We reap what we sow ...

One of Krugman's complaints is that Obama is actually more conservative than anyone thought. Now, I am not an African American, and absolutely not an African American (pretty literally) who was raised by a white mother in Indonesia and Hawaii, and was one of three black students (out of three thousand) in an elite private high school in Hawaii, etc etc. Krugman thinks that in fact Obama wants cuts in the federal spending. Personally I have no idea what Obama wants, but no one can deny that a lot of his rhetoric on the campaign trail has to be said to be just that, rhetoric. He is still a better choice than McCain, but by less and less with each passing month. Obama won by getting out the youth vote in unprecedented percentages. That ain't happening in 2012. He will have to find another way to win. Good luck.

Meanwhile, on the other side, losing 500 points on the stock exchange on Friday and 600 today had an effect. I have no idea how much effect, but I suspect we are talking about a lot of money. Now a fair bit of stocks are in retirement funds and mutual funds, but a whole bunch of stocks are owned by the wealthy. Now, who was it who funded the Tea Party? And what did the Tea Party in the debt ceiling debacle? By the way, the S $ P downgrade was not really strictly related to the amount of spending that was cut in the sense that not enough was cut. Apparently the downgrade could well be related to the notion that too much was cut, and also to the inflexible position taken by the Congressional Tea Party members during the debacle. As I understand it, as the deadline approached and it became clear that Obama was not going to use some trick and also intended to allow the nation to default if Congress didn't get its act together, financiers on Wall Street began to pressure the Republicans to get the deal done. Obviously now those financiers are suffering the consequences of their previous actions. Sometimes we reap what we sow.