De defensa

Nous citons ci-après deux textes de Paul Krugman et de Steve Clemons à propos de Barack Obama et de sa décision de “geler” $250 milliards de dépenses intérieures dans son prochain budget. Nous avons déjà rapproché les deux hommes dans une note du 26 janvier 2010.

• Paul Krugman, d’abord, sur son blog du New York Times, nommé Conscience of a Liberal, ce 26 janvier 2010.

«A spending freeze? That’s the brilliant response of the Obama team to their first serious political setback?

»It’s appalling on every level.

»It’s bad economics, depressing demand when the economy is still suffering from mass unemployment. Jonathan Zasloff writes that Obama seems to have decided to fire Tim Geithner and replace him with “the rotting corpse of Andrew Mellon” (Mellon was Herbert Hoover’s Treasury Secretary, who according to Hoover told him to “liquidate the workers, liquidate the farmers, purge the rottenness”.)

»It’s bad long-run fiscal policy, shifting attention away from the essential need to reform health care and focusing on small change instead.

»And it’s a betrayal of everything Obama’s supporters thought they were working for. Just like that, Obama has embraced and validated the Republican world-view — and more specifically, he has embraced the policy ideas of the man he defeated in 2008. A correspondent writes, “I feel like an idiot for supporting this guy”…»

• Steve Clemons d’autre part, sur son site The Washington Note, ce même 26 janvier 2010. Sa fureur s’exprime notamment dans le parallèle qu’il fait entre les dépenses pour les guerres extérieures et le refus des dépenses pour la situation intérieure…

«…One QUARTER OF A TRILLION DOLLARS is what the US is spending on two nations, Iraq and Afghanistan that together have a COMBINED GDP of just $23 billion.

»That is lunacy. Americans have a US President who is going to say tonight – we cannot afford our future, we cannot afford investment in ourselves, but we can afford to bail out Wall Street financiers, and we can afford to pump $250 billion into two small countries abroad, but we can't afford to do the right things by American working families – who deserve far better.

»There are parts of what the President's team is doing – particularly what Jared Bernstein, Paul Volcker and Austan Goolsbee have been working on – that I do support.

»But the broader issue that we are going to cease deep investment in the US in a way that is big, significant and consequential – while China does everything the reverse that we are doing and reaps the rewards is a sign of America's collapse, not America rebuilding itself.

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