Will they let is get this bad?
On Monday, August 8, the global financial markets sent a clear message: investors fled stocks and bought US bonds. Why are stocks falling? Why are investors buying bonds? Because investors see the United States hobbled by incredibly slow economic growth. We are teetering at the brink of a double dip recession. Millions are unemployed. Businesses are not growing or expanding. Investors see bonds as a safe investment in an economy going nowhere fast.
Economically speaking, our house is on fire. Worse, the Boston Globe, the leaders of both parties in Washington, and the Standard and Poor’s credit rating agency are focused on fixing our long-term debt problem, instead of today’s crisis. The sad effect is akin to pouring gasoline on the fire. (“S&P mucks up the math, but sounds a needed wake-up call” August 9, 2011).
Facts matter. Math matters. There are no numbers to back up the argument that the US cannot pay its short or medium term debts. At worse last month, there was only a short term danger of missing a few days payments because of the irresponsible hostage-taking behavior of zealots in Congress. S&P could not make its case for downgrading US debt with out a glaring and ridiculous two trillion dollar math error. When confronted with the error, S&P just scribbled over it and presented their argument again, but without math. It is a sign of how unmoored from facts our political and economic debates have become that S&P can hold its head up while offering demonstrably false mathematics as serious analysis. And S&P should already have its credibility in tatters, given its massive failure (in response to pressure and legal payola) to correctly measure the risks in the mortgage-backed securities that crashed the market and cratered the economy in 2008.
The US economy is the real problem. People are suffering. Businesses are not growing. The infrastructure — the systems for transportation, for water, sewage, and electricity, and for education — that we need for a healthy society and competitive economy for the long-term are crumbling. Reducing government investment in infrastructure is foolish, and cutting direct insurance payments to people who need them (Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and unemployment insurance) is worse. The Globe described the S&P report as a wake-up call. But, respectfully, if you can’t see the see the movement of the market, or the huge risk of a lost decade of economic sluggishness looming before us, you’re still sleeping.
It is not time to cut. It’s time to invest.
It is time to get serious about taxing corporations and the rich.
With corporations on the sideline it is time for government to step up.
Repeat after me….
Tax and spend…..Tax and invest.
TAX AND SPEND…..TAX AND INVEST.
TAX AND SPEND…..TAX AND INVEST.
Join the Verizon workers on their picket lines.
And let’s get to work building a movement to tax corporations and the rich.
Fight for a return to Eisenhower tax rates.
–Leo
I hope folks are watching the streets of London.
I assume you are refering to the rioting that has broken out over the last couple of days. I have yet to see a very good answer as to what provoked them. It seems the police fatally shot someone, which yes, can cause anger, but I get the sense this is about more than a single police incident. (I also was under the impression that police there generally go unarmed, but I disgress.) Was something building up previously that the American media didn’t cover? Also, for some reason every article I have read on this feels compelled to point out that London is set to host next year’s Olympics, but I’m having trouble making that connection.
My point is that when governance fails, chaos follows. It isn’t just the Middle East, and we are not that far removed from it here.
We aren’t likely to find simple, obvious, and readily-documented “reasons”. Rioting happens when some critical mass of the population comes to the conclusion that the government in place is so broken that anarchy and perceived immediate self-interest is preferable to perpetuating the status-quo.
When the upper two percent here takes away enough from everyone else here, we can expect the same to happen.
This was intended as a reply to Christopher’s 12:30p comment.
Whatever the reason, this failure mechanism NEVER happened to me on the old version, and doesn’t happen on the other sites I frequent. This reply bug is a significant pessimization of the site’s behavior. Let’s hope it can be fixed soon.
because you seem to be the only user experiencing this problem. I hate to say it, but it seems awfully likely that it’s you rather than us. Please email me as much detail as you can about your browser, OS, any special settings you use to browse the web, etc., so that we can try to fix this.
It’s happened to me, and if you read the threads carefully, it appears to happen to others as well.
Firefox; XP, Ghostery, AdBlock; NoScript
it doesn’t always happen to you, since you were able to reply to me. Also, it clearly doesn’t always happen to Tom, since he was able to reply to himself upthread. It doesn’t make sense to me that the Reply function would work sometimes, but not always, for a particular user. Perhaps Christopher is right?
If so, it’s one of the behaviors of Soapblox that should have been replicated on this new site. “Did not have this issue” is a clue that something was better before.
And a functionality that should be replicated. A terrific suggestion.
…my comment to which he was attempting to reply was the last (ie furthest down on the screen) comment on the thread. I suspect we are still getting used to the comment box appearing in the same place at the end, whether it is for the main post or to an individual comment. Remember, if you just start typing in the reply box the program will assume it is a comment on the main post. To reply to a comment you MUST HIT REPLY on that comment EVEN IF the comment is last on the thread. The reason Soapblox did not have this issue is because it did not show a reply space UNTIL you either clicked “reply” under the comment to which you wished to respond or “Post a comment” which was found directly under the main diary, the former doing what ST wanted to do this time and the latter accomplishing what he actually did this time.