GOP Operation Tank the Economy Running into Problems?

     At this point, they don'/t have much. Their primary is a Barnum & Bailey's production, they just lost some serious political capital in trying to use the payroll extension for yet another hostage situation and the GOP as a party is held in low repute.

    About the only thing they have is the weak economy which they can call The Obama Recession, no matter how misleading that is. They had all their bases covered-no stimulus, demanding deep spending cuts and at the same time corporate tax cuts, and use any request or procedure, no matter how routine as another hostage situation.

    Like they did with the payroll tax cut extension-we will only cut it if you do the XL Pipeline but also cut unemployment benefits to only 59 weeks and cut here and there...

   They even threatened Ben Bernanke to stand down on any monetary easing.

    Now that there's egg all over their face on that one, they have nothing left but the weak economy. Yet, it is not looking so weak lately.

    http://www.cnbc.com/id/45899343

     "December's report showed job creation of a total 200,000 non farm payrolls, after accounting for a decline of 12,000 public sector jobs. The unemployment rate, expected to rise, declined to 8.5 percent. Economists had expected 155,000 new jobs in December."

      "That compares to a revised 100,000 in November, when the unemployment rate was 8.7 percent, also revised."

      Certainly we can't get carried away just yet. Krugman points out that we need a lot of job creation just to keep up with population growth. Still it could be a lot worse. We could be Britain. Even worse we could be Europe.

      Britain under David Cameron has applied full court austerity even though there's no "debt crisis" in Britain, in fact bond yields are lower in Britain than anywhere except the U.S. Britain can gloat that they were right not to join the Euro but then they cancel it out with such a bond headed move.

       When you look at the long term stagnation of Japan and the dire picture in Europe, you wonder if that could be us, could we go through such a period of long term stagnation? I think the picture actually looks a lot brighter now. The worst risk may be of European contagion. In and of itself, we have lots of advantages that neither Japan or Europe have.

        For starters, a growing, heterogeneous population and our country is physically a large, rich land mass.