Arachnid wrote:
The right to bare arms just doesn't apply to Lady Gagoo...isn't there a big militia near you? or is that the other NE (New England)?
Is the 2nd revolution coming (after the fall of the wall?
)
Weird how socialist-democrat states like Canada, Brasil, China, Sweden, Germany are thriving...
Not really. We're the ones who do the Keynes thingy according to the book... even if Sweden happens to have a conservative PM leading a centre-right coalition government at the moment.
You feed a recession, starve a cold...
Really, the trick is to build a surplus during the good years, so you can afford to spend your way out of the inevitable recessions that occur.
The problem is that some countries, like Greece and the USA, entered the recession already having deficits. Thus they end up choosing between plague and cholera. Try to spend your way out of the recession, and your deficit grows out of hand and brings you down; try to curb the deficit and you worsen and prolong the recession... Damned if you do, damned if you don't.
As mentioned already, Clinton had built a nice surplus, that could have helped the US out of the recession as smoothly as Sweden, Canada and German have sailed, but unfortunately Dubya spent it all and created a record deficit even before the recession begun. He lowered the taxes for the richest group and started two wars. Now, the wars are kind of hard to just walk away from right now, because that would leave those places even worse off, and would make the US look not only weak, but also unreliable as a partner.
The taxes could be fixed, but the tea party has a firm grip of the balls of the republican party and says no. Thus the only way the deficit can be adressed right now is with cuts, and cuts means less spending, which means lower consumption, which leads to lower sales, more layoffs and a drop in production. It's exactly what you do not want to do during a recession.
You see, poor people spend every cent they get, so it goes right back into the economy. Thus cutting social programmes during a recession is not smart. Raising taxes also slows the wheels a bit, but not to the extent that cutting entitlement programmes does, and thus raising taxes would be the lesser of evils in this situation. And the scary shit is that every one who knows the first thing about economics knows this. But do they do what needs to be done? No. They are too afraid to piss off the tea baggers, so raising taxes is out of the question. Much better to try to put out the fire by adding gasoline.....