Politics: The Issue of Government Spending

Will have to come back to this, but feel compelled to leave a note after breakfast conversation with A. Robert Reich's blog entry for yesterday included citations of his Keynesian mantra on spending:

Now that the deal is done, Obama and the Democrats will have a much harder time passing anything close to the stimulus necessary to breach [I think he means "bridge"] the gap between what consumers (who are 70 percent of the economy) are willing to spend and what the economy can produce at or near full-employment.

This is a strange way of formulating the idea. I guess he's saying, we need to boost the consumers and boost economic production through government spending. But Adam and I found dogmatic and obscure in this column. Congressman Donna Edwards plays a more antagonistic "hard ball" two days ago when she said,

...the American public believes that those wealthiest two percent need to pay their fair share and that they’re not doing it. They also know that they’ve received those breaks for the last 10 years, and contrary to the Republican mantra, they are not job creators, because otherwise we would have created a lot of jobs. (on Democracy Now)

Another incisive, but perhaps also a bit dogmatic, statement she made that concluded on a brilliant rhetorical note was:

...And not just that, but the contributing factors to our long-term debt are those tax breaks for the wealthy, a prescription drug bill from President Bush that was never paid for, and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and then you add to that a financial crisis that was brought along by the irresponsibility of the financial sector. The American public, middle-class and poor people, are saying, "Wait a second. We didn’t do any of that stuff. We haven’t benefited from any of that stuff. And we shouldn’t have to pay for it."

Perhaps most fascinating is Rep. Edwards' voice, which others share, that the President could have prevented default by paying debts even if Congress did not vote to raise the debt ceiling; in short, the President did not need to back down. But now I digress. I'll come back to this.