David Gregory gets it

[DarrinS]

[boutons_deux]

Notice that nobody is talking about jobs. 15M+ people don't have jobs (the good ones have been exported by the greedy corps under the globalization), millions more have taken lower-paying, part-time jobs, so they can't consume the usual $Ts in crap.

Gregory lays the housing problem exclusively on Barry, when it's the bankrupt banks, bailed out by taxpayers going into debt, that are resisting all attempts to ease the housing crisis.

And the House Repugs are defunding financial regulation to protect the financial sector (eg, Warren was so trashed/insulted by House Repugs that she's not even going to be nominated).

[boutons_deux]

We’re Spent

By DAVID LEONHARDT

HERE is no shortage of explanations for the economy’s maddening inability to leave behind the Great Recession and start adding large numbers of jobs: The deficit is too big. The stimulus was flawed. China is overtaking us. Businesses are overregulated. Wall Street is underregulated.

But the real culprit — or at least the main one — has been hiding in plain sight. We are living through a tremendous bust. It isn’t simply a housing bust. It’s a fizzling of the great consumer bubble that was decades in the making.

The auto industry is on pace to sell 28 percent fewer new vehicles this year than it did 10 years ago — and 10 years ago was 2001, when the country was in recession. Sales of ovens and stoves are on pace to be at their lowest level since 1992. Home sales over the past year have fallen back to their lowest point since the crisis began. And big-ticket items are hardly the only problem.

The Federal Reserve Bank of New York recently published a jarring report on what it calls discretionary service spending, a category that excludes housing, food and health care and includes restaurant meals, entertainment, education and even insurance. Going back decades, such spending had never fallen more than 3 percent per capita in a recession. In this slump, it is down almost 7 percent, and still has not really begun to recover.

The past week brought more bad news. Retail sales in June were weaker than expected, and consumer confidence fell, causing economists to downgrade their estimates for economic growth yet again. It’s a familiar routine by now. Forecasters in Washington and on Wall Street keep saying the recovery’s problems are temporary — and then they redefine temporary.

If you’re looking for one overarching explanation for the still-terrible job market, it is this great consumer bust. Business executives are only rational to hold back on hiring if they do not know when their customers will fully return. Consumers, for their part, are coping with a sharp loss of wealth and an uncertain future (and many have discovered that they don’t need to buy a new car or stove every few years). Both consumers and executives are easily frightened by the latest economic problem, be it rising gas prices or the debt-ceiling impasse.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/17/su...gewanted=print

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Cutting $Ts at the federal level will cause Ms more unemployed, and those $Ts will certainly affect federal transfers to the states which will also cut Ms of jobs.

Anybody hammering on the deficit/debt is really shilling for the VRWC's strategy of cutting the deficit as a weakening of govt as the only countervailing power to the VRWC's already much superior power.

[DMX7]

I don't know. The republicans' economic plan of national default seems pretty infallible.