Storm Warning

Over the past couple of days, the ratings agency Stardard & Poor's has warned that they will down-grade the US bond rating from AAA...if this does in fact occur (and I see no reason for it not to, with the moribund stupidity of our ruling class thinking that they can spend without consequences) then it will cost vastly more for America to borrow money to pay for government services...The Wall Street Journal's editorial says,

Chief White House economist Austan Goolsbee declared that S&P had made a “political judgment,” and we’d have to agree, though probably not for the same reasons. The bulk of S&P’s analysis is taken up with repeatedly citing what it sees as next-to-no chance that Washington will do anything significant on deficit reduction this year or next.


“The outlook reflects our view of the increased risk that the political negotiations over when and how to address both the medium- and long-term challenges will persist until at least after the national elections in 2012,” said the credit rating outfit. S&P’s announcement is almost wholly a political analysis of the budget outlook.

There is only one reason the rating agency could suddenly have turned this dark on politics in Washington: President Obama’s speech at George Washington University last Wednesday. Mr. Obama’s “fiscal policy” speech may have sent progressive pundits cart-wheeling, but its political effect was to poison the prospect for budget negotiations.

Think about that.  It willl cost much more to fund our government.  Yet, politicians in DC are arguing over cutting less than .35% out of this year's budget.  The Democrats are calling it extreme cuts, while those of o the GOP leadership are calling them "historic."  Both sides are leading us to disaster...the deck chairs have been rearranged enough, it's time to completely balance the budget and stop spending money we don't have.

Don Surber put's it bluntly;

President Obama is a fool. He has been given everything in life and never had to earn it and so he is ignorant about how the financial world operates — and is blissfully incurious about the subject.  He sees business life in cartoonish stereotypes that date to the 1890s. Oh those grand industrialists with their [broken sentence??] He T-totally misjudged the economy in 2009. At a time when smart people would have reined the government in and quit printing money, he went full Keynesian.  Rather than put people back to work, he gave them a federally paid two-year vacation through an extension of unemployment benefits to 99 weeks. Unemployment is earned for 26 weeks. That’s what unemployment insuranc buys. After that it is welfare. Now we have this chump ignoring the reality of the inflation and stagflation he has unleashed upon the Republic. His partisan budget speech was an embarrassment to his supporters and an insult to the American People who in last November’s referendum on Obamanomics overwhelmingly said NO!  Republican gains in Congress were historic, a rebuke of this president’s policies. In January, he piously called for civility. In April, he acted as if he were a ward healer in Chicago. Maybe that is his true aptitude.

That is the state of our leadership.  They are leaderless and floundering with a clue as to what to do.