It's good to see some Republicans still believe deficits are bad. Hard to believe a Democratic President could see the need to refrain from ballooning deficits to fight a recession and a Republican can't. Clinton relied on Fed rate cuts alone. The result was 10 years of low interests rates, low unemployment, and high growth. Exactly what Republicans and Ross Perot predicted. So why have Republicans abandoned this approach?

Seems like a pure case of greed to me. Not content with the massive growth in income disparity over the last decade the Republican donors want an ever larger piece of the pie. I'm OK with a growth in income disparity if all boats are being lifted, but that has certainly not been the case with the recession. Working people have suffered major layoffs while corporate heads take home big bonuses for declining profits. Instead of providing relief to those hurt most this administration proposes a LONG TERM stimulous (likely of little benefit to ending a recession) benefiting those that are hardly being hurt and ignoring reforms needed to ensure reliable and honest capital markets. The stimulous is particularly dubious since most growth companies don't even pay dividends.

Pure spending not investment is needed to turn the economy around. Plant capacity is idle due to decreased spending and investing in more capital is not needed except possibly to increase efficiency. The quickest way to turn the economy around is to increase demand so that idle capacity is put back online. Capital spending often takes months or years to impliment while restarting idle capacity takes hours to weeks. Even if capital is invested in efficiency to make American products more competitive it may have the short term negative effect of reducing the amount of workers needed until demand picks up.

Capitalism is supposed to reward real business success not failure or phony profits. It is also a nonviable form when long term growth is sacrificed for short term profits. A lot of American Industry is wasting precious human capital with their recent strategies of forcing out or laying off highly paid and knowledgable people.

Regards,
Mark