Robert Borosage: Economic Blues

[marmar]

from OurFuture.org:



Economic Blues
Submitted by Robert Borosage on December 18, 2007 - 5:38pm.


Wall Street banks are an honest audit away from bankruptcy. Housing prices are plummeting at rates not seen since the Great Depression. Mortgage foreclosures are ravaging neighborhoods and knee-capping state and local budgets. Incomes decline even as the cost of food, gas, electricity and health care soars. Family bankruptcies reach new heights. The gurus—from former Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan to Republican economist Martin Feldstein to former Clinton Treasury Secretary Larry Summers—are starting to argue about who's to blame for the recession we may already be in.

So George Bush ventures out of the White House on Monday to a Stafford, Va., Rotary Club meeting at the local Holiday Inn's Yak-A-Doo's restaurant "with something important to say" about the economy. His message: Don't worry, be happy.

"This economy is pretty good," says the president. Sure, there's "definitely some storm clouds and concerns"—like "the credit issue and the housing issue"—but "the underpinning is good, and we'll work our way through this period."

The answer to the storm clouds: Do nothing and they will pass. Don't raise taxes; pass the president's status quo budget that pares a little off of domestic spending while pumping another $200 billion into the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

George is as clueless about the economy as his daddy was about the electronic scanner at the grocery store checkout. Stuff just slips up on you when you aren't looking. ......(more)

The complete piece is at: http://commonsense.ourfuture.org/economic_blues?tx=3