Saturday, February 7, 2009

The writing on the wall

Obama had one chance to get the stimulus package right, and he fucked it up. Contrary to what his more deluded supporters are saying, he doesn't have some kind of brilliant, masterful plan: he's an innately mediocre, cautious man whose first instinct in every situation is to do the inoffensive thing. The inoffensive thing, in this situation, is going to cause a lot of misery for a lot of people for a long, long time.

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*Update

Krugman weighs in:

My first cut says that the changes to the Senate bill will ensure that we have at least 600,000 fewer Americans employed over the next two years.

The real question now is whether Obama will be able to come back for more once it’s clear that the plan is way inadequate. My guess is no. This is really, really bad.