Bernanke urges Congress Not to Slash Spending or raise taxes during the "recovery"

[bobbyw24]

WASHINGTON (AP) — Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke told Congress Thursday that the fragile economy needs government stimulus spending to strengthen the recovery and help reduce unemployment.

Testifying before the House Financial Services Committee, Bernanke urged lawmakers to come up with a credible plan to reduce the government's record-high budget deficits in the long run. But he said they shouldn't move now to slash spending or boost taxes in the near future.

"I believe we should maintain our stimulus in the short term," Bernanke said as he spoke about the economy's challenges for the second straight day on Capitol Hill.


Bernanke again said the Fed is prepared to take new steps to bolster the recovery if needed.

"We are ready, and we will act" if the economy doesn't continue to improve, Bernanke told the House panel.

But he refrained from repeating comments made earlier in the week, that he didn't anticipate the Fed taking new action in the near term. Those comments to the Senate Banking Committee sent stocks tumbling Wednesday. The market on Thursday recovered those losses after another strong batch of earnings revived optimism on Wall Street.

Bernanke is under pressure to keep the recovery going because there's little appetite in Congress to provide a major new stimulus package.

The Fed chief made his comments as the panel's highest-ranking Republican, Rep. Spencer Bachus of Alabama, and other Republican members complained about the effectiveness of President Barack Obama's $862 billion stimulus package. That has increased government spending and cut taxes at a time when most Republicans and some Democrats are worried about the government's exploding red ink.

"The economic recovery is anemic at best," Bachus said, arguing that the stimulus package hasn't delivered.

Bernanke also gave a nod to renewing tax cuts by President George W. Bush, which are set to expire at the end of this year. "In the short term, I would believe that we ought to maintain a reasonable degree of fiscal support — stimulus — for the economy. There are many ways to do that. This is one way," he said.

http://www.baltimoresun.com/business...,5184402.story

[Live_Free_Or_Die]

If they are going to maintain current levels of spending and taxation it looks like nobody needs to do anything except geographically organize locally or bug out. They will run the ship into the ground before anything close to a libertarian majority can be elected which is never going to happen anyway.

[rp4prez]

I guess the short term isn't 3 years? Short term must be at least 10 years seeing how the government has been "stimulating" the economy since 2007.

[HOLLYWOOD]

Does Tim-May Boy's statement include the spending of $100's of Billions overseas on foreign nations?

Yeah... Hypocrisy continues full throttle

All the government spending and tax credits (especially to corporations), is masking the Depression with False Positive GDP numbers for the statisticians to dress up for the Propaganda Machine.

[ILUVRP]

http://www.321gold.com/editorials/be...son072710.html

Is it raining or are they pi$$ing on our head.

[Brian Defferding]

Too late on not raising taxes. When the 2012 taxes kick in to fund our new managed health care overlords and when the new 2014 health care policies kick in, there won't be many "stimulus" ideas left, other than the usual thing of borrowing, printing and spending.

Inflation is their savior, and will continue to be, while it will be our demise.