9 million jobs deep, we're digging out from an entire decade."

And that's true, and it's a great argument, and he should have been making it from the moment his hand came off the Bible. He should have been telling the country, from the start, "Look, you'd have to be out of your mind to want this job after the unholy hash the last guy made of it. But I stepped up, and you told me you wanted me in there with the bucket and the mop and the HazMat suit. Well, I'm here to tell you that it's even worse than I thought. There's slime and mold and some stuff I can't even identify all over the floor, and I think I saw mutant rats with antlers running into holes in the wainscoting."

However, he chose not to do that, and now, unfortunately, it is not entirely unfair to ask that he own at least part of the fact that the economy remains stuck in the mud. (There were 380,000-odd new unemployment claims announced today. This is not good.) One of the other problems with the president's speech — and it is here where I tend to agree with Alter — is that he kept coming back to The Deficit. (The blog is not an economist, but its first law of economics remains: Fk The Deficit. People Got No Jobs. People Got No Money.) Also, people out in the country really don't care about The Deficit. They occasionally use it as a proxy for Things The Government Spends Money On That I Don't Like but, in and of itself, it's a phantom issue. Why A Democratic president, facing the worst economy since the Great Depression, has wasted so much of his time publicly talking about it, and tailoring so much of his economic program around it, is going to be an subject for historians to chew over for a long time.


Read more: http://www.esquire.com/blogs/politics/obama-ohio-speech-9717553#ixzz1xsYm2N00

[hifiguy]

1. K & R for Charlie Pierce!

He's the funniest truthful observer of the political scene since the sainted Molly Ivins.

[dkf]

2. Problem is the deficit scares people with money into not spending.

The idea of onerous debt makes people who by all rights have the assets to feel secure feel insecure.

[hifiguy]

6. That is a very strange argument.

If I am sufficiently well off to be able to go and buy a new car with cash, why should I be deterred from doing so by the existence of the defecit? I do not understand this theory whatsoever.

[dkf]

7. Because you know in the future you will be taxed to cover significant interest payments on the debt

That requires more savings now for a larger base.

[HiPointDem]

8. baloney.

[girl gone mad]

9. What a specious argument.

One could make an even stronger case that fearing future taxation, wealthy might be induced to increase spending to shelter money in hard assets.

[dkf]

10. That would make sense also.

[AnotherMcIntosh]

3. A presidential obsession with The Deficit is not going to gain more Republican votes.

Fk "centrism," or triangulation or whatever it is now called.

Where is Obama's advisors?

It's time to bring in new advisors. He needs an advisor or two who will tell him,
"This won't get more Republican votes!"

[grasswire]

4. interesting comments section at esquire.com

Not many wingnuts. Usually they shit all over any message board, like pigeons pooping on park benches.

[Ghost of Huey Long]

5. Return to Tariffs, Corporate tax revenue is meant to fund government

We have trouble, my friends, In the country, because we have too much money owing, the greatest indebtedness that has ever been given to civilization, where it has been shown that we are incapable of distributing the actual things that are here, because the people have not money enough to supply themselves with them, and because the greed of a few men is such that they think it is necessary that they own everything, and their pleasure consists in the starvation of the masses, and in their possessing things they cannot use, and their children cannot use, but who bask in the splendor of sunlight and wealth, casting darkness and despair and impressing it on everyone else.

"So, therefore," said the Lord in effect, "if you see these things that now have occurred and exist in this and other countries, there must be a constant scattering of wealth in any country if this country is to survive."