The Economic Illiterates Step Up the Attack on Social Security and Medicare
Monday 8 August 2011
by: Dean Baker,
Truthout | Op-Ed
Standard & Poor's (S&P) downgrade of US debt should be seen as the joke it is. The rating agency, which gave investment grade ratings to hundreds of billions of dollars of subprime mortgage-backed securities, made an accounting error of $2 trillion in doing its assessment of the US financial situation.
However, when this error was called to S&P's attention, it still went ahead with the downgrade. Just like the war in Iraq, the policy was decided in advance of the evidence.
The nonsense with the S&P downgrade is yet another distraction - after four months of haggling over the debt ceiling idiocy - from the real problem facing the country: a downturn that has left 25 million people unemployed, underemployed or out of the labor force altogether. Tens of millions of people are seeing their career hopes and family lives wrecked by the prospect of long-term unemployment.
The incredible part of this story is that the people who are responsible are all doing just fine, and most of them are still making policy. Furthermore, they are using their own incompetence as a weapon to argue that we have to take even more money from the poor and middle class, this time in the form of Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid benefits.
(More here.)
by: Dean Baker,
Truthout | Op-Ed
Standard & Poor's (S&P) downgrade of US debt should be seen as the joke it is. The rating agency, which gave investment grade ratings to hundreds of billions of dollars of subprime mortgage-backed securities, made an accounting error of $2 trillion in doing its assessment of the US financial situation.
However, when this error was called to S&P's attention, it still went ahead with the downgrade. Just like the war in Iraq, the policy was decided in advance of the evidence.
The nonsense with the S&P downgrade is yet another distraction - after four months of haggling over the debt ceiling idiocy - from the real problem facing the country: a downturn that has left 25 million people unemployed, underemployed or out of the labor force altogether. Tens of millions of people are seeing their career hopes and family lives wrecked by the prospect of long-term unemployment.
The incredible part of this story is that the people who are responsible are all doing just fine, and most of them are still making policy. Furthermore, they are using their own incompetence as a weapon to argue that we have to take even more money from the poor and middle class, this time in the form of Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid benefits.
(More here.)
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