Political Disconnect, or Put a Finger in Your Right Ear and Go "La La La La"

The right wing crazies control the airwaves in the US so all the talk is about how evil deficits and debt are. They are the vampires of the 21st century. We will all die horrible deaths because somebody somewhere has bought something on credit. How dare they!

The issue of 14 million unemployed in the US, of millions losing their homes, of young adults coming of age with no prospect of a job, or millions of middle-aged people tossed on the dustheap of history with no hope of another job and no real retirement savings... those aren't concerns! That is noise. The real "issue" is deficits and debts. This is the corrosive force eating our souls.

That hundreds of billions of debts were rolled up under Bush... no big deal. That was what the doctor ordered. It was a necessary tonic. It is the deficits under "socialist" Obama that has turned the world upside down. And it must be stopped immediately even if it requires the US renounces its obligations and become a rogue nation refusing to pay its debts. The political right assures everybody that if the US "just says no" to debt, then all will be well.

The hypocrites! The fiends! They will destroy everything to gain political power so they can bring back the "glories" of 2001-2008 when they last destroyed the country with lunatic economic policies and insane ideological prescriptions.

Finally... here's the reason for this post. This is a bit from a post by Mark Thoma on his Economist's View blog:

Wow (the bad kind of wow) -- The economy added only 18,000 jobs in June and the unemployment rate rose to 9.2% (and previous months were revised downward) ...

Remembering that we need around 100,000 to 150,000 jobs per month just to keep up with population growth, this represents a net reduction in employment.

We have 14.1 million unemployed according to the report, with 6.3 million out of work for six months or longer. Wages fell slightly.

Why, again, are we spending so much legislative time trying to figure out how to cut the deficit in the short-run -- which will make things even worse -- instead of focusing on job creation? We do need to get the budget under control in the long-run, but deficit reduction can wait until the economy is on better footing. We need more help for job markets right now, not the creation of additional headwinds that work against the recovery.

Obama has bought into the right wing view that deficits and debt are the "real" problem, not jobs, not the housing crash, not state governments running austerity budgets that are shrinking the economy. Nope. None of that. The real issue is that the government which has seen its revenue shrink (compounded by keeping the idiotic Bush "tax cuts for the rich" just last December when debts and deficits weren't the world ending disaster they are today, six months later) while legislated spending stays high, so the government is running a deficit.

The "deficit" is the soul destroyer. Not the lack of jobs. Not the homelessness. Not the fact that the young can't find jobs and the middle-aged are facing a future with no retirment funds and an economy that will never hire them again. Nope. Those are trivial. The real issue is that somebody somewhere might says "charge it!". That is the politicial Kool-Aid that the Republican political right has people drinking in this 2011 re-run of the Jonestown tragedy.