As spring dawns, the economy's green shoots have been trampled ~ Brown Shoots

You wouldn't have expected government employees to be the poster children for broad economic distress, but the effort to blame the recession and the budget crisis on nurses, teachers, cops and firefighters backfired. Regular people saw these workers as their neighbors and fellow members of a beleaguered middle class, not as their oppressors.

At some point, the Fed's natural inflation-phobia will kick in, even though higher food and energy prices have nothing to do with overheated demand (with unemployment stuck near double digits, demand is still too low, not too high.) But as in the late 1970s, stagnation could turn into stagflation. And the Republicans in Congress are compounding the crisis of prolonged recession and joblessness by slashing everything in sight -- throwing more people out of work.