Among the pathological programs pursued by the Bush administration is its enterprise to turn the national debt from prospects made in 2001 of the debt being completely paid off in 10 years to upping the debt to $10 trillion.
'Deficits don't matter,' infamously mumbled Dick Cheney at a high-level meeting that was recalled by former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neil.
Worse is the wish list that the rightwingers wanted from the future administrations dealing with the massive debt: Eliminating those awful programs like Social Security and Medicaid and Medicare which would become unsustainable because of the debt purposefully piled up by Bush and Cheney.
Nobel Prize-winning Paul Krugman warns today that president-elect Obama should not clean up the fiscal mess immediately in the face of a dangerous recession, and views government spending as a economic imperative to ending the recession:
(C)ircumstances right now are anything but normal. ...
(W)e have a fundamental shortfall in private spending: consumers are rediscovering the virtues of saving at the same moment that businesses, burned by past excesses and hamstrung by the troubles of the financial system, are cutting back on investment. That gap will eventually close, but until it does, government spending must take up the slack. Otherwise, private investment, and the economy as a whole, will plunge even more.
The bottom line, then, is that people who think that fiscal expansion today is bad for future generations have got it exactly wrong. The best course of action, both for today’s workers and for their children, is to do whatever it takes to get this economy on the road to recovery.
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