For starters, this should not be a surprise to anyone. Of course it's bad. That's part of why many of us have been bothered by the gentle handling of Wall Street. Buying into the Wall Street view of the world is not what liberals expected.
For the GOP to pounce on this now and talk about deficits is ridiculous because a large chunk of this money was already out there when Obama took over and again, this recession is primarily a GOP recession. I say "mostly" because the Clinton economic team - the friends-of-Robert-Rubin folks - worked closely with the GOP on this. They too deserve their share of the blame. Republicans crying about deficits is also funny considering what they have done in recent years.
The spending in recent months had to be done and as we're seeing, it is likely that the spending was not enough. The recession could very easily take another drop because the stimulus cash has run its course and private industry has yet to take off. If anything, the White House deserves blame for not forcing through a larger stimulus, but ahh, look at what they received in the name of bipartisanship. Maybe it's time for Obama to start listening to the liberal economists out there and show a bit of passion and push back against the GOP on this issue.
The US economy will shrink far more than expected this year and will rebound much more slowly than forecast after that, according to a bleak new assessment by the White House Budget Office.
The federal government also faces exploding deficits and mounting debt over the next decade, far worse than what the Obama administration had estimated just a few months ago.
The revised estimates project that the economy will contract by 2.8 percent this year, more than twice what the White House predicted earlier this year.
