Robert Reich: Slouching Towards a Double-Dip or a Lousy Recovery at Best

More and more people I respect are sounding the alarm. But no one in Washington is listening…

It greatly disturbs me that no one calls out the Republicans on all this…Their policies caused the financial meltdown and they have done everything possible not to support the people they hurt and to hold back the Recovery for crass political reasons.  And the Democrats- especially the Blue Dogs- haven’t exactly done a great job standing up to them.

I can’t recall ever seeing such a failure of leadership on all sides.

Here is  another article on this subject, this time from Robert Reich, who says:

The people who are suffering the most from the failure of public officials and the greed of large bankers are the least able to endure it. Unemployment among people with four-year college degrees is barely over 5 percent; among high-school dropouts it’s over 25 percent. Those who have been jobless the longest or who have left the labor force altogether are men over fifty who are least likely to get back in. Families most in need are losing the services – state-supported Medicaid, child dental care, after-school programs for the kids, public transit – they most depend on.

And sadly, the people mentioned above still vote for Republicans.

Secretary Reich continues:

The irony is that had there been no bank bailout in 2008 and 2009, no large stimulus, and no extraordinary efforts by the Fed to pump trillions of dollars into the economy, we’d have had another Great Depression. And because it would have sucked almost everyone down with it, the nation would have demanded from politicians larger and more fundamental reforms that might well have lifted everyone, and set America and the world on a more sustainable path toward growth and shared prosperity: A stimulus that financed the rebuilding of the nation’s infrastructure and alternative energies, single-payer health care, a cap on the size of big banks and resurrection of Glass-Steagall, earnings insurance, an Earned Income Tax Credit that extended into the middle class, and a truly progressive tax coupled with a price on carbon to pay for all of this over the long term.

Link to full article:

Robert Reich: Slouching Towards a Double-Dip or a Lousy Recovery at Best.