The Tea Party Recession

How to create a double-dip recession:

1.  Manufacture a totally false and unnecessary crisis by threatening to default on the US debt unless your demands are met.  This will create instability and uncertainty in global markets, threatening retirement funds, pension plans, and 401k accounts as well as large stock-holders.
2.  As part of the solution, demand that the government take money out of the economy while unemployment is at high levels.  This will ensure that job creation will be minimal, the recession will continue, and recovery will be slow.  Without jobs, there is no increase in consumer demand and thus no recovery.
3. As part of the solution, demand that no new taxes be raised even on the wealthiest individuals and the most profitable of corporations.  This will ensure that no possible solution to the deficit will ever exist since cuts alone cannot solve it.
4.  Blame it on President Obama.  Keep lying about the cause of this recession until people forget that it was your blackmailing and discredited policies that led to the current mess.

It's especially important that you succeed with item 4.  You can count on about 30% of the American public to be ideologically blind enough, willfully ignorant, fearful, hateful, or racist enough to believe you without any question.  And if you can suppress the vote enough in the 2012 elections, you can control Congress and the Presidency in 2013.

Was this economic chaos the Tea-Party plan all along?  After all, the aim of the extremist ideologues that dominate current Republican Party "thinking" is, in the words of Grover Norquist, "to reduce [government] to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub."  Threatening to default on  the country's debt, getting its credit rating reduced, and hamstringing its ability to deal with the jobs crisis go a long, long way to accomplish this.