Budget

The President's budget has just been released, and so has a Republican alternative from the House Appropriations Committee. Reading them is like watching two people play a video game and confusing it for the real world. These budgets don't reflect competing visions so much as they do competing priorities within a commonly-held set of assumptions. They both share an artificial view of today's reality - both economic and human - that warps our vision and limits our choices. The President may be playing the game as well as he can, but what he really needs to do is stop playing altogether.

The rules of this videogame are: 1) Accept the fact that the ultra-rich will keep accumulating ever greater amounts of wealth, and will continue to exert undue influence on the political process. 2) As a result, accept the fact that we can't resist the fundamental changes to our way of life that will create. 2) Sacrifice a large part of the social programs which gave us 75 years of shared prosperity, since they're incompatible with this change. 3) Preserve and expand your political power within this virtual-reality construct.

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A full 90 members of Congress who voted to bailout Wall Street in 2008 failed to support financial reform reining in the banks that drove our economy off a cliff. more »

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“Watch what we do, not what we say.” (Famous Republican advice.)

The Reagan Revolution was first and foremost about cutting the taxes paid by the rich and corporations. Now, almost 30 years later, the United States of America is drowning in debt. And that is exactly what they wanted to happen. more »

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Cross posted from the Huffington Post more »

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Headline at Drudge Report: Obama policies projected to add $9.7 trillion to debt by 2020... points to this story, National debt to be higher than White House forecast, CBO says, more »

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In Big Push Needed For Win 60 Votes For State Aid ... And More Private Sector Jobs, Bill Scher writes of the need for,

...a major grassroots push to secure critical aid for fiscally distressed state governments and help tackle the jobs crisis.

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Conservatives claim that President Obama "tripled the deficit" and point to the huge 2009 budget deficit as proof. The fiscal-year 2009 deficit, as reported in October was, indeed, about triple the prior year's borrowing. But the 2009 budget was the last budget year of the prior, conservative administration. more »

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On the last day of 2009, The Washington Post published an article, presented as a news story, which could be a signal of the death of the Post as an independent and objective news source.

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