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Over on America’s Shittiest Website™, Eric Cantor writes,
More government spending, more bailouts, more taxes, and more government control of your life. All financed with more borrowing and more debt. There is now talk of a second (or is it a third?) stimulus bill. Stop the madness.
There is a better way. Conservatives know that we can grow the economy, create jobs, and help struggling families without further mortgaging our children’s future.
Since conservatives ran the country for most of the last decade under George W. Bush, we can actually see what they “know” about creating jobs:
The Bush administration created about three million jobs (net) over its eight years, a fraction of the 23 million jobs created under President Bill Clinton’s administration and only slightly better than President George H.W. Bush did in his four years in office.
…or about growing the economy:
George Bush is leaving the White House with a dismal economic record. By almost every measure — GDP growth, jobs, median incomes, financial-market performance — he stacks up as probably the least-successful President on the economic front since Herbert Hoover.
…or about adding to the national debt:
With no fanfare and little notice, the national debt has grown by more than $4 trillion during George W. Bush’s presidency. It’s the biggest increase under any president in U.S history.
Cantor then details 7 proposals conservatives just KNOW will work this time, gosh darnit: tax cuts, deregulation, free trade. Never been tried!
Stop the madness, Eric.
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Same old shit, different day.
Don’t forget tort reform…
Seems to me that some guys never learn.
…and the R strategy actually did work for the banksters, et. al.
…and no gay marriage!
Tax cuts and deregulation? How did he think up such new and innovative ideas? He must be some sort of genius, or something…
Second verse, same as first.
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Umpteenth verse, same as first.
Looks like the Republicans have agreed on a theme. At Politico today, Michael Steele has an “op-ed” about how the absolute very best thing to help the jobs situation is to extend the Bush tax cuts from ’01 and ’03.
In other words, they got nothing.
I really can’t add anything you covered this great. Except for how does Eric explain the 8 years of Bush Failure to create Jobs with Tax Cuts and Deregulation?
Also after 8 years of Bush just what is left to Deregulate?
And one more thing just when will Press ever confront a Republican on their lies?
Fuckin’
moronmoran.Republicans don’t deal with facts. Facts get in the way of a good story and slogan. Besides they are vastly overrated and have a liberal bias.
Because they worked sooo well creating Jobs?
But how will this protect traditional marriage?
Makes me damn proud to live in Virginia.
hell.
Or the unborn?
Ewwwww, Nosferatu on the floor of the Senate. What’s he doing out during daylight?
He doesn’t. No one in the media asks questions like that.
Deja vu.
Nosferatu
Eric is so predictable he gives me a warm fuzzy feeling. Is it a trap?
Nosferatool!
I just started listening to the Bernanke hearing. It is a near run thing who is more divorced from reality Bernanke or his questioners.
Hey, the Republicans have got so used to the media being in their corner and accepting their framing that they haven’t needed to be good at what they do. Their skills have atrophied to the point where they can’t even rob right.
I second that.
These young new conservatives and their fresh ideas….
Aw, shit. Grassley.
Vitter. I wonder if he’s wearing a diaper under his suit?
I’ve shared this before, but someone always sets it up:
Q – How many Republicans does it take to change a light bulb?
A - None, they just cut taxes and wait for it to magically change itself*.
* Of course it doesn’t get changed once the government employee who’s job it is to replace burned out light bulbs gets laid off due to the budget crunch.
Yeah they just repeat the same old lies over and over again until thinking they can brain wash us. To bad thanks to Bush people are paying attention to the issues.
Bernanke trying to say that the Fed’s easy money policy wasn’t responsible for the housing bubble because other countries with various monetary policies either did or did not have bubbles. He ignores that they had different banking systems.
Bernanke: The Fed does not want to be involved in bailouts. What a howler!
Yeah, same here. Between this and our new loony tunes Governor, it shines a big shining new light on the “Old Dominion” doesn’t it?
A blogger panel on how much more audience we can take from big media and why would be interesting.
McSFB. What an asshole.
What a moron your right in different countries they make you put more money down as a deposit for a home.
Then there is the housing tax credit. Then there is the unregulated home loan paper our banks wrote No Job No Income No Assets .
TBTF resolution is a crock. If a TBTF gets into trouble, the worse has already happened. TBTF can’t be wound down. They explode and collapse.
Yes get them all in the same room lock the door and let them suck the life out of each other, instead of us.
The Fed monitors banks No Job No Income No Assets loans is that something the Fed should have looked at?
Has the GOP mentioned Acorn yet?
You know, between the tax cuts, deregulation and defict hawking, it just comes out as a big ploy to kill entitlments. They really really want a return to the guiled age.
That quote alone could generate a days worth of posts.
Surprised he didn’t point out that there are about 12 million illegal immigrants in the US doing somebodys job.
Even as the economy moves toward depression, Bernanke is getting ready for recovery.
Growth of 3.5% next year…I don’t buy it.
The question is not just the growth rate but where that growth occurs. Most of the small growth we have seen has come from either government spending or government sponsored programs. What we are not seeing is a pickup on the private side.
well.. 3Q was downward-revised by the Fed from 3.5% to 2.8% during the Thanksgiving news dump. So much for transparency from Bernanke.
The 3.5% prediction for ’10 assumes a robust and sustainable recovery in consumer spending. I think this is a big risk, and it is very possible that the currently observed consumer spending gains are not sustainable – especially if people don’t start feeling more security in their jobs (and probably their healthcare too). Continued employment growth weakness does not lend much confidence to the consumer spending recovery, and nobody should be willing to count on more increased government/stimulus spending.
I should say that I don’t think the recession’s going to double dip back into negative growth, but I do think it is distinctly possible that 4Q09 will be on par with 3Q09 (2.5%-2.8%) and 1Q10 and 2Q10 could actually see even slower growth than 4Q unless there is real (and highly unlikely) progress ont he employment front. With credit as constrained as it is (and likely to remain that way), jobs growth IS consumer spending growth in the short and medium-run. And with the deficit approaching 13-14% of GDP and the rethugs acting like their heads have been collectively cut off, there isn’t a lot of room to maneauver.
Leave it to the smirking Eric Cantor to be on the cutting edge of fresh ideas. For 30 years we have de-regulated, tax cut, tax loopholed, tax havened, tax sheltered, outsourced our way in to a fucking depression. Enough is enough. How about a bone for us poor damn saps at the bottom of this shit heap of humanity.
The whole focus of these hearings at this point is not on Bernanke and his failures but on rather bland issues. And Bernanke even when he talks about a 3.5% growth rate next year, no one makes him defend this prediction. Same thing with “metrics” related to lending stimulated by the TARP. The whole TARP evaluation was a joke, made up after the fact, and largely depended I believe on bank self reporting. No one called him on this either.
Basically, Bernanke is allowed to say whatever and it goes unchallenged. From the tone of all this, it looks like Dodd and Reid will find a way to get to a vote and Bernanke will be confirmed, and our trajectory toward the cliff will remain unchanged.
one could argue that the Fed has jumped the edge of that cliff already and is now falling rapidly to toward the rocks down in the canyon base…. it just doesn’t feel that bad yet ’cause we haven’t hit bottom.
All this optimism is making me feel warm and fuzzy./s
Bernanke against risk based premiums for TBTF. He tries to make it sound all too complicated but the TBTF are inherently riskier and that isn’t hard to figure out at all.
Shorter Judd Gregg: I am an idiot.
This holiday season will reveal the true depths of this recession. And I’m afraid the Pollyanna’s are in for a real shock.
How’s this. How about a 50% off coupon worth up to $500 given to every household to be used for an American produced product or service (okay, we’d likely have to have some list of qualifying goods and allow for some % of foreign components…but it has to be actually put together in the US). The coupon would have a three month expiration date. Then if that worked you could do another tranche.
Kind of like a “Clunkers” program but for everything and only US products.
“…here are a few commonsense policies that we should pursue.”
Hmm, commonsense…commonsense…now where have I heard that before?
I guess there is some truth to the report that there is something in the water in Virginia that renders your brain “optional”….Cantor is living proof…If you believe he’s actually alive and not a Cheeeny automaton….
Scary thing is this is optimism. The banks are still using leverage. The Banks are still gambling that money on all kinds of funny investments. We can not afford another Bank Bailout. We still have further to drop before we reach another Great Depression.
That and Helicopter Ben seems to be trying to redeem Herbert Hoover economic ideas.
I think if we had a big and effective intervention now we could still stave off most of the effects of depression. But as I write often, our elites, all of them, have failed completely and absolutely. Just listen to Bernanke blather and a braindead idiot like Gregg or Dodd pontificate, and the only question is how fast we go over the cliff.
In the past, I used to think that our elites had strengths and weaknesses but that they could at least minimally take care of business. That what they did did not effect the core stability of our country. But not anymore. All of our core institutions and principles are under assault simultaneously.
CNN ticker said something about black Friday bringing no gains for businesses. You know sales are not good when the chattering classes are silent on the topic.
Decider Bush’s tax cuts have worked so well, I only wonder if John Bush will join Cantor and say “It’s your money. You paid for it.” first or will Palin beat him to that?
I’m not really concerned about a double dip into a serious recession or even something like the Great Depression – the fundamentals don’t really point to that kind of disaster.
I do think, however, that unless our policymakers start showing some minimum iota of intelligence, the fundamentals are pointing toward a long Japanese-style period of prolonged macroeconomic stagnation (sustained low-to-no growth punctured by occasional commodity-driven inflation spike risk), and with everybody feeling miserable, possibly for years. Believe me, 1-2% growth on a sustainable basis WILL feel like recession for most Americans. That’s what I meant in what I said in #44. A while back I asked one economist at one of the banking majors his views on unemployment. He asked: what I really think or what they’ll let me publish? After I confirmed the former, he said 2017/2018 for sub 8%.. and that was his rosiest scenario. I think he really meant >10% for much of the coming decade.
The TBTF are already have shown that they are too dangerous to exist because of the systemic threat they pose. These two idiots on the one hand recognize that such entities can pose such threats but then decry the fact that they should be downsized because of that threat.
As for the living wills for TBTF, again hokum. Lehman was in the black one day and $600 billion in the red the next. How can you have a living anything that would cover that?
On the other hand, I did see something, somewhere about how black Monday was 8% gain over last year for on-line business. Makes one wonder if in-store shopping is becoming a thing of the past.
We disagree. Strip off the effects of bubbles in stocks and commodities and you have depression. I see Japanification as a best case scenario for where we are headed but that the chances of that are fading.
All Republicans have is their “faith” in a failed ideology. Facts have no place for the true believer. The American Taliban
This derivative talk is the same old same old. The worst ones will be held off of the exchanges. And for those exchange traded ones, if margins reflected risk they would be prohibitively expensive because they are risky instruments.
Sorry but the clunker program was a huge waste of money.
Bernanke is BSing like crazy about why AIG settled with bondholders at par. The Fed and Treasury basically announced to AIG that it was being bought out. The Fed in particular didn’t really have a legally justified role in this but acted anyway. So all of this oh we didn’t have the power to do that is bogus. They could have made a take or leave it offer and everyone including the French would have gotten onboard. In other words, he is lying about this.
It should have had significantly more strict incentives to purchase high-efficiency cars.
Yeah, I mostly agree with this. Because we don’t make anything anymore, a long term problem with jobs was going to occur anyway, likely similar to the Japan model. And that’s the best case scenario.
With unemployment benefits running out (and let’s face it, even if they “extend” them this time they won’t forever), and the rising unemployment reaching double digits, we’re about to the see the “second wave” of foreclosures, and the second great pressure that’s going to put on our financial system.
And IMO, it’s going to be too much to bear this time, and a full fledged collapse/depression is almost inevitable. Unless the powers that be decided to, you know, actually do something. A nationwide, federal jobs probram (yes with deficit spending) even bigger and more far reaching than the New Deal type stuff, is probably the only way to avoid an actual collapse at this point. No one seems capable of such big thinking though.
And the problem is, there’s a perfect candidate. A brand new energy delivery system, from generation to end user, is needed and would not only benefit in the short term (by staving off collapse) but bring benefits in the long term (more efficient transmission and use of energy).
Dodd closing remarks, what a tool. I will go to my grave believing you, we did the right thing when you and Hank Paulson came to us and held the country hostage and we were stupid enough to believe you.
They let Ben talk about AIG they must want him out normally topics like this are never discussed. I think Ben is the fall guy in this play.
“Over on America’s Shittiest Website…”
Just the kind of high-class commentary we have come to expect here. Wow, way to raise the debate.
Would you have preferred,
“Over on America’s Dumbest Website…”?
Might’ve been a better choice?? Hmmm, choices choices, so tough sometimes.
They are all blowing bubbles out their asses.
You’re right. We have the situation where we need to build toward a sustainable future and a future worth building toward, and these guys are going to reflate wealth destroying bubbles until the money is gone.
Advice for california arsonists: After scorching thousands of acres make sure you’ll be seen dousing the fire. That done, you’ll be able to call Chriss Dodd to your defense.
Adjourned. Well that travesty of advise and consent is over.
well, all I can say is: if my grim and depressing views are the upside, optimistic case and Hugh’s armageddonish views are the downside, pessimistic case, I think we can all agree that we’re royally fracked.
Yep.
All this wonderful news (health care, ecomony, war, etc. etc. etc) led me to meet a new friend. His name is Jack Daniels. Perhaps you’d like an introduction?
unfortunately, I’ve never been much for the over-imbibement of state-of-mind-altering substances, so it looks like I’ll just have to grin and bear it… for the next couple of decades.
Hell yeah!
Eric Cantor is the world’s biggest a-hole, sellout and jerkwad. Appearing in that weird ginned up teabagger protest recently with that giant, huge photo of Dachau skeleton dead bodies behind him – it’s clear this louse knows no shame and never will. Nothing is too low for him to stoop to, and it’s obvious that he’d step or spit on his own mother, if it meant some money for him.
Also quite the unoriginal douchebag. Yeah: that’s right. Cut taxes for my super-duper gigarich sugar daddy lobbyists, so that I’ll get my kick-back. Yeah: that’s the ticket.
The Rethugs never have anything. They just have words that mean nothing.
Understood.
For me, I decided maybe altering my mind might be a valid option after lugging and carrying my 11th teevee (made even heavier by the bricks lodged on it’s insides) to the dump and then going to the store and buying another. This round trip got to be old, tiring, and expensive. So, now, instead of throwing bricks at my teevee, I hollar, cuss, bitch, grab a brick, then take a quick drink.
So far this teevee has outlasted the last five, so maybe it’ll work out.
Rolled up socks allow one to vent without actually destroying the TV.
Here we go again. More tax breaks for the Rich and Famous!!