A Bad Situation is Getting Worse

Paul Krugman, who has shown himself to be very prescient about this economic crisis, is getting bleaker. He just can't believe the Obama is letting himself be boxed in by the same old crazy Republican rhetoric about "tax cuts" being the only way to "stimulate" the economy. He is despairing as the US slides into a major depression and takes the whole world with it while the Republicans act as cheerleaders still dancing to the "tax cuts are the elixer for cure all ills" which was done again and again during the Bush admin and in fact helped create the current mess. He can't believe that Obama doesn't hit back and point out the failures of the eight years of Bush "tax cuts"...

Over the last two weeks, what should have been a deadly serious debate about how to save an economy in desperate straits turned, instead, into hackneyed political theater, with Republicans spouting all the old clichés about wasteful government spending and the wonders of tax cuts.

It’s as if the dismal economic failure of the last eight years never happened — yet Democrats have, incredibly, been on the defensive. Even if a major stimulus bill does pass the Senate, there’s a real risk that important parts of the original plan, especially aid to state and local governments, will have been emasculated.

Somehow, Washington has lost any sense of what’s at stake — of the reality that we may well be falling into an economic abyss, and that if we do, it will be very hard to get out again.

It’s hard to exaggerate how much economic trouble we’re in. The crisis began with housing, but the implosion of the Bush-era housing bubble has set economic dominoes falling not just in the United States, but around the world.

Consumers, their wealth decimated and their optimism shattered by collapsing home prices and a sliding stock market, have cut back their spending and sharply increased their saving — a good thing in the long run, but a huge blow to the economy right now. Developers of commercial real estate, watching rents fall and financing costs soar, are slashing their investment plans. Businesses are canceling plans to expand capacity, since they aren’t selling enough to use the capacity they have. And exports, which were one of the U.S. economy’s few areas of strength over the past couple of years, are now plunging as the financial crisis hits our trading partners.

Read the whole article and weep. Meanwhile I gnash my teeth while Canadians suffer because of the idiocy of Bush and now those eight years are being capped by a major depression brought on by the same idiot Republicans who keep chanting the same "voodoo economics" that has been shown over and over to be wrong-headed and destructive. Sad... Truly sad.