Why I gotta be the "Thuggy for hire"?
Inventions are a little slow in this economy...a guy has to keep busy.
OK enough about me...
Picking piecemeal at a debate leaves holes that eventually need filling. Of course there are limits to every financial arrangement. The problem is that the world is not physically or financially static. Shit happens. The system gets gamed.. Natural disasters cannot be predicted. War happens.
What I am saying is that we truly are the shining beacon of the world. If there is a valid American exceptional-ism then it is in the financial sector. America..AND the rest of the world are pulling are pulling ourselves back from the brink of the greatest threat to financial stability ever to threaten capitalism and probably democracy. OK.. everyone with any say in the matter had to put on their thinking caps and develop an emergency plan to avert catastrophe. OK..it was expensive..but the ship didn't sink..the train is still on the rails. Now we can work on the process of recovering the extension of the emergency tools.
The debt is not what it is because Clinton or Bush or Obama were evil. Some could argue that greed and a lack of regulatory forces caused our dilemma. Over reacting would be just as unwise as the negligence that caused the problem. We need to be intelligent and steady. The ideologues have chosen to use this situation as a political football. That IS evil.
We still need to be flexible to react to whatever comes down the pike that might disrupt our recovery. If that means temporarily accepting some substantial debt for the short or medium term then so be it.
The debt and the recession are two different events. Had we not had a recession, we would still be trillions of dollars in debt. To keep things short and to the point the very real danger of not addressing the debt in a meaningful way is that American money will become basically worthless and that WILL have a direct impact on everyone.
Wrong. They are two different symptoms of the same problem. There is no "event". Both symptoms were a long time coming. A tsunami is an "event". An earthquake is an event. But even those kinds of immediate threats can be mitigated by preparation.
One of the fragile aspects of our economy closely tied to invested wealth AKA the stock market is that it is subject to and dependent upon public confidence. It can also be looked upon as a gauge of same public confidence as to when to tackle difficult issues such as the ballooning deficit.
Obama walked head long into a financial industry shitstorm not of his own making. Much of the head of the main body of the deficit was just starting to rear its head because Bush couldn't keep EVERYTHING he was hiding off the books forever. THEN as Obama was inaugurated it was not the time to deal with the deficit. There were far more urgent fish to fry. He also got a start on his health care legislation which he recognized rightfully as one of the most dire anchors on the economy.
Bush let the boat go into serious disrepair, then ran it up on the rocks in a storm, then conveniently left the sinking ship for Obama to bail it out, assess the damage, patch the hull while it was still barely floating, then do what repairs he could with a ship full of whiny passengers...half of which were still intent on sinking the ship.
I don't know if Obama could have done a better job..Maybe..we'll never know. But the ship is upright ...the stock market has doubled in value and remains steady and up in all it's trends.
Now that we have been able to catch our collective breath it is indeed time to look at how to reduce the deficit. It is NOT time to punish the weak ..the old...the young for it's existence. Move forward on it cautiously ..deliberately ...with ALL shoulders pulling the load INCLUDING the wealthy.
