[lbo-talk] Bailout Total: $29.616 Trillion Dollars: Government Accounting Office says $16 trillion

[Dennis Redmond]

On Mon, Dec 12, 2011 at 10:15 PM, Shane Mage <shmage at pipeline.com> wrote:
>
> On Dec 12, 2011, at 10:35 PM, Dennis Redmond wrote:
>>
>> ...the numbers matter, because they're being used
>>
>> to witch-hunt deficit spending and Big Government, which are the only
>> things which will get us out of the crisis.
>
> Spoken like a liberal.  It was deficit spending (by government and banks)
> and Big Government à la Bush that was supposed to have gotten us out of the
> 2000 crisis but in fact got us into a much worse crisis.

Nonsense. Deficit spending was tiny and spent on the wrong things
(war, Wall Street subsidies). The proximate cause of the post-2007
crisis was neoliberalism's vast private credit bubble. We're in what
Richard Koo calls a "balance sheet recession", and won't exit until we
have massive deficit spending, spent on the 99%.

The whole bash-Big-Government meme sold and packaged by neoliberalism
for 35 years is toxic for any vision of a future Left.

-- DRR