It's the Ecomony, Stupid!

UPDATE: Who said: "President Bush increased government spending more than any of the six presidents preceding him, including LBJ." Read the Washington Post, GOP shows historic amnesia on spending cuts.

And it ain't lookin good. For an update, read the New York Times article:

A Sin and a Shame, which posits that "[s]o long as American corporations keep squeezing their work forces, there can be no real economic recovery,"

What They’re Not Telling You, which discusses the federal budget and "the tough truths about the causes of the deficit and the painful choices that will have to be made,"

Defining Prosperity Down, which argues that "[t]here is growing evidence that our governing elite just doesn’t care about the prospects of American workers — that a once-unthinkable level of economic distress is in the process of becoming the new normal," and

Four Deformations of the Apocalypse, written by David Stockman, a director of the Office of Management and Budget under President Ronald Reagan and which outlines how the "Republican Party destroyed the American economy." he writes:

That "new policy doctrines have caused four great deformations of the national economy, and modern Republicans have turned a blind eye to each one.

The first of these started when the Nixon administration defaulted on American obligations under the 1944 Bretton Woods agreement to balance our accounts with the world. . .

The second unhappy change in the American economy has been the extraordinary growth of our public debt. In 1970 it was just 40 percent of gross domestic product, or about $425 billion. When it reaches $18 trillion, it will be 40 times greater than in 1970. This debt explosion has resulted not from big spending by the Democrats, but instead the Republican Party’s embrace, about three decades ago, of the insidious doctrine that deficits don’t matter if they result from tax cuts. . .

The third ominous change in the American economy has been the vast, unproductive expansion of our financial sector. Here, Republicans have been oblivious to the grave danger of flooding financial markets with freely printed money and, at the same time, removing traditional restrictions on leverage and speculation. As a result, the combined assets of conventional banks and the so-called shadow banking system (including investment banks and finance companies) grew from a mere $500 billion in 1970 to $30 trillion by September 2008. . .

The fourth destructive change has been the hollowing out of the larger American economy. Having lived beyond our means for decades by borrowing heavily from abroad, we have steadily sent jobs and production offshore. In the past decade, the number of high-value jobs in goods production and in service categories like trade, transportation, information technology and the professions has shrunk by 12 percent, to 68 million from 77 million. The only reason we have not experienced a severe reduction in nonfarm payrolls since 2000 is that there has been a gain in low-paying, often part-time positions in places like bars, hotels and nursing homes."