Debt Ceiling...sigh...

This debt ceiling stuff is really getting to me.  I can’t stop listening to it.  I think the best word to describe politics now and politicians is my usual word: INSANE.  I’m actually kinda scared.  I was talking to my brother about it, as we have these really long political discussions about this stuff.  I was telling him that I think there are a lot of people who don’t really understand what’s at stake here.  It’s literally like the world is going to end and if the debt ceiling doesn’t go up so much shit will happen to the interest rates, America’s bond rating, and frankly the confidence of the world in us!  This country, financially, militarily, and economically holds up the world in so many ways.  If Saudi Arabia suddenly decides that the dollar is not stable enough and switches to another currency, that’s it for my dreams of being able to afford a mini van.  I could certainly buy it, but I wouldn’t be able to put any gas in it so it would run.




The thing that gets me is that the people around me really need jobs.  They’re just laid off, hours cut down, or underemployed.  NO ONE is talking about how to get people a J.O.B.  When you got kids, what are you supposed to do?  As a musician, I can hustle and scratch(something I’m very good at) and find a way to  make ends meet.  But not everyone has a marketable skill to be able to pick up the slack.  Paul Krugman, really laid it out in another Times article about a lesser depression.  He said in a really eloquent and nice way that the governments of both Europe and America have their collective heads up their asses concerning austerity measures and debt, and are not tackling what people are constantly asking for: deal with jobs man, so I can feed and clothe myself and my kids. Government is the spender of last resort, and it also needs to make policy to encourage job creation and re-training.  There is no policy on the table it seems to deal with this and if there were, you have to pay for it. No one is talking about that, including our lovely president, because we’re dealing with the FUCKING  DEBT CEILING which has been raised quietly year after year for the last 20 some odd years.  Sure the deficit needs to be dealt with, but right now?!  In the middle of a recession?  Shouldn’t we be paying attention to history?  WWII got us out of the 1^st great depression.  Why?  Because there was a lot of Governent spending that created JOBS so people could by stuff, which created more jobs, to make that stuff that people wanted to by, and so on, and so on.  This ain’t rocket science y’all.

The funny thing is some republicans seem to think that there is only one way to skin a cat, and that is tax relief.  I was listening to the no new taxes pledge guy on npr, Grover Norquist, and he sounded reasonable in his argument saying that you can’t cut the size of government immediately, but should strive to slowly year by year bring the size of it down.  But when you think about it, no one expects hurricane Katrina, the floods along the mississipi, or gas spilling all over the gulf.  And in a recession, people actually need MORE help with food stamps, unemployement, health care costs etc.  People would be pissed if the government just decided, we don’t have enough money to pay for that disaster relief in Nebraska because the river flooded to highs not seen in the last 100 YEARS!  The debt ceiling is money we already spent you fools.  Citibank and Bank of America(metaphorically) want they money and if they don’t get it, your rates are going to go from 5.9% to 22.9%, tomorrow!  Which will of course, plunge us into another deep depression where companies will probably shed jobs like a fat man sweats on a hot day…