I CAN HAS BATHTUB?

The Grover, he is winning.

So, I love to get snippy with DKos.  But with things looking up for the Dems, it looks like the stifling conformism is relaxing a little bit. And, truth be told, some of the "diarists" at that site have been consistently informative for years.

One longstanding diarist, bonddad, has commented on finance for some time now.  And he writes that the next US president, probably a Democrat, is probably going to be hobbled economically.

Democrats have high hopes for the 2008 election.  And they should. Bush’s policies have done an incredible amount of damage to the Republicans.  It’s doubtful they will recover anytime soon. But should a Democrat win, the fiscal mess left by Bush has already predetermined the next president’s primary policy goal: to clean-up the mess Bush is leaving behind.

He then quotes some very scary debt figures.

Canadians will know to be very wary of debt scaremongering.  If there's one thing this country learned during the previous Liberal government(s), it's that it's surprisingly easy to dig oneself out of rather deep holes.  Canadian writers such as Linda McQuaig have built careers out of pointing out the artificial nature of debt and deficit numbers and their propaganda value in media-popular victim-blaming schemes, whereby the weakest are accused of soaking up and squandering our valuable resources and left to fend for themselves.

Certainly, any drawdown in US forces in Iraq will have a noticeable effect, for instance.  Reversing some of the tax cuts, another.  And so on.

But even this long in hock has had an effect, and the patient---the prospect of a decent social welfare schemes in the USA---is still partly drowned in Grover Norquist's bathtub.  Perhaps not quite the way that dear old horrid Grover intended it; he entertained, at least publicly, the fatuous thought that it might be brought about by spending cuts on the meagre redistribution schemes for the poor, or something like that.  But by the only way it could: coercive wealth transfer to the powerful.

Comments

[Berlynn]

The debt crisis can/will then be used to institute more right whingnut economic policies, ala Friedman's shock treatment...

[Chuckles]

Pulling out of debt can be done in eight years, look at the Ninties. We will need a Democratic President committed to an almost immediate withdrawal and to reversing the ridiculous Bush tax cuts. I don't think the Democratic Party has it in them to pull both of those objectives off in the House or Senate. So far, they have folded on almost every confrontation with the Repubilican'ts, even though the Democrats are in the majority.