This is probably the worst front page NYT article I have ever seen. It romanticizes Evan Bayh for being a victim of a gridlocked Washington, when the truth is that he is a self serving hypocrite who was a major cause of the problem, and will probably go on to accept a multi-million dollar lobbying job as a reward for his corporate puppetry while serving as a senator. His father is a civil rights hero who will be remembered as part of the feminist movement for years, while he will not be remembered by anyone for anything, having done absolutely nothing to advance the interests of the oppressed or the american public in general.
At the same time it warns that the US has a 'debt crisis' and that the president will have to break his promise not to raise taxes on those who earn less than $250,000, with the last statement being even more untrue than the first. It is incredibly irresponsible to panic the public into thinking that there is a 'debt crisis' and that this is the time to solve it. Seriously? Now? In the middle of one of the worst recessions in history? Encouraging fiscal contraction during a recession is extremely irresponsible by all parties involved. If we do so, we are doomed to repeat the mistakes of Roosevelt in 1937 and Japan during the lost decade, both of which showed that curbing government spending prematurely, before a full recovery, can lead to an abrupt stoppage of growth. When Roosevelt curbed government spending in 1937, unemployment increased, and the economy dipped into another recession. The same happened in Japan throughout the 1990s. (if anyone is terribly interested in this, read Krugman's "Depression Economics", although I assume nobody will be).
And why on earth would the president have to raise taxes on those making less than $250,000, or cut social security? Neither proposal is necessary to return to a balanced budget. Instead, increasing taxes on high income earners back to their pre-Reagan levels (or even remotely near that), cutting defense spending, and PASSING REAL HEALTH CARE REFORM, which inflicts losses on various interest groups (doctors, hospitals, big pharma, insurance companies, etc.) to curb the exploding cost of Medicare, is really all that needs to be done.
Finally, this article makes it apparent yet again that the elite who control the dialog in DC and the ill-informed elite journalists who cover DC are completely oblivious to the truly devastating impact of this recession, because they and the people they know are really not affected by it (as seen in the chart below). In their experience, there never was a recession, just the threat of collapse of the financial system (which has already been solved), so it's time to move on to more important matters like maintaining the value of the dollar, so that billionaires like Peter Peterson (who is cited in the article) can still afford their Ferrari's and their vacation homes which are littered throughout the world. Truly sickening.
