It's the growing meme throughout the traditional media and newly "fiscally responsible" Republican Party: we must prepare for austerity. In fact, Sen. Tom Coburn is so sure that we must make deep, painful cuts (to the middle and lower classes, naturally) to protect the next generation that he warns of "apocalyptic pain" if we don't.
I told you the other evening that if we didn't take some pain now, we're going to experience apocalyptic pain, and it's going to be out of our control. The idea should be that we control it.[..]
I think you'll see a 15 to 18 percent unemployment rate. I think you will see an 8 to 9 percent decline in GDP. I think you'll see the middle class just destroyed if we don't do this. And the people that it will harm the most will be the poorest of the poor, because we'll print money to try to debase our currency and get out of it and what you will see is hyperinflation. So we don't have a lot of options other than living within our means and sending the signal that creates confidence that we can repay our debt and that we're not going to debase our currency to do it.
Holy Flying Spaghetti Monster on a popsicle stick, what does Coburn think it's like now for the 99ers (who have been forgotten by Congress) and the exponentially growing number of people are on government assistance, more now than ever before? A frickin' picnic? There's a whole lot of pain out there, Senator, exacerbated by you and your party's INSISTENCE that the wealthiest 2% keep paying Bush era tax rates. Talk to me about austerity and pain when EVERYONE in this country feels it as bad as the neediest. C&L commenter Wilbur1 put it astutely in Karoli's earlier post on Tom Friedman's similar calls for austerity:
What he is calling for is generational theft. His parents weren't GIVEN a god damn thing. They fought for what they got and they paid much higher taxes, had far more constricted trade and finance, had more social programs handled by the government and a wider safety net than we do. They were handed a good country and made it better. When it came time to pay for that society they did. Now, Friedman and his generation comes along and when it is time for them to pay, to pass on to the next generation a good educational system, health care system, etc, they refuse. They've destroyed everything with their nihilistic materialism. They refuse to pay higher taxes, allow for inequitable trade, financial and tax deals, allow for economic exploitation and greed to dominate the economy and here we are. They have made every single part of our society worse and are now saying to us that we better not dare hold them accountable. We better not let billionaires who couldn't posisbly "earn" that much money (it isn't possible to earn that much money, you must obtain that money by monopolizing someone else's work in some way or creating debt that adds nothing to the world) pay for money they didn't earn. It's not even let them eat cake. It's denying that cake exists, that he and his parents had plenty of it when he was younger but now he's grown, fat. and its all gone. He's telling them to eat paper.http://crooksandliars.com/nicole-belle/tom-coburn-preaches-austerity-thee-no
