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Politics : View from the Center and Left -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: JohnM who wrote (213601)	1/2/2013 11:38:03 AM
From: JohnM	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 541735

Worth a read. ----------------------------------------- Inside the Fiscal Cliff Saga National Journal has a great tick tock of the fiscal cliff deliberations. "This is the story of Plan O - the congressional Republicans' failed attempt to meet the challenge of Obama's victory. It begins in September and ends in the fiasco of the Christmas season, when the speaker was repudiated by his own troops and had to pull his last, desperate solution from the House floor, leaving Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell to cut the best deal he could with dramatically diminished leverage." "In the end, despite all the planning and forethought, Boehner would stand almost helplessly by as the nation plunged off the fiscal cliff, and a bipartisan coalition of Democrats and centrist Republicans voted to give Obama the big tax hikes he demanded on the wealthy. House Republicans saw the worst of all worlds: they failed to save tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans, put no new checks on government spending, and showed themselves a fractious and disorganized opposition party, the governance of which in the new Congress will prove to be a serious test."

To: JohnM who wrote (213601)	1/2/2013 11:59:35 AM
From: epicure	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 541735

I think that's just wrong. If the market had destabilized, and I think it might have, that WOULD have been economic change. At this stage in the recovery, if people had seen a dramatic market drop, and seen their IRAs lose a ton of money, that could have derailed consumer confidence, which then could have derailed the recovery. I don't think Obama wanted to play dice with the markets- and I'm glad he didn't. He did exactly what I would have done, and I appreciate that.

To: JohnM who wrote (213601)	1/2/2013 12:16:58 PM
From: Dale Baker	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 541735

So Krugman is a world authority on high-stakes negotiating even though his track record of being responsible for negotiating anything important in Washington or anywhere else is......zero. C'mon, this is the guy sitting in the stands screaming at the star QB on the field playing the actual game. It's borderline silly.

To: JohnM who wrote (213601)	1/2/2013 12:37:39 PM
From: Steve Lokness	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 541735

<<<<< Because of the way Obama negotiated>>>>> What a pissy whiner Krugman has become. The market is up better than 200 points. The consumers stocks are going up which should give them more confidence to spend. THAT SHOULD FALL right into Krugmans thinking about keynesian spending. People will spend more - which is exactly the idea behind keynesian stimulus. ..........OTOH, had we gone over the cliff with no agreement, Krugman would have won on his ideology - but the economy would have taken a hit. The economy in downfall is the exact opposite of the results hoped for from keynesian spending - less consumer confidence and with less consumer confidence there is less spending. Just days ago republicans promised no new taxes. Seems to me Obama did pretty darn good as a first step.

To: JohnM who wrote (213601)	1/2/2013 2:03:58 PM
From: bentway	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 541735

I'm not sure I agree with Krugman. I think the markets, and especially world markets, may have freaked out if we'd gone "over the cliff", even if he's right that it actually wouldn't have been that big a deal actually. So, Obama may have done us a solid, although we'll never really know. I sort of wish we'd gone off the cliff, myself, just to see the results.

To: JohnM who wrote (213601)	1/2/2013 2:14:09 PM
From: Metacomet	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 541735

— even though going over the fiscal cliff was not at all a drop-dead moment, since we could have gone weeks or months without much real economic damage. I think Obama is much less sanguine about this assessment of the damage I honestly believe that this is a man whose character will not allow him to tolerate damage to any group that he can avoid "Real economic damage" is a relative term If you and your children rely on unemployment compensation for groceries, rent, transportation and medicine, the Fiscal Cliff represented real economic damage to you ...and failure to allow passage of policies to advance fuller employment means there are millions of Americans in this predicament So I guess the take away is don't elect someone who will cave on your priorities in favor of folks whose priorities are desperate I'd rather we do a better job of simply eliminating the Republican Party "As for the Republicans — how can one regard seriously a frightened, greedy, nostalgic huddle of tradesmen and lucky idlers who shut their eyes to history and science, steel their emotions against decent human sympathy, cling to sordid and provincial ideals exalting sheer acquisitiveness and condoning artificial hardship for the non-materially-shrewd, dwell smugly and sentimentally in a distorted dream-cosmos of outmoded phrases and principles and attitudes based on the bygone agricultural-handicraft world, and revel in (consciously or unconsciously) mendacious assumptions (such as the notion that real liberty is synonymous with the single detail of unrestricted economic license or that a rational planning of resource-distribution would contravene some vague and mystical 'American heritage'…) utterly contrary to fact and without the slightest foundation in human experience? Intellectually, the Republican idea deserves the tolerance and respect one gives to the dead." H P Lovecraft ca 1936