John Maynard Keynes FTW!

Buying $600 Billion worth of debt is probably the right move. Put more money into the economy, people will buy more stuff, and businesses will make more stuff, and have to hire more people in order to do so. This works. The standard right wing response is that pouring money into the economy will lead to massive inflation and we'll end up like Weimar Germany. The important difference, of course, is that one of the problems with this economic downturn is deflation, not inflation. The problem is not that prices are too high, it's that nobody has any money so there is little demand in the economy resulting in prices being too low. Inflation is not what people should be afraid of. We need more inflation.

Sure, the US Dollar has sunk a little in comparison to other currencies, but the fact remains that jobs aren't growing because people aren't spending, and people aren't spending because they are broke.

Compromise on What?

Now that the Democrats no longer have the House, Obama says he's willing to compromise. "Compromise" to Republicans, of course, means doing everything they tell you to. To Obama it means "to yield to Republican demands on tax cuts," which is bad enough considering it means that in order to get tax cuts for the middle class, he has to give tax cuts to everyone richer than the middle class, thus cutting off the the vast majority of money that could have been used to pay down the deficit.

Well, at Least They Gained a Democratic Governor

Amazingly, prop19 didn't win. The contributions from the alcohol industry and other interested parties successfully scared people into believing that nurses and school bus drivers would be showing up to work high and their employers would, for some reason, not be able to fire them for it.

But on the bright side, while I actually liked Arnie, I'm glad that the governor of California is now a Democrat.