Great points!

"Sustainable" here I believe is being used more for its warm-and-fuzzy associations than for any actual denotative meaning from whatever dictionary--heterodox, orthodox, or box of rocks.

I'm afraid that, given his picks for cabinet...Obama will continue down these utterly hopeless paths to "grow" ourselves out of decline. But we will certainly see ever more pretty language like "sustainable" to make us all feel better about the whole thing.

I'm afraid that "sustainable" will acquire a negative connotation, similar to the what the current administration did to the word "freedom." Of course, very little that humans do is actually sustainable, especially when scaled up to a 6.5 billion population. Oh, and my vote is for "kitchen sink." I'd have more confidence in the FOMC if they would admit that they don't really know, at all, what they're doing, and how to solve the problems (assuming they can be solved at all, of course).

"Sustainable" here I believe is being used more for its warm-and-fuzzy associations than for any actual denotative meaning from whatever dictionary--heterodox, orthodox, or box of rocks.

That's the conventional way sustainable is used by anything from wind proponents(what's sustainable about an energy source that's totally dependent on natural gas to provide usable electricity?) to organic farmers(what's sustainable about farming dependent on nearby conventional farms for "herd immunity" from pest? What's sustainable about being dependent on fossilized bat poo and an army of cows that can't exist without conventional farming?).

Maybe they mean it. Negative growth is sustainable...