Oh USA, How We Love the Austeriteh

by paradox

In the last 30 months of our absurd hostage drama over the 2011 debt ceiling deal—soon to collapse into yet more disaster with brutal self-immolating “sequester” cuts—another dimension of austerity has been quietly slamming the United States economy, dismaying cuts to State budgets that have resulted in our children losing approximately 300,000 teachers. It’s been estimated that had the States been able to hold the line our current unemployment rate would be around 2 points lower.

In a classically stupid, vapid babbling Republican talking head observation that fill our television screens like so many scrubbing bubbles Carly Fiorina recently said these jobs were merely sclerotic bureaucratic positions in State capitals. It took the little people hero Paul Krugman to instantly counter that no, we really screwed our economy, our education systems, projected values to our children and our future when we so stupidly lost those precious teaching jobs.

Carly Fiorina. It’s like Rick Moranis in Ghostbusters, right, when he’s overtaken by a demon and scares off that horse driver with fiercely glowing green eyes. “What an asshole!” the driver said.

For the millionth time, cutting government budgets in an employment crisis is the dumbest, most destructive thing we can do to our country. My God folks bring up Greece and the UK as recent examples as to the plain screaming truth of this, but we knew this 80 years ago after the Great Depression!

The good Greg Sargent of the Washington Post reported with accurately described economic charts of hell that in their hostage-taking Republicans have gotten almost everything they want, yet are still absurdly stamping their feet like bawling children for more. Of course Digby of Hullabaloo instantly saw the B side of this horrible song, why on Earth is a Democratic President who has won 2 national elections giving it to them? All of this is a Republican game played on their disgusting austerity field.

Billmon wondered why so many little people liberals like myself were so upset after the most recent hostages were given up, it wasn’t that we “lost” or had to make a deal, it was that after winning the national election again it was so plain none of this disaster had to continue in any sense, just shut it all down now and then quietly offer the Republicans a way out.

But no, on we go on the economic road to ruin, so after fierce withering criticism the President really does get tough on the latest deadline and of course the Republicans clownishly cave for an extension. There was the faintest ray of hope the President could see how easily the whole strategy for everything in this fucking endless nightmare could be applied, just do nothing and shut it down.

A real Democratic President would not have accepted that stupid extension and shut it all so mercifully down, but Obama and the Democrats can’t finish a fight (or don’t want to) so here we are again with the President (a Democrat!) clownishly bringing out entitlement cuts for the next deal!

Cuts that will immediately hurt our economy and little people, that will damage the institutions that serve us, that will crush hope in multiple dimensions, Jesus all this after giving up almost everything to the Republicans in the first place, while disastrous budget cuts have been going on in the States! If the President can’t make another deal on Republican terms in a Republican game (instead of so easily just shutting it all down) then we get that economic and social bullet-to-the-temple evolution of “sequester” cuts March 1st.

[shows hands helplessly] Digby says liberals like myself who actually learned in Econ 101 are exasperated by this President, hell I give up on the outrage of it all in this raging inferno of unemployment, I just fervently hope at this point as little damage to the country and Party get inflicted on us all when it finally is somehow over.

We’ve just won the national election again and are making deals to raise taxes and cut spending—but not war spending. The President is going on television soon for the State of the Union and allegedly the focus will be on the economy and jobs.

[presses palms together] Please, how is this supposed to work? As Dr. Atrios at Echaton said it’s like Groundhog Day, right, over and over again the little people are supposed to be everything but then we crush them and ourselves with hostage deals that blast our economy back further.

I don’t care about losing to Republicans, I care about the economy and the little people. Some day, perhaps, leadership in DC will too.