Would It Take Soup Lines?

There are some people out there who just dont seem to understand exactly whats going on. These people are readily identifiable, they call themselves cable news reporters, centrists, and often republicans. These people exist in a reality all their own where nothing catastrophic could ever hurt america for any length of time. Time heals all wounds and eventually things will go on as they always have. or something. for these people i simply have to ask what would it take for them to understand that things are really really bad for a large and growing swath of the american people? Do we need soup lines on the streets of every neighborhood? do we need shanty towns occupying the parks across this country?

First, the context.

When that amount of slack in employment is taken into account, Mr. Rosenberg found that the ‘real’ unemployment rate has actually climbed to 13.9%, an all-time high for the period he studied, and up from 13.5% in December and 11.2% a year ago.

I think the people i loathe the most in this debate are actually the centrist democrats. They dont even benefit if the package fails like the republicans do. these people simply lack a basic grounding in the plight of the people the legislation effects. case and point is Sen. Ben Nelson (D-Neb.), the leader of the centrists,



I watched the interview live and it was readily apparent that Sen. Nelson simply lacked the intellectual capacity to understand the magnitude of the problem. When Rachel Maddow presses him on the fact that he made the package less stimulative he claims he didnt. this is a complete and total lie unless we believe that the money he cut was not actually going to be used. By definition if the government does anything with the money it has a stimulative effect. there may be a diminishing returns problem but no one has asserted that yet.

He simply said it was a lot of money. Yes we know that but we have a big problem. If he wants to take the thune approach and stack it all up he should also consider retirement. His claim that no one would be losing a job because of this is clearly false as those state employees who are laid off because of budget cuts will soon attest. massive budget shortfalls will be met with spending cuts and spending cuts end up meaning salary cuts.

So Sen. Nelsons conception of the problem seems to be that it is not really as serious as 900 billion or a trillion dollars. This is despite the fact that the projected productivity shortfall is upwards of two trillion dollars. The question for senator nelson is at what point he would be ok with a stimulus package that is more than the one he created? under what conditions would he have allowed that extra education funding to go through? my guess is that he needs to see soup lines outside his house and people camping on his lawn before he gets the magnitude of the economic problems were facing.

yea its a little ranty but really what the hell was he talking about with the curriculum stuff and special education? the money is already there, they were trying to give them money talking about unfunded mandates is a total nonsequiter.