Sunday, August 7, 2011

S &P Downgrade

Maureen Dowd
EJ Dionne Jr


“Yes, we can!” has devolved into “Hey, we might.” - Maureen Dowd
"This recession has been pulling away the football from forecasters like Lucy and Charlie Brown." - Kenneth Rogoff
"The first week of August 2011 will be remembered as a singularly irrational, wasteful and shameful moment in the political and economic history of the United States. It reflected much of what is wrong with the priorities of our political elites and the obsessions of those who now hold effective veto power over our government." - EJ Dionne Jr

So, everyone is pointing the finger at each other, saying how irresponsible the other party is, while S & P downgraded the US government from a AAA rating to a AA rating, the first time it has ever happened to our government. S & P says that the recent negotiation over the deficit was a piss-poor plan, and so the government deserved the downgrade... One wonders if there might be some kind of snippy attitude, rubbing the government's face in its basic ineffectiveness. During the lead-up to the financial crisis, the ratings companies like Moody's, Fitch, and S & P threw their ideals down the drain and were selling AAA ratings to bundles of mortgages so that other companies like Goldman and Sachs could resell them. And now they are reacting to a high drama of smoke and mirrors by extremist conservatives who feel that everything can be solved if only there were enough tax cuts... I know I was looking forward to a long, hot summer that would make people bitchy and mean, but this is more than I bargained for... If nothing else, the downgrade has certainly caught the attention of the pundits-that-be, and maybe we will start coming up with some pragmatic ideas on how to get out of this mess. after all, the rest of the world is hoping that we do so that they can follow in our footsteps, since the only ideas they have come up with is austerity programs, which isn't working out very well...

One of the statistics from the employment and unemployment statistics about last month, stated that the unemployment rate had gone down slightly, but that was because 193,000 people have stopped searching for jobs, leaving only about 25 million unemployed. But, what is going to happen to those 193,000? Does a similar amount of people give up each month, or is that when their unemployment insurance runs out? Will we see a super crime wave soon, or a rash of suicides? What happened to the dignity of a human life and the American Dream?









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