How to Sabotage a Recovery – The Great Recession – Salon.com

I think History will identify this as the key mistake of the Obama Presidency:  Letting the GOP set the debate on cost cutting during a time we needed the government to invest to grow jobs and the economy.  It’s the same mistake FDR initially made…not to mention Herbert Hoover.  But FDR recovered and I’m still hopeful Obama will, too.

I’ve also finally decided the Republicans are nothing short of evil and are certainly unpatriotic.  They are almost reaching the point of treason in their quest to destroy the Middle Class.

Their goal really is to sabotage the Economic Recovery in order to gain Political Power- then to use that power only to serve the Rich and the Corporate Elite.  The GOP certainly isn’t focused on what is good for the Country as a whole…

And I don’t know what President Obama is thinking to let them get away with this…

I think he should start by listening less to Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner and more to Nobel-Prize-Winning Economist Paul Krugman….

Or maybe do something novel, for Washington, like listen to the people.

Polls show the people want jobs, safe Social Security and Medicare and most don’t really give a damn about the deficits right now…

Only the GOP and the Tea Party are talking deficits…

From Salon.com:

Regarding the economy, Obama has let his opponents set the terms of debate, resulting in widespread public confusion. Consider, for example, the following two paragraphs from a recent Newsweek/Daily Beast article called “America the Angry”:

“By almost 4-to-1, Americans say our economy is not delivering the jobs we need, 81 percent to 12 percent.

“And Obama isn’t helping. Fifty percent of respondents think the president has no real plan to balance the budget; 40 percent say he does.”

Balance the budget during the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression? Should Obama repeat Franklin D. Roosevelt’s bad mistake of 1937, when “budget hawks” prevailed, very nearly stifling the New Deal?

That’s certainly what the GOP wants. Whether leading Republicans actually believe that returning to the economic practices of the 1920s would be good for the nation is hard to say. Some may be pretending.

The House’s freshman contingent appears sincerely misguided. New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof asks sarcastically if what Tea Partyers want is a low-tax, limited government haven of conservative religious values like … Pakistan.

Not really. What most have in mind is something more like the Deep South of the 1950s — an imagined paradise with comfortable “aristocrats,” a timid middle class, and beaten-down peasants at each other’s throats.

Many of them probably saw “The Andy Griffith Show” as a documentary.

via How to sabotage a recovery – Great Recession | Economic Recession, Economic Crisis – Salon.com.