Calls for Stimulus Yield to Deficit Concerns - NYTimes.com

If you're looking for a righteous cause where you can be a gadfly, instigator and inveterate underdog, arguing for jobs in the face of deficit hawkery should prove to be a great choice.

It will be right up there, apparently, with the idea that America should have a responsible energy policy that reliably reduces carbon emissions.

And maybe the equally ridiculous ideas that we can prevent a double-dip recession and avoid catastrophic cuts in state and local government budgets, and oh yes, solve the foreclosure crisis.

As Mark Twain once said, "What gets us into trouble is not what we don't know, it's what we know for sure that just ain't so..."

Calls for Stimulus Yield to Deficit Concerns - NYTimes.com

By DAVID E. SANGER and SEWELL CHAN

Published: June 8, 2010

WASHINGTON — At a moment when many economists warn that the American economic recovery is likely to be imperiled by prolonged high unemployment and slow growth, President Obama is discovering that the tools available to him last year — a big economic stimulus and action by the Federal Reserve — are both now politically untenable.

The mood in both parties of Congress has turned decidedly anti-deficit, meaning that the job-creation programs once favored by the White House and Democratic leaders in Congress have been cut back, then cut again. It is a measure of the mood that Mr. Obama on Tuesday hailed an initiative by his administration to cut the budgets of most major government agencies by 5 percent, at a time when conventional theory would call for more government spending to lift the economy.

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Posted by Chuck Bell at 6:36 AM