The Rise of the Austerity Hawk Democrats - The Nation

The pissing contest is now a competition to see which side (assuming there are two sides) will cut the most.

http://www.thenation.com/blog/162415/rise-austerity-hawk-democrats

That fact that Senate Democrats are trying to out-cut the cut-obsessed Republicans pretty much sums up the current political debate in Washington. “Harry Reid’s plan wins the austerity sweepstakes,” Adam Serwer wrote yesterday. “It's the austerity party vs. the austerity party,” blogger Atrios tweeted.

President Obama has actively shifted the debt debate to the right, both substantively and rhetorically. Substantively by not insisting on a “clean bill” to raise the debt ceiling at the outset and actively pushing for drastic spending cuts and changes to entitlement programs as part of any deal. And rhetorically by mimicking right-wing arguments about the economy, such as the canard that reducing spending will create jobs (it won’t), or that the government’s budget is like a family’s budget (it isn’t), or that major spending cuts will return confidence to the market and spur the economy recovery we’ve all been waiting for (Paul Krugman calls it “the confidence fairy”).

“For the last few months, I and others have watched, with amazement and horror, the emergence of a consensus in policy circles in favor of immediate fiscal austerity,” Krugman wrote on July 1. “That is, somehow it has become conventional wisdom that now is the time to slash spending, despite the fact that the world’s major economies remain deeply depressed. This conventional wisdom isn’t based on either evidence or careful analysis. Instead, it rests on what we might charitably call sheer speculation, and less charitably call figments of the policy elite’s imagination.”

In the last few weeks, the austerity hawk choir has only gotten louder. President Obama has successfully used the bully pulpit to undermine the case for progressive governance.

Makes one wonder what they're putting in the water and air in legislative chambers. Politicians worldwide seem to be listening to the bond traders while ignoring the majority of their constituents. That's a recipe for global disaster.

and liberals against conservatives. Now it's all just false framing.

Wake up people. We need to take our party back.

Some of them may vote against whatever horrible deal emerges, but it won't matter. They'll still be part of the party that implemented disastrous cuts, AND they'll be part of the party that's been "in charge" (so the electorate will think) during a time of prolonged economic stagnation. They'll have to run for re-election with unemployment still terribly high.

They can argue, correctly, that things would be much better if their policy prescriptions had been implemented. I fear it won't matter. The implementation of right-wing policies will produce bad results that will cause an anti-incumbent surge. The few sensible incumbents will suffer merely from being on the Democratic line.