God Save Us from Nancy Pelositis

I'm getting very, very nervous about Obama's economic policies. Lots of appointments in other areas are great, but the economic appointees, the ones that matter almost the most, reek of the how-we've-always-done-it establishment, Clinton-George H.W. Bush type guys. (Are there any womenfolk among them?)  Guys who like money and don't want to share it and are still getting buckets of it as corporate welfare. Guys who think you can have your cake and eat it to, to repeat a cliche. And especially among Democrats, folks who still are driven to sell their souls to Republicans by singing the siren song of compromise. The glimpses of economic policy proposals show steps that are starting to seem scarily inadequate

Robert Reich, please yell louder!

Here is Paul Krugman today:

Bit by bit we’re getting information on the Obama stimulus plan, enough to start making back-of-the-envelope estimates of impact. The bottom line is this: we’re probably looking at a plan that will shave less than 2 percentage points off the average unemployment rate for the next two years, and possibly quite a lot less. This raises real concerns about whether the incoming administration is lowballing its plans in an attempt to get bipartisan consensus.

and here:

I see the following scenario: a weak stimulus plan, perhaps even weaker than what we’re talking about now, is crafted to win those extra GOP votes. The plan limits the rise in unemployment, but things are still pretty bad, with the rate peaking at something like 9 percent and coming down only slowly. And then Mitch McConnell says “See, government spending doesn’t work.”

        Let’s hope I’ve got this wrong.

Nancy Pelositis may turn out to be a terminal disease for the country.