[J] It is the jobs stupid!!

Dear Friends,

President Obama still does not understand why the markets are crashing.  Clearly it was not the downgrade of the United States debt since all the people selling stocks today were simultaneously buying US treasuries and interest rates went down and not up.  The problem is not the United States debt level or the dysfunctional government that we have with crazy Republican extremists and a President who is unwilling to confront them. 

Here is a summary of the President's remarks by Holly Bailey (here):

In his first public remarks since Friday's downgrade, Obama blamed political gridlock for the nation's setback and insisted the markets still consider the United States a "triple-A country."
S&P's move, Obama said, was "not so much because they doubt our ability to pay our debt … but because after witnessing a month of wrangling over raising the debt ceiling, they doubted our political system's ability to act."
"We didn't need a ratings agency to tell us that we need a balanced, long-term approach to deficit reduction," he added. "That was true last week. That was true last year. That was true the day I took office."

The market is dropping like a rock because there is no growth in the economy and everybody knows that cutting federal spending will slow or reverse growth.  The only way to get this economy to grow is to increase demand and the only way to increase consumer demand is to provide people with jobs and the only way to get job growth is for the Federal government to spend money and to spend it on infrastructure projects that we badly need.  As long as the President and the Republicans are focused on deficit reduction, the markets will not improve.

Thanks for reading and please comment,
The Unabashed Liberal