The Republican Economic Plan: I'm Sorry, There's A Problem?

OK, we're back to normal now. Thank you, resetting of PRAM!

Now that I'm cheered by this return to form, let me dive right into the collapse of the US economy. Consumer confidence is in the toilet and prices are continuing to rise. New home sales are dropping like a rock, reducing the equity in people's houses. This leads them to put all their spending on credit cards, where debt is up 315% and nobody's paying their bills on time. Real wages, after finally rising year-over-year for the first time in the Bush Administration, are now falling again. The federal debt is now the same percentage of GDP that it was in 1992. In short, it's like the Clinton years, the dot-com boom, the housing boom, fiscal responsibility, it's like of that never happened.

What's worse is that Republicans remain committed to doing nothing about this, even as the serious structural economic problems already hidding the lower and middle classes threaten the bankers and high-wage earners you'd think they'd care about.

Congressional leaders yesterday gathered support for aggressive changes to bankruptcy laws that would help troubled homeowners, even as the Bush administration threatened to veto the plan and emphasized its opposition to any program that would risk tax dollars.

Democrats are calling for the government to do more than what the administration has done to date. They propose a range of initiatives that include the purchase of troubled mortgage securities by a federal agency and the empowering of bankruptcy judges to change the terms of high-interest loans held by homeowners facing foreclosure.

But the administration said that changing mortgage terms retroactively for a select group of troubled borrowers would only add to lenders' woes and lead to higher mortgage rates for everyone.

The bottom line is that they want to save their precious tax cuts, continue to hollow out the revenue base and destroy the social safety net. They literally have no plan for the economy other than riding the same policies that drove us into this ditch.