(9 am. – promoted by ek hornbeck)
The New York Times, February 23, 2009
I worry that we’re operating far beyond our economic knowledge. Every time the administration releases an initiative, I read 20 different economists with 20 different opinions. I worry that we lack the political structures to regain fiscal control. Deficits are exploding, and the president clearly wants to restrain them. But there’s no evidence that Democrats and Republicans in Congress have the courage or the mutual trust required to share the blame when taxes have to rise and benefits have to be cut.
All in all, I can see why the markets are nervous and dropping. And it’s also clear that we’re on the cusp of the biggest political experiment of our lifetimes. If Obama is mostly successful, then the epistemological skepticism natural to conservatives will have been discredited. We will know that highly trained government experts are capable of quickly designing and executing top-down transformational change. If they mostly fail, then liberalism will suffer a grievous blow, and conservatives will be called upon to restore order and sanity.
It’ll be interesting to see who’s right. But I can’t even root for my own vindication. The costs are too high. I have to go to the keyboard each morning hoping Barack Obama is going to prove me wrong.
10 comments
Skip to comment form
Author
Thank you so much for your concern.
about the part where conservative principles are the one’s that got us in this mess in the first place…discredited already.
the Doomsday year of 2012. Recent news (before the crash) has also pointed to 2009 as the beginning of the end. We are only “minutes” into the new presidency yet above red vs blue I smell the Machiavellianisms already and it is indeed a huge pile of horsemanure.
This of course would be considered “tabloid”
http://www.newswithviews.com/D…
but I have discarded ALL of lamestream media seeing it much like that sci-fi movie “They Live”.
If I have to call it right now the seven regions the US breaks up into would save us from a Jeb Bush in 2012.
is “David Brooks is off today.” Perhaps the only accurate thing in the paper. Heh.
1) A California soulution (sic) to the budget problem!
Mark Leno, Dem state legislator from San Francisco, has proposed legalizing marijuana and taxing it at $50 per oz. as a solution to Cal’s massive deficit.
Hey! Like we used to say in the sixties:
It’s easier to get by a patch with no money if you have a little weed than it is to get through a time without weed even if you have money!
You go, Mark Leno.
2) So “Newsweek” has procliamed “We’re all Socialists now.”
If so, how come we still don’t have the main socialism we have been ‘politely requesting’ for generations now — Socialized Medicine?
Call your legislators now about both of these points.
what a useless twit. His ‘operating knowledge’ is limited to the ridiculous pimping of culture wars to the elitist Nice Polite Republican’s while advocating robbing us all of our money and our democratic rights. What an asshole, I had hoped that when Obama won the idiot twits who sold this bs would be gone. 61% of Republicans think that their own party is blocking recovery for political reasons. The Corporate Media is not effectively overriding reality with their voodoo when everyone can see that they busted the economy, globally.
we are beyond scale……
we continue to hope that someone will be able to tell us how we can just keep growing indefinitely…..
and the lesson of the next decade will be that this is beyond foolish……
so in a way the human race is clearly clueless….
as is the culture of america……..