Pelosi’s statement today, like the leak of the Super Committee Democrats’ proposal yesterday, is part of an extremely depressing pattern. It is the Democratic party slowly moving from defending entitlement programs to taking the official position that Medicare and Social Security should be cut.

The poor state of the economy remains the great anchor dragging down Obama’s numbers. The poll found that 75 percent of Americans believe the country is currently in a recession and only a third of the voters approve of Obama’s handling of the economy, 61 percent disapprove.

What makes Ha-Joon Chang’s new book, 23 Things They Don’t Tell You About Capitalism, such a joy to read, is not the challenge it poses to the bad economics that undergirds global finance, though it does precisely that. Just as Thomas did nearly 40 years ago, Chang’s book succeeds, fundamentally, because it challenges the dead language that is used to market as progress our growing political discontent.

The Century Foundation, Demos and the Economic Policy Institute have released a liberal counterpoint budget plan, as a response to the plan put forward by Erskine Bowles and Alan “The Greediest Generation” Simpson on deficit reduction. The counterpoint is fundamentally different in that it demands increased employment levels before spending reductions kick in.

The Small Business Administration released its Procurement Scorecard late Friday afternoon, showing that once again, the government did not achieve its mandated 23 percent small business procurement goal. Several weeks ago, I made several predictions about this, lets see how accurate I was.

The unemployment data is due tomorrow, and it’s likely to be bad, with an expected 300,000 to 320,000 jobs lost in July, according to the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) and others. That’s a big problem. But unfortunately, when it comes to getting the nation back to work, tomorrow’s unemployment rate isn’t the biggest problem we face.

What’s really troubling is long-term unemployment.

EPI economists see the economic stimulus as alleviating the jobs crisis created under Bush.