Easy Times (9/9/10)

Call it the fitting coda to Recession Summer:

The U.S. economy continued growing this summer but “with widespread signs of deceleration,” according to a new report on business conditions around the country.

The Federal Reserve’s “beige book,” an eight-times-a-year compilation of anecdotal information from companies in the twelve Fed districts, offers a portrait of an uncertain economic moment in which growth has slowed in much of the United States.

“Economic growth at a modest pace was the most common characterization of overall conditions,” said the report, released Wednesday afternoon and based on interviews with businesspeople from mid-July through the end of August. However, five of the regional Fed banks east of the Mississippi River “highlighted mixed conditions or deceleration in overall economic activity.”

Think of the U.S. economy like a hospital patient in a vegetative coma.  Beyond a certain point, there isn't any more to be done for the patient beyond letting him heal.  Nobody knows when he'll wake up, but his recovery is pretty much up to him.  Now picture a Doogie Howseresque Dr. Chicago taking over the case after Lollipop Frank and Countrywide Dodd caved mugged the patient, caving in his skull, stealing eight hundred billion dollars from his wallet, and making a successful getaway.  The new caregiver's prescription?  Stimulants.  Lots and lots of stimulants.  "It'll wake him right up," the Doc insists.  Now maybe it will and maybe it won't, but it also won't give the patient the time he needs to heal.  Most likely all it will accomplish is to rev his cardiovascular system pointlessly, possibly causing additional damage to his heart or other vital internal organs.

Sure enough, that's the result.  The patient seems to stir for awhile, even toss and turn a bit, but he never regains consciousness.  Meanwhile Dr. Chicago has been out playing golf for a year and a half and hasn't bothered to check on his patient even once after his "remedy" was administered.

The patient is still in a coma, his remedy has failed, and now Dr. Chicago is terrified that he's going to be sued for neglect and malpractice.  But he is die-hardedly wedded to his pharmacopeal medical philosophy; he simply cannot conceive of there being "nothing more he can do" and leaving his patient alone.  He simply HAS to try again.  So he prescribes....more stimulants.  "This time, it'll work!" he argues.  His physicianal colleagues, however, are worried that another round of systemic revving could prove lethal to the patient.

That's where the U.S. economy is today.  It lays prostrate and comatose, The One's boot stubbornly and heavily on its throat, while he obstinately and malevolently insists on bleeding more capital from its "blood"stream to restribute it to his uberleft public union cronies under the phonier than Paris Hilton's double-Ds label "stimulus" (or whatever the heck he's calling it now).

Strangely, for Donks across the country who actually DID want The One to actually provide some, you know, LEADERSHIP, this offering ain't lighting their pilot lights:

Facing a rising jobless rate and the possibility of a GOP blowout in the November midterm elections, President Obama sought Wednesday to convince voters that he is charting a new path to revive the American economy.

But Obama’s proposal for $180 billion in fresh infrastructure spending and business tax breaks is not satisfying many of the groups he needs on his side – not lawmakers on Capital Hill who are leery of raising the deficit by spending more, not economists who say the plan is too modest to create many jobs, and not business groups that say the tax benefits come with too many strings attached.

Even some vulnerable Democrats – who have been begging the White House for a jobs strategy to present to recession-battered voters – quickly condemned the president’s latest proposal, suggesting that it bears an uncomfortable resemblance to last year’s unpopular stimulus package.

It's the same old crap.  It isn't even the same old crap in a shiny new package, or the same old crap in a different old package.  It's the same old crap in the exact same package.  Heck, it's the original turd, force-fed us a year and a half ago, shat out for the second time and now being force-fed us again in Skittle form.  He knows it, his party knows it, and everybody else knows it.  I don't think even he thinks he's fooling anybody with it.  Nor do I think he doesn't know what else to do.  I think he is simply unwilling to try anything else, because he knows that "anything else" WOULD work, and that would be to commit ideological suicide.  And that he will not do.

Well, it's waaaaaay late, but some Donks are belatedly unwilling to go down with Barry Ahab:

* Representative Jim Himes of Conneticut says he supports a termporary extension, because earning $250,000 annually “does not make you really rich.”

* Representative Bobby Bright of Alabama came out against ending the tax cuts, because “a vast majority of my constituents … don’t believe in tax increases on anybody at this point in time.”

* Representative Ron Klein of Florida wants a one year extension of the tax cuts, including those for the rich, because “right now, our top economic priority has to be job creation.”

* Representative Gerry Connolly of Virginia says the tax cuts should remain because the recovery remains “fragile.”

* Representative Gary Peters of Michigan wants the cuts to continue lest we “jeopardize economic recovery.”

* Representative Harry Mitchell of Arizona says he “strongly” opposes letting the tax cuts lapse because “we need to encourage investment, not discourage it.” 

You do realize what this means, don't you?  More and more Democrats are going on the public record as acknowledging that universal tax rate reductions lead to REAL economic growth and job creation, and universal tax rate increases lead to the opposite.  This leads to the next logical question for these dragged-kicking-and-screaming-towards-economic-sanity-crats: If tax cuts for the "wealthy" promote job-creation, why just temporarily extend them?  Why not make them permanent?  It really isn't arguble, once you take that first step towards economic policy redemption.

Now do you see why The One is balking at leaving the Bush tax cuts in place?  We tried it FDR's way and the result was the Great Depression; eventually we tried it the Gipper's way and the result was a generation-long economic boom; now B.O. wants to roll it all the way back to FDR's way, and even his own party is defecting to Double-R not even two years into the Age of Obamatopia out of craven fear for their careers.  In his mind, if he relents on such a fundamental tenet of Marxist class struggle, he might as well bag the whole thing, resign, and go play bad golf for the rest of his misspent life.

At the rate his presidency's deterioration is "progressing", sooner or later, this is going to be a one-man last stand.  And that's far too heroic and noble a demand to place on the skinny, narrow, sloped shoulders of an ivory tower dilettante who's never faced the slightest bit of adversity in his entire, worthless, overprivileged, perfumed prince, sychophanted life.

Sure will make good reality TV, though.