Why do the Republicans even have a chance of getting anywhere near the controls again?
PS: Robert Borosage made this point in a post on HuffPo about Bayh and the deficit:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-l-borosage/bipartisan-blight-iii-eva_b_465397.html...
The reality -- as Martin Wolf of the conservative Financial Times once more details, the recovery act was too small, not too large - and too laden with ineffective top end tax cuts, rather than public services jobs and infrastructure spending that would put people to work. This, of course, was a reflection of Evan Bayh's bipartisan labors, as he joined with a couple Republicans and the sainted Ben Nelson to cut the size of the recovery bill that passed the House, adding top end tax cuts and cutting spending on school repairs and the like, making it far less effective than it might have been.
Since then Bayh has been echoing the growing establishment clamor about deficits and debt. He has championed the notion of a bipartisan commission to report to a lame duck Congress to vote up or down on a package that would surely include cuts in Social Security and Medicare and tax increases. This is a classic example of Naomi Klein's Shock Doctrine, of conservatives using a crisis to enact measures that would otherwise be politically unacceptable - and that force working families to pay for the failures of the elite. (to follow this issue, go to ourfuture.org)
It's worth repeating, as Martin Wolf summarizes: In sort term, we need more, not less of a boost to the economy; deficits should be higher not lower, as government spending steps in while consumers recover from the loss of over $10 trillion in assets.
Once the economy starts moving, growing employment produces rising tax revenues, and lower spending on supports like unemployment and food subsidies will erase much of that short-term borrowing. In the long term, our unsustainable deficit projections are driven almost entirely by our broken health care system. If the US had the German health care system -- or spent the same percentage of GDP as they do on health -- we'd have better health, and a surplus as far as the eye can see.
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