Republicans see it as a good thing if only the unemployment rate stays high, if only enough businesses fail, if only enough people lose their homes to foreclosure, file for bankruptcy, have to tell their kids that the money they expected to have available to send them to college just isn’t there anymore. Because, in their warped worldview, bad news for most of us is good news for transforming the Republicans’ misfortunes into an electoral restoration.
Robert Reich looks at it this way:
Why are Senate Republicans (all, that is, except the lonely moderates Collins, Snowe, and Specter) nixing the stimulus package, as House Republicans did? …
The reason has to do with the timing of the economic recovery. If everything goes as well as possible and the stimulus and next round of bank bailouts work perfectly, a turnaround could begin as early as mid-2010. But even under this rosy scenario, employers wouldn’t start rehiring until late 2010 because they’ll want to be sure the upturn is for real (employment typically lags in a recovery). This means that under the best of circumstances — assuming the stimulus is big enough to jump-start the economy and the next bank bailout big enough to get credit moving — most Americans won’t feel much better than they do now by November, 2010. Unemployment could easily be hovering close to 8 percent; underemployment, close to 14 percent; and many other indicators, still in the doldrums.
That’s if all goes extremely well. But what if the stimulus isn’t big enough? (I fear it won’t be, given the large and growing gap between what the economy can produce at near full-employment and the meager demand coming from consumers and businesses.) And what if the bailout doesn’t quite work? (It may not, given that the banking system is collapsing and many banks are actually insolvent.) The economy in November of 2010 may be worse than it is now, with no turnaround in sight. …
Republicans don’t want their fingerprints on the stimulus bill or the next bank bailout because they plan to make the midterm election of 2010 a national referendum on Barack Obama’s handling of the economy. They know that by then the economy will still appear sufficiently weak that they can dub the entire Obama effort a failure — even if the economy would have been far worse without it, even if the economy is beginning to turn around. They’ll say "he wanted more government spending, and we said no, but we didn’t have the votes. Elect us and we’ll turn the economy around by cutting taxes and getting government out of the private sector."Modern Republicans have thrived, of course, on keeping the lower economic quintiles in their place. Dismantling the Roosevelt legacy has been on their agenda since they crammed Taft-Hartley down our throats 62 years ago, a smashing of the safety net that got seriously under way during Ronald Reagan’s two terms and has continued ever since, with only a partial hiatus under Bill Clinton…
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Enemy: "libs and media" "And liberals loved it" "Americans beg their President for free stuff"
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Good Guys: "They can con libs and media but they can’t con us" "The achievers are to be punished and prosecuted"
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