Cheese it, the cops! We'd better lie low for a while -- Robert Reich has us figured out. After recalling his boyhood trials with bullies who took his cupcakes and half his sandwiches -- until he bravely stood up to them! -- he counsels President Obama:
I hope the president decides he has to take a stand, and the sooner the better. Last December he caved in to Republican demands that the Bush tax cut be extended to wealthier Americans for two more years, at a cost of more than $60 billion. That was only the beginning -- the equivalent of my cupcake.
Last night he gave away more than half the sandwich -- $39 billion less than was budgeted for 2010, $79 billion less than he originally requested. Non-defense discretionary spending -- basically, everything from roads and bridges to schools and innumerable programs for the poor -- has been slashed.
The right-wing bullies are emboldened.
As Reich reveals, of course we don't believe for a second that spending less will revive the economy. We secretly know what he knows about President Obama and the economy: "He is losing the war of ideas because he won't tell the American public the truth: That we need more government spending now -- not less -- in order to get out of the gravitational pull of the Great Recession." But we have to pretend to be afraid of deficts and debt because we can't come right out and say we're just trying to help our rich friends and screw all those unwashed poor that we hate so much.
That's why the pitiful little $39 billion cut is so disappointing. At $100 billion, we could have thrown old folks out of their nursing homes, deprived destitute families of food, kicked deserving poor students out of college and poisoned the baby formula of immigrant children. Even at $60-some billion, we could have caused misery for a few million of the sick and hungry here and there. But $39 billion? It was hardly worth the effort.
Catch you later. I see someone whose cupcake I need to take.
