Disappeared News

I was going to write what I thought about Obama’s targeted budget cuts when Sam Smith’s Progressive Review email came through. I can’t do better than repeat a couple of his snips, I don’t think he’ll mind, and these are rather good IMHO. Yes, Obama is planning to shred the safety net and save the military-industrial-banking complex. 

 Paul Krugman, NY Times - It's appalling on every level. It's bad economics, depressing demand when the economy is still suffering from mass unemployment. Jonathan Zasloff writes that Obama seems to have decided to fire Tim Geithner and replace him with "the rotting corpse of Andrew Mellon" . . .

It's bad long-run fiscal policy, shifting attention away from the essential need to reform health care and focusing on small change instead.

And it's a betrayal of everything Obama's supporters thought they were working for. Just like that, Obama has embraced and validated the Republican world-view - and more specifically, he has embraced the policy ideas of the man he defeated in 2008. A correspondent writes, "I feel like an idiot for supporting this guy."

David Sirota, Open Left - This is actually worse - way worse - than John McCain's campaign proposal for across-the-board cuts, as across-the-board cuts would have hit the massive and bloated Pentagon budget. Instead, the Obama administration is specifically and exclusively targeting social safety-net spending for a budget freeze (read: cut in real, inflation-adjusted dollars). Yes, cutting social safety-net programs during a recession, while increasing spending on wars, underwriting a no-strings-attached bank bailout and pushing a health care bill that is a massive giveaway to the insurance and drug companies. This is textbook Selective Deficit Disorder and it is grotesque. Indefensibly grotesque.

Paul Rosenberg, Open Left - Obama is now intentionally recreating FDR's mistake of 1937, when he prematurely cut back spending to try to balance the budget, and sent the country into a new recession. . .

The rationale is that he wants to appease folks worried about runaway deficits. Which is just what FDR was worried about in 1937.

This is Bush-style idiocy. There is no other word for it.

Adding insult to injury, at the same time, he's also proposing more Ronald Reagan/GW Bush tax cuts. . . which will, of course, increase the runaway deficits.

And he's also talking about privatizing NASA. Because privatizing the Pentagon turned out so great.

It's time to seriously start talking about primarying Obama in 2012. He's now officially the most conservative Democratic President since Grover Cleveland. And the dumbest one since James Buchanan.