**Uniqueness 2 Generic Links 16Link Turn – H2-B Helps Economy
**Which Internal Link Is Best?** I/L – Reducing the Deficit BadPremature ending Deficit spending leads to econ collapse Froomkin 2010 Dan, Huffington Post Online, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/01/23/7-things-about-the-econom_n_433688.html In Washington salons and newsrooms, you are not considered a serious person unless you are very, very worried about the deficit. The principle that reducing the deficit is of the greatest urgency (and must come at the cost of entitlements) is for some reason firmly lodged in the halls of power in Washington. An example of just how uncontroversial deficit hawkery is among Washington's elite was provided by The Washington Post earlier this month when it supported and apparently didn't think twice about turning over its news columns to an organization funded by Peter G. Peterson, the billionaire investment banker on a crusade to reduce the deficit by looting Social Security. But deficit hawkery right now is not just ludicrous, it's dangerous. As New York Times columnist Paul Krugman noted recently, "the calls we're already hearing for an end to stimulus, for reversing the steps the government and the Federal Reserve took to prop up the economy, will grow even louder." He adds: But if those calls are heeded, we'll be repeating the great mistake of 1937, when the Fed and the Roosevelt administration decided that the Great Depression was over, that it was time for the economy to throw away its crutches. Spending was cut back, monetary policy was tightened -- and the economy promptly plunged back into the depths.
Dan, Huffington Post Online, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/01/23/7-things-about-the-econom_n_433688.html Back in March, Obama described modern Wall Street as a "house of cards" and a "Ponzi scheme" in which "a relatively few do spectacularly well while the middle class loses ground." In his major speech on the economy in April, the president proclaimed that "we cannot go back to the bubble-and-bust economy that led us to this point." He continued: It is simply not sustainable to have a 21st-century financial system that is governed by 20th-century rules and regulations that allowed the recklessness of a few to threaten the entire economy. It is not sustainable to have an economy where in one year, 40 percent of our corporate profits came from a financial sector that was based on inflated home prices, maxed-out credit cards, over-leveraged banks and overvalued assets. It's not sustainable to have an economy where the incomes of the top 1 percent has skyrocketed while the typical working household has seen their incomes decline by nearly $2,000. That's just not a sustainable model for long-term prosperity. He was right. He even used powerful biblical imagery from Jesus's Sermon on the Mount to liken the boom-and-bust economy he inherited to a house built on sand and the future U.S. economy he is working toward to one built on a rock, that could weather a storm. But the big banks, with their enormous political clout, appear to be managing to duck the re-regulation that seemed inevitable a year ago -- and they are now in fact more powerful than ever. The ultimate litmus test is that the banks that are "too big to fail," rather than being broken up, are now making huge profits -- and paying astronomical bonuses -- based on the implicit guarantee that the government will pay their debts if they ever face bankruptcy. Indeed, that government backstop gives them every reason to place riskier bets than ever. Even Obama's latest, much more assertive and populist proposal to limit bank activities does not break up those banks -- and faces an uncertain future in our nearly paralyzed legislative branch. Economist Simon Johnson (the subject of one of Hanrahan's articles) recently said on CNBC: The conventional wisdom is you can't have back-to-back major financial crises. I think we're going to push that, we're going to have a look and see whether that's true. And the next 12 months could really be exciting. People could be very positive, but we are setting ourselves up for an enormous catastrophe. Indeed. By Obama's biblical analogy, our economy is still very much built on sand --and the next big storm might not be very far away at all.
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