Stories and Predictions from Around the Net: The Future Will Judge

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/07/opinion/sunday/the-truth-about-taxes.html?_r=1&ref=opinion: The Truth About Taxes

A week later and we are still amazed at how the Republicans in Congress pulled it off. They held the economy hostage, won some cheap political points, and all of us will spend the next decade paying the ransom as government programs — $900 billion over 10 years in the first round — are slashed and the recovery is put at risk.

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/columnists/ct-oped-0807-page-20110807,0,1454378.column: Is the tea party over?

Has the tea party peaked? Republican lawmakers affiliated with the upstart anti-tax movement scored big in the nerve-racking debt-ceiling debacle, but the victory left enough hard feelings to feed the movement’s ultimate defeat.

To quote an old Chicago White Sox slogan from the 1980s, their achievement was a case of “winning ugly.”

With the nation’s credit rating in the balance, the tea partiers seized the normally routine matter of raising the nation’s debt ceiling and held it hostage, gangsta-style: Cut government spending our way, they reasoned, and nobody gets hurt.

http://www.tnr.com/article/john-judis/93287/obama-administration-economy-recession: Liberals’ Strange Retreat on Government Spending Continue reading →