More borrowing is going to cause our creditors like the Chinese and Saudis to lose faith in the US's ability to repay its debts with hard currency (like gold) rather than hyper-inflated Federal Reserve funny money. It's time to cut federal spending, not increase it!

No, the time to cut federal spending was when the economy was supposedly "booming". Instead, the Republicans ran up enormous budget deficits on misadventures like destroying Iraq and throwing pork to rightwing welfare states like Alaska. So it's a little late for fascist nitwits to complain about the horrors of deficit spending after their incompetent mismanagement wrecked the economy in the first place.

Anyhow, where else are the Chinese and Saudis going to park all of the money they make selling cheap plastic crap to WalMart and the oil to manufacture the plastic? The Japanese are already in debt up to their eyeballs, and Europe is being sucked into the economic black hole formed by Wall Street's collapse. The US Treasury still represents the best of a lot of increasingly awful options, and that's all it takes to attract enormous capital. Provided they see at least some of the money spent on useful investments, they'll keep providing us with a steady flow of capital.

Bad times like this are exactly when it makes sense for the government to borrow tons of cash and spend it stimulating the economy, because:

1) The government can get a better interest rate than any private individual or organization (especially in times like these, when literally nobody knows which company is going to be hit next by some financial scandal - another reason why the government will find it easy to get capital).

2) Interest rates have hit all-time lows.

3) Asset price deflation is happening across the board, worldwide. That means there's little to no chance of significant inflation taking off anytime in the immediate future (a typical concern when the government goes on a borrowing spree).

4) Borrowing gobs of cash and using it for economic stimulus heads off the specter of a deflationary spiral of the kind we saw in the 1930's. American business and consumers are already in debt up to their eyeballs, and a prolonged cycle of deflation would make that debt far more difficult to pay off. Deflation also discourages private investment, which is the last thing this economy needs. Indeed, it needs billions of dollars of private investment to rebuild our atrophied industrial sector and get people back to work producing real, tangible goods consumers want and need to purchase - not cardboard McMansions in the outer asteroid belts of suburbia financed with fraudulently-rated loans.

We know borrowing money and spending it on industry works to end economic slumps because it worked - spectacularly well - during WWII. Japan went on a borrowing spree in the early '30s - using it to build up the military and modernize its industry - and was the first economic power to emerge from the Depression. The US wasn't as aggressive and the Depression ground on until the late '30s, finally showing some signs of relief as government spending increased heading into the war (and building out infrastructure like the TVA, which generated cheap electrical power America used to produce aluminum for aircraft and, later, to enrich the uranium needed to build the first atomic bombs). America could see similar returns this century by investing hundreds of billions in increased energy efficiency (like smart grids) and renewable domestic power (which could save trillions of dollars a decade flowing overseas to nations who do not have our best interests at heart).

The private sector has utterly failed to manage itself effectively when left to it's own supervision - you only need to look at the likes of Citibank, General Motors and Enron to see that. It's time to end the stupid scams and bubbles of the failed Republican era and get America back to work with a productive, properly-regulated economy. And the first step toward doing this is to rebuild our national infrastructure, which has been allowed to crumble during the rightwing's 30 year reign of economic terror.

Obama seems to understand the Congressional Republicans about as well as he understands the likes of Reverends Warren and Wright. Obama is a rational man, and the Congressional Republicans - like Warren and Wright - are grandstanding, self-absorbed, manipulative assholes with only a tenuous connection to reality (i.e. they know how to jerk people around and get money and support from them). Accomplishing anything of material substance - beyond enriching themselves - is not something they're particularly good at, which is bad because material substance is exactly what the country needs.

Some Southern Republican is guaranteed to filibuster this budget regardless of how much Obama panders to their phony "concerns". The last thing the want is for the Democrats to possibly get any credit for a recovery. Anybody who thinks Obama can get enough Republicans onboard to overcome that filibuster is dreaming - not with any legislation that's worth passing he can't.

He might as well ask for what the country needs. At least then the gauntlet will have been thrown down.