Has Obama Finally Rejected Austerity - and Will California Reject It Too?
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By Robert CruickshankIt has become the most important political story of the year - the battle between the New Hoovers who demand austerity, and the rest of the world that understands we need prosperity instead of prolonged recession. So far the Obama Administration has been hard to pin down on this. They pushed hard to get the $787 billion stimulus done in early 2009, but made the stimulus too small to pull the nation out of recession for fear of asking for too much.
Since then, calls for austerity have grown louder. Some of this comes from wealthy folks like Pete Peterson spending a ton of money to push this messaging out to the public. Some comes from Austerity Democrats who do not understand how economies actually work. And some comes from the teabaggers, who as I explained are afraid deficit spending will undermine their privileges by being spent on nonwhite and poor people.
California has been suffering from the flaws of austerity since the summer of 2007. Budget cuts have merely worsened the recession and worsened the budget crisis, not solved it. Yet it would have been worse had the White House not won the stimulus