Standard & Poor’s lowered its outlook for the United States from “stable” to “negative,” and said there is a one in three chance it will downgrade the U.S.’s triple-A credit rating in the next couple of years. We’ve enjoyed that credit rating since 1917. Barack Obama can cook up entitlement schemes as much as he likes, but if America loses its ability to borrow money on favorable terms there will be no safety net big enough to catch us all.
The S&P Outlook and Obama
God help us all...
UPDATE - POWERLINEThe Democrats absurdly tried to spin the S&P warning as evidence that it is urgently necessary to increase the debt ceiling. This is much like saying that a bystander waving his arms and telling you your car is heading for a cliff is a good reason to step on the gas.
Excerpts:
The track record is discouraging...Not only was the stimulative effect of Great Depression fiscal policy non-existent, but follow-on efforts during the ten subsequent recessions proved equally ineffective. As a result of that hard-won experience, the consensus until recently among economists was that attempts at stimulus through emergency fiscal policies—as opposed to monetary policies and the automatic effects of increases in unemployment assistance and decreases in tax payments—were useless at best...stimulus may be precisely the wrong metaphor. Rather than getting jazzed up, we need to be calmed down and to take the time to learn from the Great Depression, a time when government did too much, not too little.
Stimulus: A History Of Folly
Every now and then, someone writes something that says exactly what I wanted to say had I said it. An article by Yuval Levin in Commentary Magazine, titled "The Meaning of Sarah Palin" so well expresses my disgust at the treatment of Sarah Palin, that I'll simply give you some of the better passages from the article:
Are Anti-Palin Intellectuals Anti-Intelligence?
Alias Barack Obama: a lie is born: The greatest identity fraud in history Paperback – July 10, 2012
