World-News

Foundation for Economic Education
by Sheldon Richman

07/16/10

Last week’s TGIF asked if the American people can afford a world-girdling foreign policy more befitting an empire than a republic. Look at it this way: War hawks make poor deficit hawks. Facing a $13 trillion national debt and trillion-dollar-plus annual budget deficits, we can’t afford to be complacent about foreign interventions costing $12 billion a month. It’s not just that the budget numbers are daunting: The very institutions of small-government republicanism are suffocated by the quest for global hegemony...

http://tinyurl.com/2vnz9on



Deficits of mass destruction

The Nation
by Christopher Hayes

07/15/10

If you’ve been paying attention this past decade, it won’t surprise you to learn that the country’s policy elites are in the midst of a destructive, well-nigh unhinged discussion about the future of the nation. But even by the degraded standards of the Washington establishment, the growing panic over government debt is shocking. First, the facts. Nearly the entire deficit for this year and those projected into the near and medium terms are the result of three things: the ongoing wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the Bush tax cuts and the recession. The solution to our fiscal situation is: end the wars, allow the tax cuts to expire and restore robust growth. Our long-term structural deficits will require us to control healthcare inflation the way countries with single-payer systems do...

http://www.thenation.com/article/37534/deficits-mass-destruction


Informant: Thomas L. Knapp

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Deficit Doves
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2010/07/21-7

Democrats May Stop Bush-Era Tax Cuts for Wealthy From Expiring
http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2010/07/22-1

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We're in a One-and-a-Half Dip Recession

Robert Reich, Robert Reich's Blog: "We're not in a double-dip recession yet. We're in a one and a half dip recession. Consumer confidence is down. Retail sales are down. Home sales are down. Permits for single-family starts are down. The average work week is down. The only things not down are inventories - unsold stuff is piling up in warehouses and inventories of unsold homes are rising - and defaults on loans."

http://www.truth-out.org/robert-reich-we%E2%80%99re-in-a-one-and-a-half-dip-recession61614



Professors as Welfare Queens?

Jesse Lemisch, Truthout: "From Obama on down, the political atmosphere is deeply polluted by the use of 'centrism' as a self-description of what are essentially retrograde right-wing views. Under Obama, the US wars in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iraq continue, as do the lies put out about them. Guantanamo goes on. Obama's 'Deficit Commission' warms us up for cuts in Medicare and Social Security. 'The perfect is the enemy of the good,' and, thus, we have health care 'reform' by and for the insurers, with higher premiums and profits, and more evasions of coverage by merchants of death like UnitedHealthCare."

http://www.truth-out.org/professors-welfare-queens61981



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