Poverty is up, pay is down, bills are up, morale is down...and dare you complain the refrain is "be glad you have a job."  

Since I'm one of those "be glad you have a job!"'s, I talk to other "be glad you have a job!" colleagues all day long...I don't think morale and spirits have ever been lower amongst those who should be "glad".

In fact, I see where there is going to be a press conference today by 30 Democratic and Republican members of Congress,

...calling on the Super Committee to "go big" on deficit reduction. This Gang of 30 could come up with their own plan. If it includes cuts to the safety net, I'm sure you'll hear the refrain "even President Obama believes..." The difference between the parties on this is gone in the minds of the public.

In further fact, Obama shouts with much enthusiasm, that "the best part" of his jobs bill is the fact that it's "all paid for!"  That's a big selling point for him, when what he ought to be selling is how his bill will put people back to work - and not just back to work for companies that get the benefit of their labor while they continue to collect unemployment benefits, and have no guarantee of permanent employment or benefits or anything once their time is up.  "Georgia Works" and "Wisconsin Works" didn't really, um, work, but we live in a time, apparently, when the big brains making the decisions have deliberately lost the bag of solutions that have been shown to work (because they aren't going to further enrich their BFF's), and keep pulling old, tired, failed, proposals out of their a$$es, and expecting us to believe that "this time" they will work.

Republicans are reacting in knee-jerk fashion to a bill that has fake revenue increases in it ("fake" because the bill also says that if the Super Committee can find enough things to cut to equal what the jobs bill will cost, revenue increases in the bill are nullified), and a slew of Dems are reacting to it like Republicans, and it's kind of hard to run against the economic policies of the Bush years when the economic policies of the Obama years are awfully - and I do mean "awfully" in the truest sense of that word - similar: tax cuts and more tax cuts that didn't create jobs then, and aren't and won't create them now.

As bad as I thought the Bush years were, it's starting to feel like they were only hell's reception room, and Obama is taking us deeper into some really bad times.

"As of a month ago, people calling on the president to propose a bold new jobs plan and advocate for it loudly were "Obama critics" and those of us saying this wouldn't work were "Obama apologists." Well, last week he gave the big speech, the White House comms shop keeps pushing out jobs plan content, the party leaders in House and Senate are backing the bill, they've done some barnstorming in various congressional districts, and critics are still depressed and sarcastic . . . This, right before our eyes, is a living, breathing example of why presidential speechmaking doesn't do the things people say it does. It doesn't even have the intended impact on its intended audience! Is Atrios fired up and ready to go? Prepared to stop writing sarcastic, depressed, and dismissive blog posts and instead go hard against the president's critics, boosting the morale of the president's audience? No, he's sarcastic, depressed, and dismissive because the objective situation is depressing and everyone knows the jobs plan won't pass."

But any model that is embraced by Geithner and those who support him will not condone any sort of deflation because that will blow up securitization and pensions and everything else having to do with what they turned investing into.

I don't know what the answer is now.  They refused to deal with the insolvency, everything was too big to fail so they created new bookkeeping methods, printed money, and saved the infrastructure that will now eat us alive until it all explodes.