Yes, because no one listened to those that warned(including myself) this would happen in 2010 with the Bush tax cut sellout leading to the debt ceiling debacle in 2011 to now, it looks like the sequester created by this White House and Congress is going to happen. Back then, there was leverage with the Bush tax cuts expiring for using the High Value Platinum Coin, invoking the 14th amendment, or legislating the debt ceiling away entirely. None of this was considered even as a temporary measure to avoid this epic failure fixing to hit our shores.
It’s insulting to the public that none of this was even tried, because this sequester will be painful and more painful in the future. The political damage as we create more miniature crisis will be even costlier than what is projected as more bills have to be passed every few months which always get worse the more they are revisited, all needlessly created all in the name what I call deficit terrorism. Through each bipartisan crisis more austerity is brought out in these miniature Shock Doctrine scenarios especially on the debt ceiling. This austerity will eventually terrorize the public because a failure to govern or understand our economy.
As you might have heard the economy is contracting while unemployment remains high inching higher especially in real terms again while Washington is too stupid or corrupt across the board to notice. I can’t say I didn’t see this coming even as just an above average layman. All this focus on austerity is detrimental. After all, spending is actually income and so are deficits which are the life blood of the private sector in the economy when it comes to those sectoral balances you hear me always harping about.
I have to thank NY brit expat for introducing me to John whom is not only a brilliant economist, but an all around cool guy who is very approachable and has an awesome taste in music. He stresses that the economics discipline hasn’t made economics very understandable to the general public and he’s right; however, you wouldn’t know that by reading his many excellent pieces on why everything people think they know about debt and deficits is absolutely wrong. As John points out, it’s not only wrong, it pervades this entire ignorant and corrupt political debate happening right now over this stupid sequester that was a creation of the White House and Congress.
As you will read down below, this horrible self induced debt ceiling pro austerity political show where never is heard an encouraging word like full employment, but instead for Peter Peterson’s enjoyment, idiotic words praising deficit terrorism(budget balance and cutting our safety net) rule the day. It only amounts to economic decay and a likely recession on the way depending on how much deficit spending is cut in the coming days.
There seems to be a lot of celebrating without actually understanding much of what has happened as of late. One reason is that it looks like House Republicans will agree to raise the debt ceiling but only for 3 months until the budget gimmick of all Congressmen supposedly either passing a budget or denying their own pay as if that will ever happen. There will be infighting on whether there should be heavy or light deficit terrorism terrorizing the unemployed as usual, but now we can expect these dysfunctional austerity celebrating battles to go on and on. And as I pointed out when I predicted all of this 3 years ago, when this is the debate in Washington DC we have already lost.
This budget gimmick fight is already on top of what the last debt ceiling fight created with the negotiations coming up over the self induced sequester on the basis that 4 trillion bipartisan austerity is awesome. That is the problem for all debates and all fake “progressive” political rhetoric in DC we heard at the Inauguration even though it was a great speech.
The plans to kick this austerity shit can down the road continually every few months is not a victory; it’s also not even a clean debt ceiling raise because it’s not even going to be for a fiscal year. It also means the White House was really posturing as I said they were when they claimed they wouldn’t negotiate on the debt ceiling; this shows that all this so called new-found post reelection “strength for progress” is a myth. That also means that all the hyp being bandied about, about the low-balled 60 billion to merely 9 billion Sandy relief bill passing weeks late and 51 billion dollars short breaking the Hastert rule did not have the significance of the spin behind it at all. It’s simple: John Boehner was looking out for his own ass as speaker(shocking!). That’s it.
The idiotic bipartisan sequester created by the last grand self induced standoff over the last debt ceiling fight will come to a head on March 1. I don’t expect a lot of defense cuts despite the posturing and fully expect more cuts to SS and Medicare to be floated and bargained with within multiple negotiations that show nothing but contempt for the public. Yves Smith goes into the real reasons why a Republican grand standoff on the debt ceiling looks like it won’t happen despite the coming miniature ones every few months that will happen where plenty of deal making and deficit terrorism will take place.
First, if you widen the frame, the budget jockeying is largely kabuki: which team is going to score more points that appeal (or more accurately, can hopefully be spun to appeal) to their base? The reality is that both parties are fully committed to imposing austerity. The only question is whether we get Dem Lite or Republican Hi Test. But rest assured, neither version will be good for ordinary Americans.
Second, the Republicans have not dropped the deficit ceiling cudgel, but they seem to recognize that it is a mutual assured destruction weapon, and therefore not as useful as they once thought. They seem to still be coming to grips with the negotiating implications. As the New York Times reports, the Republicans are willing to extend the deficit ceiling for three months, but that increase was conditioned on having the Democrats approve a budget (during the Obama administration, no budget has been approved; the government has carried on because Congress has passed spending resolutions). Notice that while Obama has said that he would not discuss deficit cuts under a debt ceiling sword of Damocles. But if he accepts this deal (which includes a gimmick, of having Congresscritters go unpaid if they can’t agree on a budget on the normal timetable), he will still be doing that. So why is this a victory of sorts?
The more important part of the New York Times story on the Republican climbdown is that Dave Camp, the House Ways and Means Committee chairman, disabused his fellow party members of the idea that the government could limp through hitting the debt ceiling by using tax proceeds to pay only debt obligations, Social Security, the military, and other critical needs. So the Republicans can’t refuse to raise the debt ceiling and not do serious damage, pronto. And everyone would blame them for their intransigence. So unless they want to play Major Kong, they will probably continue to play ball with the Democrats on debt ceiling increases while trying to save face about it.
We know by now that fake tough talk from the President on letting the Bush tax cuts above those making $250,000 expire being an absolute was just that, fake. So there’s absolutely no reason to believe that Republicans do not have all the leverage in this upcoming debt ceiling fight coming up. They do.
Jay Carney’s press conference today leaves no doubt that the situation is substantially as I described it in my previous post.The White House commitment not to negotiate on the debt ceiling is mainly fluff. Their public position is that the Congress must lift the debt ceiling with a “clean” vote first, before a deal can be struck on the massive spending cuts that will take place automatically in March. Carney implores listeners to believe that the debt ceiling and sequester are “separate” issues, and insists that “this not a negotiation the White House is going to have.” But of course the entire press conference is itself a public gambit in an ongoing negotiation that obviously includes back-channel talks.
There’s also no reason to believe the President won’t put up huge cuts to our safety net just to raise the debt ceiling thanks to what we know from the austerity memo from Jack Lew’s office when he was head of Obama’s OMB in 2011.
This was all thanks to the gross incompetence of not adding a raise in the debt ceiling in the original 2010 deal that extended the Bush tax cuts as I have repeatedly pointed out. However more than half of you already know this, so let’s get to the here and now; there are only two options.
There is the 14th amendment challenge to the SCOTUS option and there is the minting of a 1 trillion platinum coin to start off with. We know the 14th amendment challenge is the least likely scenario to be pursued now. So given the lack of appetite there, there is only one other option and the President better consider it because no one believes the fake posturing about a debt ceiling raise “not being for debate.” Too late. It is.
It didn’t have to be, but the President made it that way by trusting John Boehner with the full faith and credit of the US so now political default(the only way it could happen as a currency sovereign) is a possibility thanks to this mess. So a Trillion Dollar Coin (TDC) is the first step and a small chance at redemption that suddenly is bigger than the blogger and the blogs talking about it thought it would be. It suddenly got real and thank goodness it did because we need to go further. To defeat austerity for the future we also should go from a Trillion Dollar Coin (TDC) towards Platinum Coin Seigniorage(PCS) and think about minting coins of a higher value up to 60 trillion. Therefore, as a firts step, I urge all of you to instruct the President to…
Once we realize there is no fiscal cliff and the whole premise is a myth, you think about why it was created. It was created so we can mop up after the 1% which owns all three branches of government including the President. Obama didn’t add a raise in the debt ceiling to the Obama Bush tax cut deal he made in 2010 which created this political mess we are in right now.
Yet the poor and middle class are supposed to “stop whining and complaining” and just mop it up as if it’s one of the menial 60% of low wage jobs created that were part of this “recovery” where 93% of the income it went to the top 1%? I don’t think that’s fair. He needs to ask his Wall St buddies in his Treasury Department to share sacrifice. We have sacrificed enough in the name of the fantasy evil deficits from the land of Mordor causing fantasy default. Think about this when Nancy Pelosi was lying to you about this sellout ultimately helping the middle class last night.
On July 18, 2012, the U.S. Bureau of the Census made it official: The middle-class is getting poorer. The median family — that family exactly at the mid-point of the wealth ladder — saw its net worth collapse. (Net worth is all assets minus all liabilities.) In 2005, the median family’s wealth was valued at $102,844 (in inflation adjusted dollars.) By 2010, the latest Census figures showed a drop of 35 percent to $66,740.
It’s basically good cop, bad cop; or bad cop, worse cop theatre to get you to sign off on this grand betrayal as UKMC economist William K. Black aptly calls it.
Of course that can be easy to do with corporate media hacks parading around as “journalists” basically working to preserve the corrupt machine they feed off of. They’re feeding people revisionist nonsense about the so called fiscal cliff; nonsense like how because of the President was reelected he has more leverage this time. As if Democrats ever use leverage after they win elections like how they kept funding the Iraq war in 2006 after their opposition to the war gave them those mid term victories. Nancy Pelosi also took impeachment of the war criminal GWB off the table so future war crimes could be committed.
And then in 2008 after winning an unprecedented majority in both Houses of Congress, higher than at anytime leading up to that point on the GOP’s end, we were told we didn’t have a mandate for progressive polices despite the fact that the right’s neoconservative Laissez-faire ideology had been fully discredited.
As I predicted a while back, the Partisan-Industrial Complex in Washington, D.C. has deployed its quadrennial Mandate Manipulation Machine to make sure that the 65 million Americans who voted for Barack Obama remember that America giving more than 340 electoral votes to an African American billed as a Islamic Marxist terrorist means there is no mandate for real change in this, a country obviously more conservative than ever.
A cursory glance at the newspapers today shows the media teeming with stories quoting incoming Obama administration officials, Democratic Party leaders and spokespeople for corporate front groups insisting that actually, no real change can be made, and what small-bore changes can happen, will have to happen in the very distant future, not soon. My favorite was the one-two punch from Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) and Democratic National Committee chair Howard Dean. Upon hearing of his bigger senate majority, Reid said on Tuesday, “This is not a mandate for a political party or an ideology.
And of course we now know that was Democrats’ way of telling us they would waste the crisis that elected them, keep TBTF, not prosecute anyone who caused the crash, dump the EFCA, enact Dolecare instead of a public option or Medicare Buy In, and go half ass on all qualitative legislation. This is what actually led up to the mid term losses in 2010. And keep in mind this 2012 election victory doesn’t even compare to the victory in 2008.
And yet they tell us we will see a new reinvigorated President and Congress. They tell us they are confident this time. They tell us that this time Democrats know they have a mandate for progress so things will be different than when the debt ceiling debacle made fools of them all. No, this is actually what the White House is telling us; the same thing as after the 2008 election victory now in 2012.
Obama senior campaign adviser David Axelrod downplayed talk of an election mandate on the “fiscal cliff” on Thursday.
Axelrod said presidents always talk after an election about a mandate, but he called such talk “foolish.” President Obama and congressional Republicans are bracing for talks on tax hikes and spending cuts that are now set to be implemented in January.
“Everyone’s going to have to come to the table in the spirit of getting things done, but on this issue of particularly the fiscal cliff – presidents always say, ‘I have a mandate’; that’s a foolish word and generally untrue,” Axelrod told MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” on Thursday.
Yes, it’s true. If the White House would like to disavow David Plouffe’s words now is the time. Time is running short but it’s pretty obvious that he speaks for the White House given that David Plouffe is the President’s closest confidante. If you have the stomach to sit through this forum it’s right there for you to see, but I’ll post the relevant portion that matches up with Lloyd Blankfein’s mentality that the 99% need to sacrifice Medicare and retire later for the fantasy deficit crisis he, the White House, and Congress are peddling to the American people.
The President’s closest adviser is telling his base that additional cuts to pay down the deficit(not the 716 billion to Advantage, fraud, or providers from the 2010 CBO baseline on the effects of the ACA) in Medicare and Medicaid are coming and to be ready for them.
“The only way that gets done is for Republicans again to step back and get mercilessly criticized by Grover Norquist and the Right, and it means that Democrats are going to have to do some tough things on spending and entitlements that means that they’ll criticized on by their left,” Plouffe said at his alma mater in conversation with former McCain campaign manager Steve Schmidt.
[………]
Plouffe added that while the White House wants to engage in comprehensive tax reform, they know they must also “carefully” address the “chief drivers of our deficit”: Medicare and Medicaid.
Lloyd “Sell them shitty deals with the blessing of the US DOJ” Blankfein whole heartedly agrees with Plouffe. He’s also visiting the White House today. I have a feeling whatever good feelings labor and progressive groups had yesterday were perhaps misguided given the statement we just heard from David Pouffe. That and of course basically the priority of making capital whole on the backs of labor as 93% of the “recovery” goes into Lloyd Blankfein’s pocket since 2010.
BLANKFEIN: You’re going to have to undoubtedly do something to lower people’s expectations — the entitlements and what people think that they’re going to get, because it’s not going to — they’re not going to get it.
PELLEY: Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid?
BLANKFEIN: You can look at history of these things, and Social Security wasn’t devised to be a system that supported you for a 30-year retirement after a 25-year career. … So there will be things that, you know, the retirement age has to be changed, maybe some of the benefits have to be affected, maybe some of the inflation adjustments have to be revised. But in general, entitlements have to be slowed down and contained.
Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid will be on the chopping block like it was last time. This is not a conspiracy theory, and it comes from solid sources involved in all of the deliberations if you read the source material provided. Sure, some can pretend it is CT. They can even cry it out loud from the rooftops while closing their eyes and plugging their ears, but the reality based community is all talking about this because this is confirmed reality, and the prospects are real like they were last time.
I heard Dick Durbin, the Illinois senator who is close to Obama, on the radio the next morning boasting that he was one of the Democrats on the Simpson-Bowles Commission to vote for its recommendations – recommendations that included, in addition to changes in the tax code meant to increase revenue (while also cutting tax rates), diminishing eligibility and benefits for Medicare and Social Security. Though the commission failed to reach consensus, making its proposals moot, it was aiming at just the sort of “grand bargain” that Obama has consistently and quietly spoken about as his sort of beau ideal for what a successful presidency would look like. Durbin went on to say he hoped a grand bargain might be wrapped up in the next calendar year, before congressmen and senators became preoccupied with reelection.
And it’s not just people like me that support the Democratic Party Platform over any politician that noticed this. It was one of the President’s biggest most enthusiastic supporters; Ed Schultz of the Ed Show on MSNBC.
LEHRER: All right? All right. This is segment three, the economy. Entitlements. First — first answer goes to you, two minutes, Mr. President. Do you see a major difference between the two of you on Social Security?
OBAMA: You know, I suspect that, on Social Security, we’ve got a somewhat similar position. Social Security is structurally sound. It’s going to have to be tweaked the way it was by Ronald Reagan and Speaker — Democratic Speaker Tip O’Neill. But it is — the basic structure is sound.
And yes, I know the President offered a touching anecdotal of what SS has meant for his family and I respect that; however I’m going to borrow a line from someone whom I won’t speak for, but it’s a good line anyway so I’ll tweak it for my POV on this. Mr. President, don’t tell me what you believe about Social Security, you have shown what you plan to do with Social Security by agreeing to another Greenspan commission like “tweak.” So I’ll tell you what you really believe and why that is a problem.
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