Caught a couple of good articles on the Internets today. One talked about why the Democrats might lose the 2010 midterm elections and another talked about how to fix the short term deficit problem. The fix doesn’t include cutting social security or electing Republicans – as smart people know.
Democrats won their massive majority because of an economic collapse. They’ve passed so much legislation because they have a massive majority based on an economic collapse. But the economic collapse isn’t over. And having a lot more seats than the other party means 1) voters blame you for the condition of the country, and 2) you have a lot of seats to lose. What the bad economy and the huge majority giveth, the bad economy and the huge majority taketh away. Om.
The incredible obviousness of the Democrats’ political fortunes
*Side Note* One reason it seems people aren’t happy with the President and the Democrats is because they still can’t rub two stones together to get us to see their half-assed watered down legislation (like the Health care reform and the recent financial reform bills for example) is the bees knees.
Policies such as the stimulus were not done well enough, and everyone from Nobel prize winners with good predictive records like Stiglitz and Krugman, down to nobodies like me, predicted it at the time. The President hired the wrong people to give him advice, didn’t even do as much as many of them wanted, and now we all pay the price.
Sometimes half doesn’t work. Half-assed rarely does. All Obama’s half assed “left wing” policies have done is discredit the left for another generation. Combined with the ability of the media, Republicans and hysterical Tea Baggers unable to use a dictionary to define him as a “socialist” this means that Obama’s policies are seen as left wing, and left wing policies are seen to have failed.
That leads us to the real fix for the deficit since the Republicans and other idiots insist on “fixing” it:
First, the facts. Nearly the entire deficit for this year and those projected into the near and medium terms are the result of three things: the ongoing wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the Bush tax cuts and the recession. The solution to our fiscal situation is: end the wars, allow the tax cuts to expire and restore robust growth. Our long-term structural deficits will require us to control healthcare inflation the way countries with single-payer systems do.
The deficit hawks would be satisfied and it doesn’t include Republicans or trashing the economy.
