TPM: The Rapid Economic Recovery Republicans Are Praying Against

[City Lights]

Brian Beutler January 9, 2012, 5:20 AM

Everything that’s supposed to happen in politics this year, and everything that has happened for the last several months, has been premised on the tacit, but seemingly safe assumption: The economy will remain weak for years.

This has underlined Congressional jobs bill theatrics, campaign rhetoric about Obama’s record, debates about who’s to blame for high unemployment, and which party best represents the interests of the middle class.

But what if that assumption is wrong?

A contrarian school of thought holds that it is wrong — and its proponents have a growing cache of evidence to back them up.

Read the entire piece at TPM.com

[Jackpine Radical]

1. The odds of a short-term burst of economic activity are probably pretty god.

A boost like that could shoo Obama into his second term, and I hope it does.

However, any such boost will be a little hill of optimism on the long. slow glide into economic oblivion. the long-term trends will not be turning positive. Our infrastructure is still collapsing, our overseas manufacturing jobs are not coming back, we are doing nothing much to lessen our dependence on fossil fuel, our information technology is falling further and further behind, and the gap between the 1% & the 99% continues to widen.