Historic achievement
by digby
This is definitely Mt Rushmore material:
White House spokesman Jay Carney said Wednesday that President Obama’s policies have contributed to “the most rapid deficit reduction since World War II.”
How proud they must be to see the results of their great accomplishment:
Spectrum Generations, midcoast Maine’s non-profit Area Agency on Aging, says Meals On Wheels is taking a hit due to automatic spending cuts in the so-called “sequester” austerity budget. Meals On Wheels, which receives funding through the Older Americans Act, delivers meals to homebound seniors over 60 and disabled individuals. In Knox County, the program also has two on-site meals for seniors at the Methodist Conference Home in Rockland and the John Street Methodist Church in Camden. Lee Karker, executive director of the social service agency MCH, which administers the program, says that while funding for Meals On Wheels has been flat in recent years, the demand for the service has spiked.
“There are a lot of people out in the community who are eligible for this program, but because of pride or whatever don’t ask for it,” said Karker. “But with economic conditions that we’ve had, people have decided that they really do need it.”
I’m not saying they are solely responsible for the hideous consequences of the austerity push we’ve seen over the past three years. But they certainly seem eager to credit for it anyway so I’m going to guess they are proud of the results.
This deficit hysteria has led to massive casualties in the country and around the world — an entire generation has been delayed in even starting to seriously pursue its hopes and dreams, millions have lost their jobs and their homes and have had to start over and the rest of their lives are going to be financially insecure because of it. We have a huge group of long term unemployed who nobody cares about and who are probably never going to be employable again. We have more poverty even as the wealthiest are once again drowning in a sea of money, richer than they were before the financial crisis began. Austerity isn’t to blame for all of it, but there can be no doubt that the constant garment rending over deficits has made it impossible to even talk about doing what’s necessary to fix the real problems we’re facing.
This is a standard talking point for the White House, don’t forget. The following quote came from Jason Furman just last February:
The deficit this year is projected to be about 5 percent of GDP. It’s come down by nearly 5 percentage points in the last four years. That’s the most rapid pace of deficit reduction the United States has seen since the end of World War II. The reason we’re seeing this is in part due to the recovery of the economy, but also in part because the President has already signed into law $2.5 trillion of deficit reduction, including $1.4 trillion of spending cuts through the continuing resolutions and Budget Control Act, and another $600 billion of revenue from high-income households in the tax agreement and then the associated intrasavings.
But that wasn’t good enough then. back in the days before Reinhardt-Rogoff exploded the austerity assumptions, this was the second part of the talking points:
So that $2.5 trillion gets you more than halfway to the $4 trillion that you need to stabilize your debt over the long term, and it actually has been sufficient to be bringing your deficit down quite strongly over the short run.
What we do need, though, is a lot more medium- and long-term deficit reduction.
This was the argument against the sequester, of course. “Yes we must have much more deficit reduction, but we need to drag it out over the medium and the long term so we can keep cutting the budget for decades to come!” (Yes, I know that wasn’t the stated logic, but it might as well have been.)
I don’t know at what moment the Democratic party became the proudest lil’ deficit hawks on Washington but I’m going to guess it was somewhere around the time that George W. Bush started giving away lavish tax cuts to the wealthy. It’s nice to see them once again strutting proudly and proclaiming that “the era of big government is over” so that when the Republicans take over ( as a consequence of “austerity fatigue” dontcha know)they can offer up big tax cuts and increase military spending again. But hey, at least the Democrats can all go to bed at night secure in the knowledge that history will record they were the grown-ups in the room.
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