Yeesh

Obama Liquidates Himself

A spending freeze? That’s the brilliant response of the Obama team to their first serious political setback?

It’s appalling on every level.

It’s bad economics, depressing demand when the economy is still suffering from mass unemployment. Jonathan Zasloff writes that Obama seems to have decided to fire Tim Geithner and replace him with “the rotting corpse of Andrew Mellon” (Mellon was Herbert Hoover’s Treasury Secretary, who according to Hoover told him to “liquidate the workers, liquidate the farmers, purge the rottenness”.)

It’s bad long-run fiscal policy, shifting attention away from the essential need to reform health care and focusing on small change instead.

And it’s a betrayal of everything Obama’s supporters thought they were working for. Just like that, Obama has embraced and validated the Republican world-view — and more specifically, he has embraced the policy ideas of the man he defeated in 2008. A correspondent writes, “I feel like an idiot for supporting this guy.”

Now, I still cling to a fantasy: maybe, just possibly, Obama is going to tie his spending freeze to something that would actually help the economy, like an employment tax credit. (No, trivial tax breaks don’t count). There has, however, been no hint of anything like that in the reports so far. Right now, this looks like pure disaster.

via krugman.blogs.nytimes.com

Krugman, amping up the shrill. And I feel like I'm right there with him ... A "freeze" feels like nothing but a gimmick. It doesn't do much to change the deficit, and it sends all sorts of terrible political messages. You know what does cut the deficit? The health care plan! If voters don't know about key provisions of reform, like the ban on denying coverage on the basis of pre-existing conditions, they sure as hell won't know about the benefits for the deficit (especially given the false information that some have spread). But the White House has done an absolutely abysmal job in educating the public, and now he has to resort to Republican gimmicks to make it seem like he cares about a deficit that, just a month ago, his signature health care reform was poised to cut by over $100 billion over the next 20 years.

Posted via web from Aught he has to know it with.