Wednesday, November 26, 2008

Same players, maybe, but a new game for sure

The blogs are rife with postings and comments about Obama's economic picks. There is hand-wringing over all of the familiar faces and understandable fear of more Wall Street-centric thinking.
Don't sweat it, comrades.
The one upside of our burgeoning economic disaster is the end of old, flawed perceptions. No one with a brain can still argue "government always bad, rich white guys always good." The Chicago/Laffer school of pseudo-economics is fatally wounded. Clowns like W., Gingrich, Gramm, Greenspan and their slavish minions on CNBC and Fox News got everything they wanted and it all played out to its inevitable conclusion. Trickle down has been proven every bit as idiotic as we lefties predicted oh so many years ago.
Ideally, we would return to a more classic Keynesian form of economic management -- deficits spending and tax cuts during recession, followed by spending cuts and tax hikes during expansion to retire the debt. We can't do that this time because, despite Bush's attempts to pretend the Iraq debacle doesn't count towards the budget, our deficits are exploding as fast as the economy is shrinking. There will have to be tax hikes this time to fund the very expensive, invasive steps needed to staunch the economic bleeding.
Even the old Clinton, Republican-lite hands in Obama's administration won't be able to deny the necessity of getting money into working peoples' hands ASAFP. No more cutting taxes and hoping nice rich people don't ship their business overseas. Money will be spent quickly on work to be done by American workers with goods manufactured in America, all aimed at goosing household incomes. There is no other way to deal with the flaming bag of shit Obama will inherit.

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