The commentary, Why We Should Beware Budget-Deficit Mania, by Robert Reich is posted on Truth-out.org.

If Congress and the President started right now to cut the federal deficit – slashing spending and raising taxes on the middle class – our anemic economy would quickly become comatose.

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Even worse, budget-deficit mania will slow future growth if it forces government to cut the things that fuel growth – education, basic R&D, child health, improved infrastructure.

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Don’t get me wrong. America’s projected budget deficits require attention. But in addressing them we need to focus on the right solutions, and make sure we’re solving the right problem.

The preliminary report of the President’s deficit commission doesn’t help. It’s another example of budget-deficit mania generating more heat than light.

Warning! Warning! Warning! Cheap Attempt At Humor Ensues!

As the newly Republican dominated House started Presidential impeachment hearings, the Department Of Justice announced criminal investigations of the spending of large amounts of money by deceptively named organizations to influence the elections of these representatives.

The DOJ is investigating whether or not there had been any illegal coordination between the organizations spending the money and the candidates themselves.  Such a violation could lead to bribery charges and long prison sentences for the guilty.  The Supreme Court will then decide if buying the impeachment of a President could be classified as treason by either the buyers or the sellers or both.

The impeachment hearings were quickly ended when the majority of Republicans found no grounds for impeachment.

I hope that the above warning was enough to help you judge this article.

Warning! Warning! Warning! Satire Ensues!

Today, President Obama vowed to veto any tax cut extension bill that includes extending the tax cut for the wealthy.

He said he very much wanted to extend the tax cuts for those making less than $250,000 a year, but in all good conscience he could not allow the inclusion of the tax cut for the wealthy.  The need to cut trillions of dollars from the deficit over the next decade mandated the ending of the tax cut to people who didn’t desperately need it.

Although letting the tax cut for the middle class expire might have dire consequences for the recovery,  the consequences of extending the tax cut to the wealthy would be far worse.

The Republicans caved into this firm stance of the President and passed a bill in the House of Representatives and in the Senate that did not include the extension of the extra tax cut for the wealthy.

Don’t get your hopes up for such a story to be true.  I just made it up as an example of how the tax cut extension could be handled.

Is it possible my wish could come true? Since posting the above wish, I read the article Henry in the House: Tax man (compromise) cometh By Ed Henry.

I hadn’t known that the initial report came from Huffington Post.  Is it any wonder that I no longer read the Huffington Post?

The warning at the beginning of the post was added because one of my satire challeneged readers was offended at the lack of warning.

McClatchy News web site has the article, How China Policy Squeezes Companies Anchored In U.S.

“The United States faces the lack of a national and international trading strategy, or economic policy . . . we as a nation don’t have an entity that competes with other nations, and I think this harkens back to a reluctance to get into national economic policy or strategies because of the concern that it has the taint of some kind of government control and government assistance,” he said.

The free-trade debate gets bogged down in political labels, which O’Shaugnessy thinks misses the broader point.

“So you have got ‘socialists’ fighting the ‘capitalists,’ and neither side realizes the mercantilists are kicking their ass. Both of them, it doesn’t matter whether you are on this side or that side, if you are dealing with a mercantilist society, and that’s what we’re fighting in China,” he said.

While I agree that the U.S. could benefit from strategic thinking, I also warn that we need to do it with some humility.  Japan was beating us severely 20 or so years ago because of their strategic efforts of their Ministry of Trade and Industry. This ministry came up with the idea of the 5th generation computer strategy to emphasize artificial intelligence.  It turned out to be a poor strategic choice.  The diverse efforts of private companies in the U.S. tried many different things including artificial intelligence.  I think the internet, the web, inexpensive computer chips, and mobile communication and computing  did a lot more to stimulate the world economy than the efforts in artificial intelligence.

It’s not that the U.S. companies were smarter at predicting the technologies of the future.  It is that the diverse set of U.S. companies and diverse venture capitalists were trying many different things.  Of that broad set of initiatives, some really bore fruit and established the rapidly growing industries that fueled economic growth around the world.

Just as in investing and agriculture, diversification in industry has a lot of benefits.

Fitting in with my new emphasis on this blog of the perils of extremism,  I am making the point that neither extreme laissez-faire in industrial strategy nor extreme centralization of industrial strategy is the best policy. Intelligent approaches are better than doctrinaire approaches.