elfs | Щоб з'їсти своїх дітей є варварським актом

The Ukrainian in the subject translates to "To eat your own children is an act of barbarism." This phrase was printed on leaflets and posters throughout the Ukraine in the 1933, when the Soviet Union, whether through accident or design, so thoroughly destroyed Ukrainian agriculture that an estimated 4 million people died.

(This is why hammer-and-sickle hipster t-shirts annoy the hell out of me; everyone remembers the Shoah, and well they should; but nobody cares to remember the Holodomor, or any of the other atrocities perpetrated.)

And while Republicans whine and bitch and moan about how the deficit and the debt will destroy our children's future. Their solution? Instead of destroying our future, why not consume it all now? That's exactly what the $60 billion in cuts proposed by John Boehner's House Congressional Republicans have proposed. As Brad Delong writes:

WIC is nutritional aid for pregnant women and women with young children; let's cut that, because the damage to the nation from malnourishment is a problem for future politicians. NOAA is weather and climate - hey, what we don't know can't hurt us. Nuclear nonproliferation - well, we probably won't feel the pain of a terrorist nuke assembled from old Soviet fissile material for a couple of years. FEMA - well, how often do hurricanes hit New Orleans? CDC - with luck, by the time plague hits someone else can be blamed. Don't start thinking about tomorrow.

After ten years of thoroughly wrecking the American economy-- take out the illusory financial sector, and the US economy created almost no new jobs in the years between 2000 and 2010-- and with a current president utterly uninterested in fixing the problem, the solution, it seems, is to cave.

It is striking to me that nobody will tell the basic truth: we have the deficits we do now because the Obama administration actually put our two wars on the books, rather than what the Bush administration did, which was hide them in a separate set of books entitled "emergency" accounting.

I think the President ought to say, "Okay, I take the Republicans at their word. Our unemployment problem is structural: the people out of work now are those who can't find any because they don't have the skills. And the Republicans want to reduce the size of government. Therefore, I am cutting the Pentagon's budget in half, closing two-thirds of our military bases overseas, and eliminating most new weapons programs. This will eliminate tens of thousands of government-sponsored jobs and shrink the size of government substantially. Yes, it will put many people out of work, but those people clearly have desirable skills, and if the Republicans are right they'll be able to find new work in short order."