from the Center for American Progress
We hear a lot about our debt. And it is a pressing issue. But where did it come from? Michael Linden, the Center for American Progress’s Director of Tax and Budget Policy, looks at what happened in the 10-years since the Congressional Budget Office projected a massive surplus.
from Democracy Now!
As European leaders scramble to address the sovereign debt crisis, Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz argues the austerity measures pushed by Germany, the United States and international creditors are only “going to make the countries weaker and weaker.” If European economies contract, Stiglitz predicts that “our economy [will] go down further into the hole. … Those policies then increase the probability of our weak economy tipping over into recession.” Stiglitz’s new book is “The Price of Inequality: How Today’s Divided Society Endangers our Future.” Stigliz continues: “Occupy Wall Street was a reflection of a lot of American’s perspective that our economic system is unfair. … There was a hope after the crisis, that government would fix things, it didn’t. Or didn’t do enough, and that combination of economic unfairness and a political system that doesn’t seem capable of correcting these injustices, I think is what motivated a lot of the Occupy Wall Street.”
from Democracy Now!
Public spending is under assault from the United States to Europe in the name of fighting deficits. Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman argues in his new book, “End This Depression Now!”, that the hysteria over the deficit will constrain an economic recovery in a time of high unemployment and stagnating wages. “The economics is really easy,” says Krugman, “If we were to spend more money at the government level, rehire the school teachers, firefighters, police officers who have been laid off in the last several years because of cutbacks, we would be a long way back toward full employment. … Right now there’s just not enough spending. We need the government to step in and provide the demand we need … We’ve had austerity in the face of a recession in a way that we’ve never had before since the 1930s. The results are clear — it is disastrous.” Krugman writes about the economy as a columnist for the New York Times and is a Professor of Economics at Princeton University.
The interview continues after the jump …
So this morning’s job report was better than expected, with the economy adding 117,000 jobs. So that’s good, right? Well, not really. More like mediocre. Among other things, we get to write off people who are so discouraged they just stopped looking, meaning there were actually less people working in July than in June. So that’s the mediocre.
The Bad is the downgrading of the country’s credit rating, courtesy of S&P. As a coworker of mine noted last week, when this was only a possibility, “If you’ve seen the movie Inside Job you’d kind of have to take any rating coming out of S&P with a grain of salt – okay maybe a truckload of salt – becuase how did those people put it when they were in the Congressional hearings? They said something like ‘It’s not like those ratings mean anything, it’s more like’…what’s the word I’m looking for here?”
“You mean ‘It’s more like they’re guidelines?'” I asked”
“Exactly!” she said. “Like Pirates of the Caribbean, which is fitting, since they are real, live 21st Century Pirates.”
Though this one is a bit of a biggie: the Down closed down 512 points, its worst day since 2008, you know, the last time our economy crashed into the most serious recession since the Great Depression.
But, not to worry, as I pointed out yesterday, we’ve solved all of our economic problems.
Next up: jobs report, due out tomorrow. But I’m sure that will be good news. Lots of people are saying that it’s going to be good news. Sure, none of the unemployed people I know are saying that, but lots of people are optimistic. I know I read that somewhere on the intertubes.
Really, I can’t thank those Tea Partiers enough for making all the right moves to ensure that we continue to push the Great Recession well along the way toward becoming the Greatest Depression.
Today we’ve learned that in the wake of the Debt Ceiling Deal of Doom being signed, sealed and delivered, the stock market continues an alarming slide and the Chinese have downgraded our credit rating. A special shout out to Enabler in Chief Barack Obama, for his exquisitly choreographed moves in response to the Economic Terrorists in Congress. But I want to reserve my most special shout out of all for local Illinois Economic Terrorists Randy Hultgren and Joe Walsh, because it’s just not easy for two freshmen congresscritters-turned-economic-terrorists to accomplish so much in such a short time. Helluva Job!
Damn. I just used the “j” word didn’t I? Sorry, so sorry. Forgot. We are all supposed to be pretending that there is no problem with one in ten Americans being unemployed by obsessively focusing on a deficit that could be much better handled if we just worked on getting them jobs. Damn. Did it again didn’t I?
Well, will just have to hope that Congress is so busy right now that they failed to notice someone worried about jobs. I think it’s more likely than not.
Well, this has been an interesting cap on an interesting few weeks. I’ve spent most of this evening trying not to have a hyperbolic reaction to the Deal of Debt Ceiling Global Economic Doom, but, well, guess you can tell from the term I’ve applied to it that I’ve largely failed.
I’d have to say the most prevalent reaction to the Deal of Debt Ceiling Global Economic Doom I am seeing on lefty blogs tonight seems so hyperbolic on the face of it (We’re DOOMED) that I tried and tried to resist the impulse to say the same. But there it is. I think we might well be doomed.
This morning the Labor Department clued us in to something most of us living out here in the real world already know: no jobs for you.
New claims for unemployment insurance jumped by 37,000 to a seasonally adjusted 464,000, the Labor Department said Thursday.
I know this woman – let’s call her Sue, since both she and her company shall remain nameless, you know, to protect the innocent, and by innocent I mean Sue and definitely not her company – who works for a large corporation which provides a service that is actually doing well right now. Sue says that, as the corporation is well aware and loves to tout, their service is actually in demand in a down economy, so actual sales are up and business is booming. But this is not stopping them from maximizing profits at workers expenses. Because the down economy is providing them with the opportunity to do so, or as the managers put it: “because we can.”
The Progressive Fox is proudly powered by
WordPress
Entries (RSS)
and Comments (RSS).
Content on this site is licensed under a Creative Commons
Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 License