Regardless of the bill itself...

Given the sheer number...

of cooks and their talent, a sh-t sandwich might be considered a miracle:whistle:
To be fair the immediate cuts at .2% of GDP may have the advantage of not actually adding to the recessionary pressure too much, although they aren't going to help in the other direction at all-which means in a sense that until about 2016 the bill doesn't do much except promise to do something later-to hell with being fair, I just talked myself back to it being a sh-t sandwich!

Here is the parting shot from an Op-Ed piece decrying the diminishment of Obama.


"...This leaves Americans to contemplate two possibilities more alarming than debt-ceiling brinkmanship. First, that we’re living through yet another failed presidency. And second, that there’s nobody waiting in the wings who’s up to the task either..."

Not sure what sort of sandwich that makes, but it's not a "... nice mutton, lettuce and tomato when the mutton is real lean..."
 
The bill was inevitable. In Washington all it takes to pass a bill is the endorsement of the leadership of both parties. It was nearly a foregone conclusion that whatever they had on the table the day before Aug 2 was going to get endorsed by Boehner, Reid and Obama which guarantees at least half the Democrats and more than half the GOP would vote for it. It really could have been just about anything. This whole thing was a charade. The President didn't want anyone to know that if nothing passed the world wouldn't come to an end and the GOP didn't want to be seen as uncompromising. I do find it interesting that a bill that spends more money every year for the next ten years and never balances the budget has the "Professional Left" foaming at the mouth and some parts of the TEA Party declaring victory. But then I guess when it comes to the likes of Paul Krugman spending more money is never enough money.

Nice to see Rep. Giffords is well enough to return even if just for this. :)
 
Paul K. is true believer....

and having a Nobel prize probably is more than enough to keep his faith going. Of course by the same logic Obama's war policy are equally consistent with HIS Nobel:whistle:
 
I heard it was a different sandwitch

I heard someone call it a "satan sandwitch"! :devil::mad4::devil:
 
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Me neither.....

nor, do many others.

Even the National Journal is bemoaning the lack of any real substance in the thing after all this hoo-haw and the fact that a major Donegal is being set up for the first quarter of 2013 when a number of major birds come home to roost again. The backloading of the cuts, for all its apparent prudence at the moment could seriously backfire if the economy manages to be in bad shape in 2 years. I admit the basic rock-and-hard place issue involved with the timing of the cuts but at some point the bullet needs to be bit and putting off will prove to be a good idea only if putting it off proves to be a good idea, if you see my point.:mallet:
 
As you have probably figured, I am not of the opinion that cuts hurt the economy. Unless they are lucky and the spending helps in ways that doesn't do more harm than good. With government spending you could say that is a crap shoot but that overstates the risks of playing craps.
 
It seems to be a ....

1 in 173 long shot that cuts won't hurt in the short term, barring some unrelated variable coming into play, of course. That is the record on fiscal consolidations. Whether there is a long term heaven is a matter of speculation and a bit hard to gather evidence for. It could well be the case-at some point if enough cuts are made (fat chance) then that experiment may get an airing, but on the world wide record back to 1980 the only consolidations that did result in the economy growing are 4 in number and 3 of those involved either desertions of a currency mechanism(2 cases) or an attack on doulbel digit inflation(2) but only one of those has even remote relevance to our situation . The problem in putting this in terms of neo-Keynesian theory is that Keynes could well be right about cuts harming an economy and wrong about spending helping. In much the way that the Laffer Curve is not symetrical at every level of taxation-i.e. it is true that at a certain point raising taxes can result in less revenue but it is not true that at any given level of taxation lowering will result in more revenue.
 
I don't think JMKeynes ever spent a lot of brainpower thinking about the long-term consequences of his theories and how they would be implemented by politicians.

I'm sure he was convinced that his prescription for deficit spending as stimulus would work to get a nation's (or world's) economy out of a jam like the Great Depression, but I don't think he realized that politicicans would get as addicted to it even more than a narcotic addict is addicted to his narcotic of choice.

EVERY human being who has ever lived enjoys something for nothing, and at its core, that's what deficit spending is, something for nothing.

But here we are, well into Keynes infamous "long run".......he's dead and we're holding a bag full of sh_t sandwiches that he and his disciples ordered.
 
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usta in Portland said:
"...This leaves Americans to contemplate two possibilities more alarming than debt-ceiling brinkmanship. First, that we’re living through yet another failed presidency. And second, that there’s nobody waiting in the wings who’s up to the task either..."
Click to expand...

The concept of "failed presidency" fascinates me. What do you suppose this writer meant by that?
 
I'm quite sure that I don't know....

how much brainpower he expended on the long term and I'm equally sure that you don't either.

If you want to argue the anti-Keynesian position then argue it, but making utterly unverifiable assertions about what JMK did or did not think about is less than pointless.
 
That 4, or God forbid,...

8 years go by and our situation has deteriorated in some significant way either through errors of commission or ommission or both on the part of the President. If he turns out to be correct that would mean a chunk of 12-16 lost years in our collective history of reasonable progress. It happens, it has happened in Japan for nearly 20 years now-political ineptitude magnifying and abetting structural and demographic weaknesses that have placed the Japanese economy in a semi-permanent deflation and increased their national debt to 226% of GDP, the highest, it goes almost without saying, in the world by nearly 2X. Italy may be on the same path, as are we probably. There is no silver in bullet in deleveraging and the whole of our economy is deleveraging-the national debt only represents about 20-25% of all the cumulative debt in the economy. Households, small businesses, institutions and smaller government units are all overly indebted and trying to reverse their positions. Of the bunch the national debt is at least the cheapest to finance. Just a few years ago (2008 I think) service on the national debt was 9.3% of GDP, right now it is a bit above 5% even though the total debt has increased substantially-all because of investor willingness to lend Uncle Sam short and long term at stupid low rates. We Americans hold 50% of the debt in one way and another and foreigners hold 50 %. As the Debt Ceiling drama unfolded Treasuries went up in price and down in yield, Hmmm? The cheap credit available is one of the ugly little incentives that Washington has to keep on borrowing-I mean just look at the fact that they borrowed more and yet they are paying out less each quarter for the privelege-how many of these bastards are going to be able to keep their fingers out of that cookie jar? The hand wringing is, and should, be about what happens when the money gets more expensive-and it really has only that direction to go, sub 3% just can't hold with the pressure of global capital being what it is.
 
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