It’s a little late in coming, but it sounds like some common sense may be taking hold with the Dems…
If they had a backbone earlier, we would be having an entirely different conversation now. It would be about the success of the Second New Deal on jobs and infrastructure spending and how the Democratic Congress would move forward next. Not to mention the Economy would be growing faster and unemployment would be coming down faster.
You can’t cut deficits with two wars and a greedy military industrial complex running rampant. You can’t cut a deficit by offering more tax breaks to the rich and the corporations.
No one is willing to take on these groups, so deficit reduction is not really possible. It’s a GOP fairy tale…
This is just an excuse by the GOP to cut social programs that help the most vulnerable Americas: Children and Seniors. As well as to attack women’s health and welfare issues.
It’s about time the Democrats stopped enabling this foolishness.
From Sam Stein at The Huffington Post:
WASHINGTON — Senate Democratic Whip Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) declared on Sunday that his party was unwilling to budge one cent further on the number of cuts it included in its budget proposal, even with a government shutdown looming in less than two weeks.
The Illinois Democrat, in an appearance on “Fox News Sunday,” said that in offering $10 billion in cuts from current spending levels, Democrats had, in his estimation, “pushed this to the limit.” Cutting additional discretionary spending — which constitutes roughly 12 percent of the budget deficit –- in the hopes of balancing the budget was not only, quite literally, impossible, but counterproductive to economic recovery.
“To go any further is to push more kids out of school, to stifle the innovation which small businesses and large alike need to create more jobs, and it stops the investment in infrastructure which kills good paying jobs right here in the United States,” said Durbin.
via Dick Durbin On Democratic Spending Cut Proposals: We’ve ‘Pushed This To The Limit’.
Lost in the 21st Century 
I hate to say it but it may be necessary to raise the national debt ceiling if the U.S. is to keep a good bond rating. If our dollar continues to devalue then that could impact our economy by having less foreign investors trading our currency due to lack of confidence in being able to guarantee our debts, in which bonds are.. a debt instrument. Bernanke QE2 policy will realize after this 1Qtr completes to see if it was worth the experiment to stimulate growth & revenue. Inflation is on it’s way for sure, just look at the cost of commodities going up like food & including cost of oil effecting the upward swing prices at the pumps. Tax increases may be necessary to create a higher revenue stream for the gov’t, but this is at expense of no increase COLA to keep up and although the unemployment rate has drop below 9%, consumer spending is still tentative. Certainly domestic deficit spending should not be on the any bill and there needs to be a thorough examination of all gov’t depts, especially the military where cuts can be made that will not impact the social needs of the public. A large overhaul of Medicare or Social Security is not viable at this time as a solution to our nation trillion dollar deficit, but certainly redundancies should be eliminated where necessary. Bottomline, smart deficit reduction needs to be made, and not use a “scorched-earth” policy process.
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