Idiots

I forget who said that the difference between conservatives and liberals is that conservatives operate on ideology and liberals operate on results, but they may have been wrong in one regard: it would appear that conservatives can't conceive of anything outside their ideology, and liberals can't get their shit together.

This is not good news:

The country’s gross domestic product, a broad measure of the goods and services produced across the economy, grew at an annual rate of 1.3 percent in the second quarter, after having grown at an annual rate of 0.4 percent in the first quarter — a number that itself was revised sharply down from earlier estimates of 1.9 percent . Both figures were well below economists’ expectations.

Data revisions going back to 2003 also showed that the 2007-2009 recession was deeper, and the recovery to date weaker, than originally estimated. Indeed, the latest figures show that the nation’s economy is still smaller than it was in 2007, when the Great Recession officially began.

So basically, while Obama and Boehner have been playing charades over the national debt, the economy is going down the toilet. Make no mistake: I am not going to play false equivalents here. This is the Republicans' fault. It was their recession, it is their dismal recovery, it is their ideology -- and childishness -- that is screwing the rest of us. The most that can be said for Democrats is that they're accomplices, some willing, some not.

“There’s nothing that you can look at here that is signaling some revival in growth in the second half of the year, and in fact we may see another catastrophically weak quarter next quarter if things go wrong next week,” said Nigel Gault, chief United States economist at IHS Global Insight. By “things going wrong,” he said he means “if Congress actually starts implementing a massive contraction by suddenly cutting government spending immediately,” as many Republican representatives hope to do.

Get this right: the discussion in Washington is not about how to fix the economy and get it humming again, it's about how badly to trash it. I'm no genius in economics, but even I can see that if we have really high long-term unemployment and people have no money to spend to keep the economy moving (and let me remind everyone that it's consumer spending the drives this economy -- and that does not include Jamie Dimon buying another Lamborghini), the answer is not to throw more people out of work by cutting government programs. You need to spend money to create jobs, and the private sector is sitting tight.

The idiots in Washington don't get it. They're not even asking the right questions -- and I suspect that's deliberate.

Update:

Just ran across this tweet from Peter Daou, which seems to sum it up pretty succinctly:

@peterdaou

So, two parties are bickering over opposing plans to sink the country into recession and if they can't pick one, they'll torpedo the economy