Bernanke Not the Only One Telling Romney to Bug Off?

DoD Not Making Plans for Sequester Cuts

"For months, even as congressional negotiations have faltered, defense officials have insisted that they aren’t planning for harsh automatic budget cuts slated to go into effect in January because lawmakers will find an alternative solution."

Read into this as much as you want. One way or another, could sanity still prevail?

Or, could things get much worse?

Pentagon press secretary George Little called the automatic cuts “irresponsible” and repeated that “it is time for Congress to enact a balanced reduction in the deficit and a law halting the entire sequestration.”

“It’s pretty difficult for members to make informed decisions about the issue if they don’t fully understand the consequences ... ,” another committee staffer said. “It’s hard to create enough urgency to solve the problem.”

For Pete's sake! If they only knew how true that was.  More than they're letting on publicly.

"... failing to present realistic alternatives to lower the national deficit and prevent a national security disaster."

That's a very twisted way to present voluntary austerity, depression, and economic suicide. It actually is a national security disaster, but not in the way they're representing it.  We better hope that sanity actually could prevail.

The Defense Department isn’t the only federal agency left in the budgetary limbo. In July, the Office of Management and Budget issued guidance to federal agencies instructing them to continue normal spending and operations “to avoid unnecessarily diverting scarce resources.”

Could it be that the whole fiat deficit issue could go away after the election ... by fiat?

Dave Weigel reports on what's up with the Tea Party

It’s easy to think that the Tea Party is on the wane. Its obituary has been written countless times in the past twelve months. And, in a couple of big, visible ways, it’s true....

 But this is the wrong way to look at the Tea Party. After 2010, the movement evolved. Activists got jobs with newly elected Republicans. Political organizations like Americans for Prosperity and FreedomWorks grew their staffs and budgets....

This new, professionalized Tea Party may not have the numbers to pack the National Mall with tricorne hats, but it has proved itself spectacularly adept at two other tasks: exacting promises and submission from presidential candidates; and setting the Republican policy agenda. And in a representative government, at a time when a languishing economy and anemic voter turnout may turn the odds against Democrats, truly—what else matters?

If, as is quite possible, the Republicans gain control of both the White House and Congress, the Tea Party will have gained a hugely disproportionate amount of control over the government through the use of these two mechanisms. One of them is playing out right now in the garish arena of the primary campaign. The other has been in rehearsals for the past year in the halls of Congress. Here’s a brief description of both.

Read it at The Washington Monthly
The Tea Party — Picking the candidates and writing the agenda.
By David Weigel

One agenda item is privatizing the commons.

We see a map of the United States with public lands marked in red.

“Dead capital is property that has no possibility of securing property rights on it,” says Edwards. “Folks, I submit to you that everything in red has no possibility of securing property rights on it.”

Of course, there is much more to the agenda of cutting government.

Oh, there are limits. In polls, the Tea Party’s membership reveals itself as naive about what costs what. There’s boundless enthusiasm for foreign aid cuts, but the same people who cheer for those budgets to be slashed will then boo in agreement whenever Romney denounces the Medicare cost reductions in “Obamacare.”

That’s where the full-time Tea Party agitators come in. That’s how the industry-funded groups find their opening to tell the base what it cares about. The Tea Party’s grassroots apparatus peaked in 2010. The think tanks funded by the energy industry or the banking sector are thriving, and they know what they want the base to work toward. Deregulation, scaled-back appropriations, sold-off public goods—if the Tea Party wins, it’ll be expected to provide the public pressure for all of it.

A GOP win in November is certain to have broad economic repercussions.

UPDATE: see also

The Huffington Post
The Fantastical Crackpot Cult of Ron Paul

by Bob Cesca

Since a GOP wins is not possible without the support of Ron Paul and his supporters, the Libertarian-Tea Party wing of the GOP will inevitably have a significant seat at the bargaining table when it comes to setting policy.

When it comes to economic policy the Democrats are their own worst enemy

I wish someone of influence within the Democratic Party would learn some MMT. Unless that happens, their economic ideas are doomed.

Here's an example of the proposed "stimulus" being put forth by Democratic members of the Supercommittee:

Supercommittee Dems push for stimulus to be part of deficit deal By Erik Wasson - 10/26/11 11:49 AM ET Democrats on the congressional supercommittee this week presented Republicans with a plan to cut the deficit that included billions of dollars in stimulus spending, aides told The Hill. In a private session of the deficit panel on Tuesday, Sen. Max Baucus (D-Mont.), chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, proposed trillions of dollars in tax increases that would partially cover stimulus spending for the economy, aides said.

The tax hike thing is just not going to pass. They should stop, already.

Or, they should call it what it really is: income redistribution. They should just come right out and say, "We want to redistribute income. That is our plan."

But for heavens sake, stop calling it a stimulus.

The don't do this because they are ignorant about how our monetary system functions. So are the Republicans, by the way, but at least the Republicans don't lie about their intentions. They pretty much come right out and say they want to give everything to the rich because the rich are "the job creators." We know that's a bunch of BS, but it's a sound bite that they've managed to make work.

This thing will never work. You have one party that is openly and unabashedly creating a policy conduit by which all of the nation's wealth is funneled up to an elite class of plutocrats, and then you have the bumbling Democrats who talk of "fairness" and greater equality, but then act like we've but a few crumbs left and we must struggle and strive and sacrifice in order to find a better way to divy those crumbs up among the citizenry.

It's truly pathetic. Both parties are to blame, but mostly I blame the Democrats. The party's leadership and its "intellectuals" are a bunch of snobby elitists who went to places like Harvard, Yale and Princeton who'll fight you tooth and nail so that that their misguided dogma rules the way they think and act.

It's hopeless.

Real Cost of Budget Cuts

Police and firemen in Alameda, California watched a man drown on Monday after realizing they did not have proper certifications for water rescue, leaving them open to possible lawsuits if they attempted to save him....

A crowd of about 75 gathered to watch the bizarre scene, which saw police and firemen just standing at shoreline watching helplessly. After the man had drowned, authorities couldn’t even go into the surf to retrieve the body. They instead recruited a passer-by for the job.

City officials reportedly blamed the incident on budget cuts and said they would have a discussion about why Alameda, an island city, does not have proper authorization to rescue people from the waters surrounding it.

Budget cuts force Calif. police and firemen to watch man drown

"I'm Sorry"

"For over 45 years I have enjoyed making a living teaching. It hasn’t been easy or lucrative, but it had its rewards, one of which was a secure retirement plan.

"Now, after reading the recent California Little Hoover Commission Report that recommends that public school retirements be reduced, even for those who are already retired, and the actions of the Ohio, Idaho, and Wisconsin republicans in accusing teachers and their pensions and bargaining rights as mainly responsible for that state’s financial situation, I am sorry I became a teacher. I honestly didn’t mean to place so many states in danger of going bankrupt...."

It gets evcn better. Read the full article at AlterNet: A Teacher of 45 Years Speaks Out: How Educators Are Being Blamed for Our Financial Mess

Ryan's "Path to Prosperity." Here's the chilling math.

Let's walk through the numbers of GOP hatchetman Paul Ryan's plan to see what happens if we follow what he proposes and subtract $580 billion from U.S. eocnomic output over a 10-year period.

We start off with a currrent GDP of $14,700 bln.

Year 1 14120
Year 2 13540
Year 3 12960
Year 4 12380
Year 5 11800
Year 6 11220
Year 7 10640
Year 8 10060
Year 9 9480
Year 10 8900

You can see that by year 10, economic output has shrunk 40%.

Given that the unemployment rate shot up about 5 percentage points when the economy contracted a mere 5% in 2009, we can guestimate that unemployment would increase by 40%. That means we'd have a 50% unemployment rate. Half the workforce would be unemployed.

This is Ryan's "Path to Prosperity."

It's catastrophic. This is a Great Depression.