So the President has taken to the pages of the Washington Post to freak people out over the terrifying, irreversible devastation that will befall us if the world-sized deficit spending bill doesn’t clear the Congress. If you’re into the macroeconomics-as-mind-control game, this is a bit of a paradox, isn’t it?
In order to “restore confidence” we are alleged to require interventions contained in the deficit spending bill. But the bill won’t clear Congress unless the President succeeds in terrifying the public into clamoring once more for his spending extravaganza kludge. So, the idea seems to be that in order to save the economy, you’ve got to get people to flip out first, so that you can do what it takes to calm them down later. This may seem a bit like dumping gas on a person on fire so that they can more easily burn through the wall standing between them and the lake. But I’m sure this feat of psychological needle-threading can be achieved with laser-like accuracy by deploying the virtuoso mood-management skills of Obama’s first-rate team of applied mathematicians.
Kevin Grier’s comment on the following section of Obama’s lamentation is pretty special:
This recession might linger for years. Our economy will lose 5 million more jobs. Unemployment will approach double digits. Our nation will sink deeper into a crisis that, at some point, we may not be able to reverse. …
People, an irreversible recession means that GDP will shrink to zero and the USA will cease to exist. Can it really be that Porkulus is the only thing standing between us and extinction?
It’s Porkulus or starvation, nation. Choose sides carefully.
Will Wilkinson 