Words.
"So let’s see: The solution to large-scale abuses of the financial system, a breakdown of the private sector, extreme economic inequality and the failure of companies and individuals to invest and create jobs is — well, to give even more money and power to very wealthy people, to disable government and to trust those who got us into the mess to get us out of it.
Those who have plenty of capital to invest are holding back because consumers don’t have enough cash. But let’s not give potential middle-class buyers jobs and money to spend. No, let’s heap yet more resources onto investors. And if sharp guys made fortunes writing abusive mortgages, let’s repeal all the rules we just passed to prevent them from doing the same thing again.
Better yet, don’t blame the people who got the windfalls. Blame poor people.
...In any other democracy, we would say that Obama’s jobs bill passed its first test in the Senate because 51 out of 100 senators supported moving it along. But not in America, where we now require 60 votes to get a bill out of the Senate — even though our Constitution, supposedly so revered by conservative “strict constructionists,” says absolutely nothing about a Senate supermajority.
The jobs bill is a pretty simple mix of tax cuts and spending on popular items such as schools and roads. Its core idea accords with what the vast majority of economists (and a lot of businesspeople) think needs to be done: In the absence of private-sector investment and job creation, the federal government should be the investor of last resort to get the economy moving. This should be an urgent priority with unemployment stuck at more than 9 percent.
But no, “don’t do something, stand there” is the order of the day. Every Republican senator present voted to block the jobs bill. Government is to be powerless because the country’s most energetic ideological minority has declared that it must be powerless..."
THE WASHINGTON POST: The GOP ties itself up in knots
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