Princeton economist and Nobel laureate Paul Krugman is once again excoriating the budget vultures. He is absolutely correct that austerity now will not improve the deficit, but instead slow the economy even further, thus reducing tax revenues and raising the deficit. I sense that Krugman’s tone is becoming more desperate. Like the rest of us, he is caught in a stampede towards the cliff and is trying to reason with a herd that is dead-set on staying the course.

I haven’t read anyone who makes a reasonable case for immediate austerity, but I haven’t read every article on the subject, either. If anyone knows of an intelligent article justifying budget-balancing at the present time, please leave a comment.

Such a push to balance the budget clearly is not made with the intent of putting people back to work or restoring the economic health of the United States and therefore the economic health of the global economy upon which it depends. One must conclude that the budget vultures (or in the case of Congressional budget vultures, their sponsors) have a monetary interest in a tightening of the currency supply and will not experience the resultant suffering it will cause amongst the population.

Who are these vultures? In a deflationary economy, the only good that rises in value is money. Gold declines as money becomes scarce. People with money hang on to their money in the expectation that it will purchase more tomorrow than today, the very opposite of inflation. Debts suddenly become more and more burdensome to debtors as the dollar value of their collateral declines and their employment prospects become progressively worse. Merchants must reduce prices to sell their goods because demand is down. Holders of debt, like banks, see the purchasing power of their assets increase, but they also must suffer the increasing number of defaults that accompany a deflationary spiral.

So who stands to gain from economic austerity measures?

Since there are few Uncle Scrooges with vast underground vaults of money, we can eliminate hoarders of cash as a significant factor. What remains are holders of very high quality, very safe debts, and the very highest quality, safest, blue-chip debts are the obligations of the United States. If your money is sunk into government paper, you are very well set for a depression, because the purchasing power of your bonds will increase as prices fall.

There are also the Wall Street banks. A strong currency makes the dollar the favored choice for many international financial deals. It draws investments from abroad into the stock and bond markets, filling the coffers of the bankers. The aborted coup against Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1932—exposed by General Smedley Butler (ret)—was most likely instigated by some of the biggest banks in the world, including the House of Morgan, motivated by Roosevelt’s decision to cut the dollar loose from the gold standard, which caused it to sink in value against other national currencies. This was good for the economy, since American goods sold more cheaply in overseas markets and foreign products became more expensive here. But it clearly hurt the holders of dollar-denominated debt, and as a result the banks did everything in their power to defeat Roosevelt.

The budget-balancing tide, unfortunately, seems to be rising. If Congress attempts to balance the budget in the middle of a recession—and we most assuredly are in the middle of a nasty recession—it will bring about severe and undeserved hardship for a large number of Americans, as well as people overseas. It will also fail to balance the budget, as tax revenues will decline with a deepening recession exacerbated by the very austerity measures undertaken to balance the budget.

But a few people and a few institutions will do very well, including bankruptcy attorneys, who always thrive in hard times.

Tags: Krugman, Smedley Butler, Roosevelt, Austerity

If you have not read Barbara Tuchman’s The Guns of August, you have missed one of the finest history books ever written. But I digress.

Chalmers Johnson, sometime CIA consultant and author of a series of books on the American empire and the American security state—Blowback (2000), The Sorrows of Empire (2004), and Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic (2006), among others—has a new book out, Dismantling the Empire: America’s Last Best Hope. Tom Dispatch, A blog on the website of The Nation Magazine, features what appears to be Johnson’s preface to the book. It’s worth reading.

Johnson argues that the days of American hegemony are drawing to a close and that we would be better off withdrawing from our hundreds of overseas military bases now and spending the money on pressing domestic needs, rather than throwing it away on bases that we will ultimately give up, anyway:

If, however, we were to dismantle our empire of military bases and redirect our economy toward productive, instead of destructive, industries; if we maintained our volunteer armed forces primarily to defend our own shores (and perhaps to be used at the behest of the United Nations); if we began to invest in our infrastructure, education, health care, and savings, then we might have a chance to reinvent ourselves as a productive, normal nation. Unfortunately, I don't see that happening. Peering into that foggy future, I simply can't imagine the U.S. dismantling its empire voluntarily, which doesn't mean that, like all sets of imperial garrisons, our bases won't go someday.

Instead, I foresee the U.S. drifting along, much as the Obama administration seems to be drifting along in the war in Afghanistan. The common talk among economists today is that high unemployment may linger for another decade. Add in low investment and depressed spending (except perhaps by the government) and I fear T.S. Eliot had it right when he wrote: "This is the way the world ends, not with a bang but a whimper."

Read the article and the introduction. If you click on the link above and buy the book from Amazon, the commission will go to Tom Dispach, which is worthy of your support.

Tags: Chalmers Johnson, Tuchman, empire

Over the last couple of weeks I have been harangued by otherwise intelligent persons on the failure of Obama to waive the Jones Act so that foreign ships can assist in the cleanup. When I point out that there are plenty of foreign ships working on the spill and that the Jones Act doesn’t even apply beyond the 3-mile international limit, I am met by sneers and otherwise “more informed that you” looks that indicate minds that long ago snapped shut.

McClatchy sets out the facts

Text of The Jones Act

42 USC §55113 Use of foreign documented oil spill response vessels

The right-wingnut response to inconvenient facts, even among friends and loved ones, has always been extremely frustrating to me. The idea that if the facts contradict your beliefs then you ought to carefully examine those beliefs seems to be a completely alien concept to this type of person. It is always disheartening to contemplate that a substantial number of adults in the U.S. still believe that Saddam Hussein had something to do with the 9/11 attack on the WTC when even George Bush finally admitted that the government had no evidence to support Saddam’s involvement.

Here’s a partial explanation from the blog Stop the Spirit of Zossen 2.0:

Narrative radicalization and escalating vehemence through cant and acting out must — by internal logic — treble when fantasy can not surmount the limits imposed by Objective Reality (say Nov. 2008). Obama’s victory is a crisis threatening the ability to segregate their disassociated fantasized self-image with their often fragmented and undeveloped self. Why anyone remotely close to the Movement who said after defeat “now is the time for introspection” was doomed to be mau maued and kicked off the island. And Lord help you if there was a photo with you hugging Obama . . .

Read the entire post: Rightist Collective Narcissism And Why Obama’s Own Fantasy Of Rational Dialogue Is Doomed

I felt from the beginning that Obama was in error, if not denial, in striving for a bipartisan approach. There is a certain strategic advantage to appearing reasonable when your opponent is determined to do anything in his power to make you fail, including causing a great deal of unnecessary suffering to the American People, but at some point it becomes imperative to be honest with everybody and state the unvarnished truth about your opponents, that they are scoundrels who would sacrifice this nation’s welfare in a Texas minute to regain political power.

It’s the right thing to do. Secondly, there is the 25-30 percent of the voters who will not change their minds if the Lord himself descended from heaven holding gold tablets with the truth written on them in 7th grade English, if the contents of the tablets contradicted their beliefs. The rest of the electorate expects Obama to do something more that he has done so far. Part of his failure must be attributed to his misguided attempt to appeal to the better natures of the Republicans in Congress. (His other major mistake is in listening to Summers, Geithner and Bernake, the gruesome threesome that played such a huge part in bringing about the current financial mess.) They have no better natures and will stop at nothing to defeat him. That’s a fact.

Tags: Jones Act, GOP

Facing South reports that BP is attempting to hire marine faculty at southern universities to do research on the oil spill. The catch: they cannot reveal the results of their research without BP’s permission. In addition, they are to communicate through BP’s lawyers, a provision obviously intended to clothe their results in attorney-client privilege.

Backlash grows against BP's effort to 'buy up' Gulf scientists

Tags: BP, Oil Spill

Click on the picture to see it enlarged and read the BBC article. The horizonal white line through
the center is our own galaxy, the Milky Way.

The Planck telescope photographs the universe using longer wavelengths (infrared and microwave)
in order to study what scientists believe is light created shortly after the Big Bang.

Tags: Planck telescope

Here’s an interesting article on income inequality in the United States. The Gini coefficient measures how far the distribution of income differs from a perfectly equal income distribution, and is used by the Census Bureau to measure inequality. A population in which everyone makes the same income has a Gini coefficient of 0, whereas a perfectly unequal population—one person at the top receives all the income—would have a Gini coefficient of 1.

The article lists each state and its Gini coefficients along with the third-world nation with the closest-matching Gini coefficient. Mississippi (Gini coefficient = .471) most closely resembles Nepal by that measure.

The title of the linked article, “Is the U.S. Becoming a Third-World Country?” thus has an answer: Mississippi is already a third-world country. The rest of the U.S. is following us onto the plantation.

Tags: Gini Coefficient, income, inequality

Vampires are mythological or folkloric beings who subsist by feeding on the life essence (generally in the form of blood) of living creatures. Typically, they are the undead—not living but not actually dead, and their victims usually turn into vampires themselves. Killing a vampire, according to the literature, requires driving a stake through its heart.

At a Jungian dream seminar I once attended, led by the late Fr. Michael Dwinell, the vampire was presented as the archetype for addiction, a monster that reducea its victim and those close to him to zombies. But that is a subject for another place and time.

Similarly, the big banks of Wall Street, still holding debt assets at their face value for purposes of calculating their balance sheets, have become veritable vampires, lacking solvency themselves and frantically attempting to suck money out of any convenient victims, whether they be the Federal Reserve, the U. S. Treasury, investors, or debtors, most notably their mortgagors and credit card holders. The latest propaganda meme put out by the banks is the threat of “strategic defaulters,” loosely defined as homeowners who can make their house payments but walk away from the house because it is underwater. The meme has the same deceitful purpose as Reagan’s non-existent “welfare queens” and Bush’s “war on terror”: to conceal the real reasons behind otherwise unacceptable public policies.

It would not be too far out to say that the archetype for financial meltdown is the vampire.

For the last few months it has been more and more obvious to me that the behavior of the big banks can be explained only by assuming that they are insolvent and are remaining in existence only through accounting dishonesty, that is, valuing their assets far above their real value. Before I decided to write a blog post setting out these conclusions, a recent post on Naked Capitalism, Strategic Defaulters are the New Welfare Queens, made such an article superfluous. Here’s an excerpt:

So why all this hysteria about strategic defaulters? If I were conspiracy-minded, I’d say this is a very clever push to stoke jealousy among what is left of the middle class to keep the focus off the way the banksters wrecked the economy, got lots of cash and prizes, and have every reason to repeat that profitable exercise. So focus public ire instead about the commies in our midst, um, the new welfare queens, aka various forms of alleged housing deadbeats. The immediate reason is that the more people are made to resent the breaks they fantasize their neighbors are getting, the more they will oppose deep principal mods, which historically is what banks always did when they had a borrower get in trouble who still had a remotely viable income.

Why would the banks oppose principal mods? It will force an end to extend and pretend, and when THAT happens, a lot of financial firms will be shown to be undercapitalized and in need of rescue or resolution (as we and others have pointed out repeatedly, Mike Konczal’s conservative analysis of second mortgage portfolios at the four biggest US banks, Bank of America, JP Morgan, Citigroup, and Wells Fargo, shows that they probably need another $150 billion in equity among them, and others contend the writedowns on seconds should be much more aggressive than Konczal assumed).

The entire article is well-worth reading.

The term “deep principal mods” means that either the banks would be forced to carry the debts on their books at actual value, taking into account the decline in collateral values (the bursting of the housing bubble, in other words) or bankruptcy courts would be empowered to adjust mortgage principals downwards to reflect the actual value of the mortgaged property. The latter process is known as “cram down” and a bill to give bankruptcy cram down power was defeated in Congress by the finance lobby.

The basis of the problem is politics and denial. The housing bubble was, for the most part, a bipartisan project, hence the reluctance of either major political party to make it an issue. The mainstream media, including its economic experts, was inexcusably negligent for years in ignoring the housing bubble and they are reluctant to admit that the emperor has no clothes. With a few exceptions, it is still spouting economic nonsense. Economist Dean Baker has been chronicling this willful blindness for years and his has been a lone voice in the wilderness.

Disconnection from reality eventually exacts a fearsome price. We have already experienced housing value losses in excess of $6 trillion and the reduction in demand that invariably results from such a loss. The financial reform bill, despite all the hype it has been given by its proponents, is inadequate to address the real causes of our current malaise and does little to lessen the likelihood of another speculative bubble and meltdown. Nevertheless, it is a start.

7/19/2010 Update:

Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz puts it very well in his latest column:

The “innovations” unleashed by modern finance did not lead to higher long-term efficiency, faster growth, or more prosperity for all. Instead, they were designed to circumvent accounting standards and to evade and avoid taxes that are required to finance the public investments in infrastructure and technology – like the Internet – that underlie real growth, not the phantom growth promoted by the financial sector.

The financial sector pontificated not only about how to create a dynamic economy, but also about what to do in the event of a recession (which, according to their ideology, could be caused only by a failure of government, not of markets). Whenever an economy enters recession, revenues fall, and expenditures – say, for unemployment benefits – increase. So deficits grow.

Financial-sector deficit hawks said that governments should focus on eliminating deficits, preferably by cutting back on expenditures. The reduced deficits would restore confidence, which would restore investment – and thus growth. But, as plausible as this line of reasoning may sound, the historical evidence repeatedly refutes it.

Tags: mortgages, Defaults, Strategic defaults, Welfare queens, Reagan, bush, War on terror, vampire, Dean Baker

If you are unaware of how a little commodity trading by some very big and very greedy firms can destroy the health and lives of billions of people, read this article from The Independent, a British newspaper. It will turn your stomach. Ebenezer Scrooge would have been outraged.

Johann Hari: How Goldman Gambled on Starvation

The reader should keep in mind that until the financial system was deregulated in the ’80s, ’90s and the last decade, this kind of depraved behavior would not have happened.

Tags: Goldman Sachs, Merrill Lynch, Commodity futures, Starvation

Global Research, a Canada-based web site on economics, has published another article clarifying the economic and political forces that have brought us to the situation we are in today, and explains how the austerity measures called for by a suddenly-formed consensus goes about completing the vast transfer of wealth from the lower and middle classes to the tiny financial elite that has been proceeding apace for the last 30 years. It is a grim picture, and unlikely to improve, given the attitude of the victims, who lack the information or the intellectual preparation to understand how the scam operates.

Working people don’t rise to the task because they have been propagandized into believing that “fiscal austerity” is something that needs to be done in order to save their children from an even worse fate. What actually needs to happen in a deflationary collapse is to spend more money into the system, not pull it back out by paying off the federal debt; but the money needs to go into the real economy – into factories, farms, businesses, housing, transportation, sustainable energy systems, health care, education. Instead, the stimulus money has been hijacked, diverted into cleaning up the toxic balance sheets of the financial gamblers who propelled the economy into its perilous dive.

What’s happening to us is what has happened over and over to third-world countries in the grip of the Word Bank and IMF ”structural adjustment” programs that extract wealth from natural resources and impoverish their citizens through the mechanism of overwhelming debt. It does not take a lot of insight to realize that if our elites can impoverish yellow, brown, black and red people in other lands without the slightest twinges of conscience, they could to the same thing to their own people -- us, in other words.

If you doubt this, you should acquaint yourself with two of John Perkins’s books, Confessions of an Economic Hit Man and The Secret History of the American Empire: The Truth About Economic Hit Men, Jackals, and How to Change the World. They are eye-openers.

Update 6/3/2010; An even more trenchant explanation of the austerity program of global financial and political elites from New Economic Perspectives:

So we are witnessing a policy long in the planning, now being unleashed in a full-court press. The rentier interests, the vested interests that a century of Progressive Era, New Deal and kindred reforms sought to subordinate to the economy at large, are fighting back. And they are in control, with their own representatives in power – ironically, as Social Democrats and Labour party leaders, from President Obama here to President Papandreou in Greece and President Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero in Spain.

Having bided their time for the past few years the global predatory class is now making its move to "free" economies from the social philosophy long thought to have been built into the economic system irreversibly: Social Security and old-age pensions so that labor didn't have to be paid higher wages to save for its own retirement; public education and health care to raise labor productivity; basic infrastructure spending to lower the costs of doing business; anti-monopoly price regulation to prevent prices from rising above the necessary costs of production; and central banking to stabilize economies by monetizing government deficits rather than forcing the economy to rely on commercial bank credit under conditions where property and income are collateralized to pay the interest-bearing debts culminating in forfeitures as the logical culmination of the Miracle of Compound Interest.

From the article Europe’s Fiscal Dystopia: The “New Austerity” Road to Neoserfdom

Tags: vat, States, Deficits, Ellen Brown

Update 7/2/2010: Krugman is becoming even more nervous over the deficit vultures and their capacity to wreck the economy. Examine the flowchart above once again. If you don’t understand it, try reading any basic macroeconomics textbook.

Tags: Deficits, Austerity

Joe Firestone. posting on New Economic Perspectives, makes a highly persuasive argument against attempts to balance the budget under present conditions in his post An Open Letter to President Obama. He concludes with the following paragraphs:

Mr. President, this has been a long open letter, and I'll close it with some short statements. First, you will hurt, not help fiscal sustainability by pursuing austerity in Federal spending. Second, austerity in these times is not fiscally responsible. It is fiscally irresponsible. Third, real fiscal responsibility means spending what Government needs to spend to fulfill public purposes, and spending in such a way that spending can continue in the future, until public purposes are achieved. There are all kinds of public purposes going begging right now, and you're proposing that achieving those has to be subjected to austerity constraints because we are running out of money. Fourth, I can't imagine a more fiscally irresponsible course than the one you appear to be moving towards now. And that fiscally irresponsible course will, make no mistake about it, also hurt fiscal sustainability. While it won't destroy our solvency, it will destroy part of our productive capacity, and this will give us less room for government spending in the future to both heal our economic problems and avoid inflation while doing it.

So, please Mr. President, don't do austerity. Don't assume you know all about economics. Don't believe we have solvency problems when we have none. Don't believe we have to worry about inflation, when there is not the slightest chance of it anytime soon. Look at what you've done so far and evaluate it honestly. No excuses, please. It can't be right, because it has not worked. Don't be fiscally irresponsible and join the other global elites in following an ignorant and mistaken economic policy, likely to drive the world into a double-dip recession, or perhaps even a Great Depression 2.0. Instead, change course right now! Act like our President, an American President. Give us what we need, not what they need. Be loyal to us, not to them. And end this recession before it ruins any more American lives.

Admittedly, some of the letter may be a little difficult for the lay reader, but it is not abstruse or deliberately obfuscating. Anyone who retains some of what s/he learned in Econ 101 should not find it difficult. Chalk up its difficulties to the economic instruction all high schools graduates and most college graduates lack. But read the letter.

It is becoming all too clear that President Obama is in over his head in the field of economics. Receiving instruction from Bernake, Geithner and Summers will not put him any closer to economic reality, and especially its impact upon the average citizen. As I wrote over a year ago, real progress will come only when he fires this plutocratic threesome who genuinely believe that anything good for the financial sector (read “Goldman Sachs”) is good for America.

Tags: employment, elites, Deficits, Deflation

It appears that the deficit vultures are in the ascendency. As their position is backed neither by economic theory or the raw numbers, one must conclude that they have an alternate, but unspoken, agenda. I have no idea what it could be.

Paul Krugman is similarly nonplussed. His version of a typical dialogue between himself and a German deficit vulture is all too representative of what passes for most political argument that goes on today:

German hawk: “We must cut deficits immediately, because we have to deal with the fiscal burden of an aging population.”

Ugly American: “But that doesn’t make sense. Even if you manage to save 80 billion euros — which you won’t, because the budget cuts will hurt your economy and reduce revenues — the interest payments on that much debt would be less than a tenth of a percent of your G.D.P. So the austerity you’re pursuing will threaten economic recovery while doing next to nothing to improve your long-run budget position.”

German hawk: “I won’t try to argue the arithmetic. You have to take into account the market reaction.”

Ugly American: “But how do you know how the market will react? And anyway, why should the market be moved by policies that have almost no impact on the long-run fiscal position?”

German hawk: “You just don’t understand our situation.”

So on it goes. I blame most of this idiocy on total ignorance of economic history. If anyone has a better explanation, please enlighten us in the comments.

Tags: Krugman, Recession, Deficits

The Israeli attack in international waters upon a defenseless flotilla bringing humanitarian supplies to Gaza is no isolated event, but merely one more step towards what looks like a Zionist version of the Final Solution. They pushed the Palestinians off their land, imprisoned them in Gaza—which can be accurately described as one of the world’s largest concentration camps—and it is now tightening the noose around its hapless inhabitants.

We in the U.S. have long been the enablers of this vast atrocity and will have much to answer for when the inevitable time of accounting comes.

Earlier, Turkey — the unofficial sponsor of the convoy — had proposed a statement that would have condemned Israel for violating international law and demanded a United Nations investigation, the prosecution of those responsible for the raid and compensation for the victims. It also called for the end of the blockade.

But the Obama administration refused to endorse a statement that singled out Israel, and it proposed a broader condemnation of the violence that would include the assault by passengers of the Israeli commandos as they landed on the deck of the ship.

Already, the usual game of “Blame the Victim” is in full swing.

But this is not the time to equivocate or to blame the victim. The Israeli attack was an act of piracy, in violation of the law of the oceans, and a serious international crime. Resisting piracy is not the same as causing death and mayhem by the pirates. In fact, resisting piracy is usually regarded as a laudable, if unwise, action. Israeli/U.S. “logic” is reminiscent of WWI atrocities against civilians by the German army under the doctrine that resistance by an occupied people to its occupiers is a heinous crime and a justification for indiscriminate mass murder.

I am ashamed of the Obama administration for its duplicitous behavior. And we wonder why so much of the world hates us. There’s your answer. If he had only done the decent thing he would have raised the reputation of the U.S. throughout the world, and especially thorughout the middle east.

It shouldn’t have come as a surprise, however. Obama’s silence as president-elect during the Israeli assault on Gaza should was a powerful clue to his later behavior.

Tags: Gaza, Netanyahu

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Unfortunately, all the previous comments on Haloscan have been lost.

Deficit hawks vultures are screaming, circling and puking all over Washington, DC and the European capitals. They are either well-intended fools or liars. They should be shot down as soon as possible, lest their ill-conceived policies change the recession into another Great Depression.

The reason governments are in deficit is the financial collapse and the recession that followed hard upon it. (For the time, let us ignore the mammoth tax cuts for the wealthy during the Bush administration that turned surpluses into deficits.)

When people lose their jobs they pay less in taxes, including sales tax (affecting states and cities) and income tax (affecting the Federal government), and they spend less. Austerity accelerates these very processes and thus deepens the recession and further reduces tax revenues.

Can’t these people understand something so mind-bogglingly simple? Let us demand that Obama and the Democrats don’t make the same mistake that Roosevelt made in 1937, when he submitted a balanced budget and created a sharp recession.

Here’s an historical unemployment chart from the Wikipedia:



Notice the sharp spike in unemployment around 1938? That was the result of enacting a balanced budget while the nation was still in recession.

There are present grounds for concern. The commission Obama has assembled to work on the deficit is packed with conservative dinosaurs known to have opposed Social Security and who would like nothing better than to eliminate the deficit on the backs of the most vulnerable of the American people. Exhibit A: former congressman Alan Simpson, an extreme rightist, is the Republican co-chairman of the commission.

Economist Robert Kuttner has issued serious warnings about austerity in times of recession:

The current global economic crisis, now entering a new phase as a crisis of sovereign debt, has only one rough precedent. The last time major nations (such as Germany, its European creditors, and much of Latin America) faced insolvency, the combination of financial collapse and deflation helped create depression, dictatorship, and then World War II.

In the US, we finally ended the Great Depression with massive wartime borrowing and public outlay. We ended the war with a debt-to-GDP ratio of more than 120 percent, more than double today's ratio. In Britain, debt-to-GDP peaked at about 250 percent.

He points out the difference this time, however:

Today’s situation is different. The origin of all the debt is not a war but a financial collapse. The new round of financial panic is the result of still fearful markets, a still fragile banking system, and deficits caused mainly by reduced output, not overspending.

In this context, it is insane to think that we can recover from a financial panic and an economic recession by inducing a worse recession in the name of fiscal soundness. For now, while the real economy heals, there is no substitute for aggressive central bank intervention to restore markets in sovereign debt. The right grand bargain is tough financial reform and limits on Wall Street--so that this crisis is never repeated. The wrong grand bargain is austerity for everyone else.

I was always under the impression that this was Economics 101, but obviously, the deficit hawks took a different class—one that required them to completely forget history and abjure common sense.

Obama is no fool, and he undoubtedly knows all this. Is the commission merely window-dressing, so that Obama can say that he attempted to be bipartisan but was thwarted at every turn by the Republicans? Or is it simply a means of delay, so that the stimulus can lower unemployment and lower the deficit by election time in November and nothing more needs to be done? That’s a risky game.

The stimulus was almost certainly inadequate and Congress is reluctant to enact another one any time soon. Obama will be stuck with whatever happens. For all our sakes, l hope he succeeds.

Tags: Kuttner, Recession, Austerity