Thomas Ferguson appeared on The Real News Network today. He says deflationary impact starts in October, to the tune of about $300 billion. And as for those defense cuts being meaningful….well, now we know.

Thomas Ferguson is a professor of politics and economics at University of Massachusetts at Boston. The author of the “Investment Theory of Party Competition,” he believes that business elites, not voters, are the dominant force in political systems. Together with Joi Chen, he has released an analysis of the Brown/Coakley election, and concludes that the Brown vote correlates strongly with the decline in housing values.

I’ve put the blame on the “veal pen” in the past, who largely abandoned their Wall Street critiques when the bankers told Obama they didn’t want their bonuses criticized any more. Without the normal liberal validators driving the economic argument from the left, the media is left with little to cover and the danger has always been that all of that discontent would accrue to the right — which is exactly what happened. But credit where credit is due, Fox’s constant “Obama is a socialist” drumbeat has played a huge part in the ridiculously inadequate economic conversation that has driven pissed off old people with declining mortgage values to the right.