The Rise of the Austerity Hawk Democrats

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http://www.thenation.com/blog/162415/rise-austerity-hawk-democrats

“Our plan includes more cuts,” Chuck Schumer bragged at a news conference on Capitol Hill yesterday when comparing Harry Reid’s debt plan to John Boehner’s.

The fact that Senate Democrats are trying to out-cut the cut-obsessed Republicans pretty much sums up the current political debate in Washington. “Harry Reid’s plan wins the austerity sweepstakes,” Adam Serwer wrote yesterday. “It's the austerity party vs. the austerity party,” blogger Atrios tweeted.

President Obama has actively shifted the debt debate to the right, both substantively and rhetorically. Substantively by not insisting on a “clean bill” to raise the debt ceiling at the outset and actively pushing for drastic spending cuts and changes to entitlement programs as part of any deal. And rhetorically by mimicking right-wing arguments about the economy, such as the canard that reducing spending will create jobs (it won’t), or that the government’s budget is like a family’s budget (it isn’t), or that major spending cuts will return confidence to the market and spur the economy recovery we’ve all been waiting for (Paul Krugman calls it “the confidence fairy”).

“For the last few months, I and others have watched, with amazement and horror, the emergence of a consensus in policy circles in favor of immediate fiscal austerity,” Krugman wrote on July 1. “That is, somehow it has become conventional wisdom that now is the time to slash spending, despite the fact that the world’s major economies remain deeply depressed. This conventional wisdom isn’t based on either evidence or careful analysis. Instead, it rests on what we might charitably call sheer speculation, and less charitably call figments of the policy elite’s imagination.”

[county worker]

1. Well I'll just rely on the DUers who are in the know to tell me what to

think about the OP. They seem to know what is going to happen in the future and that it isn't going to be anything we have to worry about since Dems would never cut social programs.

[Hawkowl]

2. Hoover Democrats

I call these Democrats, Hoover Democrats, to invoke the memory of the disastrous policies of President Herbert Hoover which turned the 1929 stock market crash into the Great Depression.

You can also call them supply siders, or Chicago School of Economics free market freaks.

In any case they have declared war on Keynes and are determined that by shrinking government jobs, contracts and expenditures will magically restore confidence in the private sector to create jobs in China, India, Me....err oh, wait....We are completely fucked. Whoops.

[Blue_Tires]

3. Why can't we just cut defense and keep everything else?

What is so foreign about that idea that it can't even be mentioned, but SS/MediCare can?