Squawking Hawks

[Elphaba]

Much of the current deficit debate is for the birds. - By Daniel Gross - Slate Magazine

A once-endangered species is staging a robust comeback: the deficit hawk. Hunted nearly to death during the Bush years, many varieties not seen in Washington in a decade are now perching on branches and dropping their wisdom. Look, there's the puff-chested congressional peacock hawk, frequently seen strutting about Sunday-morning-TV-show sets complaining about pork while emitting loud honks on the receipt of stimulus funds. The furrowed-brow warbler hawk (natural habitat: the op-ed pages) loathes deficit spending for the purpose of eliminating social injustice but loves it when the spending is used to finance military actions abroad. The blue-bellied partisan hawk nests in think tanks; it goes mute when members of its own party run the show but squawks loudly when opponents run up debt. On Nov. 3, birders sighted the rare skinny parrot hawk, which repeats back calls about fiscal probity. Said President Barack Obama on that date: "The government is going to have to get serious about reducing our debt levels."
. . . .
But signs of recovery returned with the spring. As the financial system came back from the brink, banks paid back billions in TARP funds. In its mid-session review, issued in late July, the Office of Management and Budget dialed back its estimate for the fiscal 2009 deficit from $1.84 trillion in May to $1.58 trillion, due in large part to the trimming of cash piles set aside to help Wall Street. The stock market rally, recovering corporate profits, and an economy that began to expand at a 3.5 percent rate in the summer have translated into higher-than-expected tax receipts. And so, as the treasury department's Financial Management Service reported, the final numbers came out better both on spending and receipts—with a $1.42 trillion deficit, $138 billion smaller than was forecast in July.

Elphaba

[Wingnut]

"Squawking Hawks" sounds like a really bad name for a kids intramural soccer team.

[Just_A_Guy]

Originally Posted by Wingnut

"Squawking Hawks" sounds like a really bad name for a kids intramural soccer team.

Yet, oddly, "screaming eagles" would be a really good name.