Dow Jones Disaster

Not since the worst days of the Great Recession in October of 2008 (during the Cheney/Bush disaster) has the Dow Jones plunged to this level, and lost over 500 points in one day.

Thanks, Regressive republican Congress and Teabaggers, for holding the country hostage so you could force through your agenda of taking in absolutely no additional revenue in the form of taxes on millionaires, or even the closing of tax loopholes that corporations take advantage of.  Thanks for bringing us to the brink of economic disaster to have your way, a technique no party has ever abused before in American history, bringing the US on the edge of defaulting on our loans. Thanks for not only refusing to spend money to push this sluggish economy forward, but for actually cutting spending and firing more and more government employees, thereby slowing down the economy even more, adding to the unemployment rolls, and diminishing the amount of payroll taxes the US collects because there are fewer people working.

The investors, speculators, buyers, and everyone remotely connected with the stock market are so jinxed by your selfish, destructive, un-American behavior, that the market lost over 500 points, plunging almost as low as it did at the end of the Bush administration. Investors fear plummeting into another recession.

Remember this graph? It's the last year of the Bush administration and the first year of the Obama administration.  You can see Obama's first year is a mirror image of Bush's last year.  Bush left after losing 750,000 jobs a month in the center of the graph. We lost fewer and fewer jobs during the Obama administration, as seen by the smaller and smaller blue lines, and then began gaining jobs. Last year we were gaining around 200,000 jobs a month!

Oh, but the Regressive republicans wouldn't stand for that very long.  Nope. Are they going to stand for economic improvement with a president that's the "wrong" party, the "wrong" age, the "wrong" color? Not with another election coming up in 2012.

The stimulus money that was pushing the economy ran out. There's been no talk of another stimulus. So instead of spending more temporarily to get us out of this deep, deadly Bush recession, the Regressive republicans did the exact opposite: cutting programs, cutting funding, and firing government employees.

Let's hope voters remember who insisted on this debt ceiling / job killing / spending cuts bill next year.