NYT:
The prospect of further reductions worries forecasters. Jerry Webman, chief economist of OppenheimerFunds, wrote in an analysis that while the cuts were not huge this year or next, “they are nonetheless contrary to what would be expected in a fragile economic environment.”
In separate interviews, Joel Prakken, chairman of Macroeconomic Advisers, a forecasting firm, and Laurence H. Meyer, its co-founder and a former Federal Reserve governor, called the reductions “job-killing spending cuts” — playing on Republicans’ mantra against “job-killing tax increases.”
“At the very least,” said Mark Zandi, chief economist of Moody’s Analytics, Congress should renew for another year two measures that expire after 2011 — payroll tax relief for employees and extended unemployment compensation — as Mr. Obama has proposed. If either expired, Mr. Zandi said, that could shave roughly a half-percentage point from economic growth next year.Democrats have been at a loss, message-wise, for at 12 years now. Nor do they know how to fight, nor wish to, which goes along with not being able to articulate a message. The Netroots knows how to fight, and we do pretty well getting our message disseminated and picked up, but the Democratic party has always kept the Netroots at arm's length. And, at the same time, the President's own inability/unwillingness to message effectively, or fight, only compounds the problem that Democrats already had pre-Obama.
Republicans are resistant. And Democrats are too cowed to counter much, given polls that show many Americans believe Mr. Obama’s 2009-10 stimulus package did not work, despite studies to the contrary.
A Democratic Congressional adviser, granted anonymity to discuss party deliberations, said: “We’re at a loss to figure out a way to articulate the argument in a way that doesn’t get us pegged as tax-and-spenders.”
I'm not sure what the solution is, other than a serious purge of the party and a serious intervention at the White House.
