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Politics : President Barack Obama -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: ChinuSFO who wrote (50120)	2/7/2009 6:54:18 PM
From: koan	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 149317

I post this in a polite spirit Chinu, and merely as my defense that moderates are not superior to liberals. Which so many seem to take at face value. February 6, 2009, 1:01 pm Appeasing the centrists Atrios is right, though I’d put it a bit differently: centrism is a pose rather than a philosophy. And to support that pose, the centrists are demanding $100 billion in cuts in the economic stimulus plan — not because they have any coherent argument saying that the plan is $100 billion too big, not because they can identify $100 billion of stuff that should not be done, but in order to be able to say that they forced Obama to move to the center. Which raises the obvious question: shouldn’t Obama have made a much bigger plan, say $1.3 trillion, his opening gambit? If he had, he could have conceded to the centrists by cutting it to $1.2 trillion, and still have had a plan with a good chance of really controlling this slump. Instead he made preemptive concessions, only to find the centrists demanding another pound of flesh as proof of their centrist power.

To: ChinuSFO who wrote (50120)	2/8/2009 10:14:17 PM
From: RMF	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 149317

ChinuSFO, I've been complaining about the debt for years now. I thought Bush's tax cuts were the height of stupidity. We were actually running surpluses at the time and could have been on the road to eliminating our National Debt in the next few years, but Bush cut revenue, even when he increased spending drastically after 9/11 through his 2 wars and increased spending on Homeland Security. Currently we are paying as much or more for "interest payments" as we are for National Defense. I agree that a stimulus was necessary and I think there are parts of this one that will be beneficial, but I also think that there's a lot in there that won't give much bang for the buck. I would rather have seen more cash going directly to states and local communities, some of which could have been given out as low or interest free loans. That way states and communities could get all the cash they needed to maintain employment, battle problems with foreclosures, healthcare, etc. but they'd be carrying the debt on their books and not the National Government. I think the taxcuts will be good because they will be very incremental and likely to be spent by consumers. The main thing I'm worried about is how we are going to finance all this debt. Eventually the FED will have to choose between MUCH higher interest rates or just running the printing presses all out which will lead to extreme inflation. That 2 BAD options. All in all, I think future generations of Americans will be looking at a lower standard of living.