Calculating the costs of the Bush tax cuts...

Just for the top 5% of incomes:


(Source: National Priorities Project)
 via Wonkblog

"Britain's Self-Inflicted Misery"

An excellent editorial in the New York Times on the disastrous British austerity strategy - which, as the authors point out, is an ideology more than a viable economic plan:

PM Cameron cogitates

For a year now, Britain’s economy has been stuck in a vicious cycle of low growth, high unemployment and fiscal austerity. But unlike Greece, which has been forced into induced recession by misguided European Union creditors, Britain has inflicted this harmful quack cure on itself.

Austerity was a deliberate ideological choice by Prime Minister David Cameron’s ruling coalition of Conservatives and Liberal Democrats, elected 17 months ago. It has failed and can be expected to keep failing. But neither party is yet prepared to acknowledge that reality and change course.

Britain’s economy has barely grown since the budget cuts began taking effect late last year. The most recent quarterly figures showed the economy flat-lining, with growth at 0.1 percent.

New figures released this week reported Britain’s highest jobless numbers in more than 15 years.

Remembering The New Deal

This excerpt, published at Slate courtesy of the Free Press, comes from Michael Hiltzik’s new book, The New Deal: A Modern History.

During the years of the New Deal, America’s government built as it never had before—or has since. 

The New Deal physically reshaped the country. To this day, Americans still rely on its works for transportation, electricity, flood control, housing, and community amenities. The output of one agency alone, the Works Progress Administration, represents a magnificent bequest to later generations. The WPA produced, among many other projects, 1,000 miles of new and rebuilt airport runways, 651,000 miles of highway, 124,000 bridges, 8,000 parks, and 18,000 playgrounds and athletic fields; some 84,000 miles of drainage pipes, 69,000 highway light standards, and 125,000 public buildings built, rebuilt, or expanded. Among the latter were 41,300 schools.

The transformative power of this effort is inestimable. The Tennessee Valley in 1933 was a quintessential backwoods region of “grim drudgery, and grind” in the words of its savior George Norris: beleaguered by floods, drained of its manpower by the siren call of the cities, the latent wealth of its river and lumber left fallow. The TVA of Norris and Franklin Roosevelt turned it into a land of plenty that called its workers home, put its natural endowments to productive use, and delivered to its residents the promise of a secure American middle-class lifestyle.

The Republican Rabbit Hole

Paul Krugman marvels at the GOP's "adventures in Wonderland":

Reading the transcript of Tuesday’s Republican debate on the economy is, for anyone who has actually been following economic events these past few years, like falling down a rabbit hole. Suddenly, you find yourself in a fantasy world where nothing looks or behaves the way it does in real life.

And since economic policy has to deal with the world we live in, not the fantasy world of the G.O.P.’s imagination, the prospect that one of these people may well be our next president is, frankly, terrifying.

In the real world, recent events were a devastating refutation of the free-market orthodoxy that has ruled American politics these past three decades. Above all, the long crusade against financial regulation, the successful effort to unravel the prudential rules established after the Great Depression on the grounds that they were unnecessary, ended up demonstrating — at immense cost to the nation — that those rules were necessary, after all.

But down the rabbit hole, none of that happened.

Polish Hero Lech Walesa in Solidarity with Occupy Wall Street

It will be interesting to see how Occupy Wall Street's critics respond to this:

Solidarity hero Lech Walesa is flying to New York to show his support for the Occupy Wall Street protesters.

"How could I not respond," Walesa told a Polish newspaper Wednesday. "The thousands of people gathered near Wall Street are worried about the fate of their future, the fate of their country. This is something I understand."

A former shipyard worker who led Poland's successful revolt against Soviet communism, Walesa said "capitalism is in crisis" and not just in America.

"This is a worldwide problem," he told the Lublin-based Dziennik Wschodni newspaper. "The Wall Street protesters have focused a magnifying glass on the problem."

Cainsian Economics - "The Devil is in the details"

Lawrence O'Donnell and Bruce Bartlett - with an assist
from Michele Bachmann - dissect the GOP "frontrunner du
jour" and pizza Godfather's devilish 9-9-9 Plan to raise
taxes on the working poor and cut taxes for the rich:

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

"Founding Fathers" quote of the day - and what it means for us in the present tense

We are free today substantially,  but the day will come when our Republic will be an impossibility.

It will be an impossibility because wealth will be concentrated in the hands of a few. A republic cannot stand upon bayonets, and when that day comes, when the wealth of the nation will be in the hands of a few, then we must rely upon the wisdom of the best elements in the country to readjust the laws of the nation to the changed conditions.

The "Father of the Constitution", President James Madison,  cited in "The Great Quotations" by George Seldes - via Washington Monthly.

Rick Ungar adds this perspective on our current problems to Madison's quote:

Robert Reich - The 7 Biggest Economic Lies (in 2.5 minutes)

Via robertreich.org

Occupy Wall Street - the view from a "Wall Street Insider" at Big Business journal, FORBES

This commentary on the Wall Street protests from Gene Marcial is interesting primarily because it appeared on the Forbes magazine website. Forbes characterizes itself as "Information for the World's Business Leaders." Marcial wrote the "Inside Wall Street" column at Business Week for 28 years:

Surely, it’s time for the nation’s leaders to meet with the Occupy Wall Street protesters and publicly address their grievances. The country’s decision makers, most notably those in Congress, can’t simply watch idly by and wish them away, as they appear to be doing...

One of the major problems that most Americans feel is their utter sense of frustration and helplessness in the face of the mounting oppressive problems that the gasping economy and rudderless leadership in Congress have engendered. So this expanding public outcry shouldn’t be  surprising at all.

9-9-9: "Raising Cain" or just raising taxes on those who can least afford it?

"Don't condemn me because the first black one was bad."

Republican Presidential aspirant, pizza Godfather and book tour star Herman Cain has caused controversy with various remarks. He's labeled peaceful demonstrators "anti-American" because they call into question income inequality, waves of foreclosures after bailouts of banks and tax-fairness issues.

Worse, he has called African-Americans "brainwashed" because they've trended overwhelmingly toward the Democratic Party - their "plantation masters" according to Cain - since the 1960s when the GOP first ran a presidential candidate who opposed the Civil Rights Act and Republicans began eagerly embracing Dixiecrats who couldn't accept change.  In recycling that racial attack and posing as the "responsible" black man, Cain is giving cover to bigots like Rush Limbaugh who routinely smear black Democrats in the same vein.

And, while pandering to the GOP's racial polarization, Cain has the temerity to describe himself as a "real black man" - as opposed to President Obama.  That one is worthy of contempt, but no further comment.

In all of the brouhaha about Cain's rhetoric as he's rising in the GOP polls, appealing directly to the Tea Party base that is steeped in white resentment and hatred of President Obama, Cain's 9-9-9 tax plan tends to get overlooked. It's a 9% tax on income, a 9% tax on business profits and a 9% national sales tax.  Cain would entirely eliminate capital gains taxes - making even worse one of the most unfair income tax loopholes on the books.

On it's face, Cain's 9-9-9 scheme is obviously a tax break for the rich. Worse, it's a tax increase for the folks with the lowest incomes.  And as formulated it's even a bad deal for many businesses and for job creation.

The Wall Street Protests

In a stunningly on-point editorial, the New York Times gets it:

As the Occupy Wall Street protests spread from Lower Manhattan to Washington and other cities, the chattering classes keep complaining that the marchers lack a clear message and specific policy prescriptions. The message — and the solutions — should be obvious to anyone who has been paying attention since the economy went into a recession that continues to sock the middle class while the rich have recovered and prospered. The problem is that no one in Washington has been listening.

Willful Distortion

William Galston of Brookings Institution and The New Republic on George Will's "misunderstanding" of Elizabeth Warren and modern liberalism:

"Baseball should be beyond the whims of the unwashed"

George Will and I have something in common: We were both trained in the close reading of political texts. Will recently applied his interpretive skills to a statement by Elizabeth Warren, who is running for the Democratic senatorial nomination in Massachusetts. Here is what Warren said:

There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own. Nobody. You built a factory out there—good for you. But I want to be clear. You moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for. You hired workers the rest of us paid to educate. You were safe in your factory because of police forces and fire forces that the rest of us paid for. … You built a factory and it turned into something terrific or a great idea—God bless, keep a big hunk of it. But part of the underlying social contract is [that] you take a hunk of that and pay forward for the next kid who comes along. 

After applying to Warren’s words William F. Buckley’s description of John Kenneth Galbraith—a pyromaniac in a field of straw men, refuting propositions no one asserts—Will moves to the gravamen of his argument: Warren’s vision entails a collectivist political agenda. He tartly and uncharitably described that agenda as follows:

Annals of Class Warfare - "Look who's talking" edition!

Quote of the Day

Via Eric Alterman:

“We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few,” the great liberal jurist Louis Brandeis prophesied in the second decade of the 20th century. “But we can't have both.”

"Bernanke's Mostly Right"

Administration critic Robert Kuttner gives Federal Reserve Chair Ben Benanke pretty good marks on the substance of his testimony before Congress this past week.

I would not expect these guys could agree on ordering lunch - and while the substance of the commentary is worrisome, it's heartening to see some of the distance lessen between Bernanke and one of the administration's toughest liberal critics:

Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke says the economy is on the verge of another recession—“close to faltering” was his euphuism of choice in his testimony to Congress Tuesday—and there is only so much the Federal Reserve can do about it.

For once, he is mostly right.

"Krugman's Army?"

Rich Yeselson, an experienced organizer,  research coordinator at Change to Win and historian of social movements in America and Europe, commenting at Ezra Klein's WonkBlog on "Occupy Wall Street":

(T)he emergence of the Wall Street movement is a reminder that the liberal left has not in quite a few years actually driven anything like a mass social movement in this country. When Obama was elected, some people made the mistake of thinking that an election-bounded jolt of energy that conflated a charismatic candidate with a popular political vision was such a movement. Nobody thinks that anymore.

The left does have something important however: a coterie of several thousand intellectuals, academics, writers, and engaged professionals who articulate liberal public policy, generate empirical and analytical expertise through the Internet, the media, and universities, and staff the offices of advocacy groups and progressive politicians on the local and national level.

David Frum: "On the most urgent issue of the day...the GOP is seriously wrong"

I am loathe to credit former "W" Bush speech-writer David Frum - a leading proponent of the Iraq war and author of the nutty and utterly incoherent "Axis of Evil" (Iraq-Iran-North Korea) locution that signaled the cynicism and delusions of the Bush-Cheney inner circle - but increasingly Frum has come around to a relatively reasonable and chastened  conservatism that rejects the aggressive ignorance of the Tea Party Right and takes a step back from the most assertive neo-conservative expressions of global bullying as a "national security" strategy.

In a commentary entitled, paradoxically, "What Romney Gets Right", the conservative gadfly Frum acknowledges that the GOP is totally bankrupt in its economic agenda.

Frum's conclusions about the chameleon Romney are tepid at best ("the only one who has shown any degree of skepticism about the profoundly and dangerously mistaken Republican consensus"), but his indictment of Republican orthodoxy is brutal, considering it's coming from a very conservative author:

On the most urgent economic issue of the day – recovery from the Great Recession – the Republican consensus is seriously wrong.

Jon Stewart on the GOP "Front-Runner" - Mitt Romney & his dueling personalities

The Daily Show
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The "One Percenters" - charting the economic elite

From Think Progress - The top five facts we should know about the wealthiest 1% at the pinnacle of growing U.S. income inequality:

1. The Top 1 Percent Of Americans Owns 40 Percent Of The Nation’s Wealth: As Nobel Laureate Joseph Stiglitz points out, the richest 1 percent of Americans now own 40 percent of the nation’s wealth.

The "Government regulations are killing jobs!" canard - Desperate claims by desperate men

The Republicans are desperate. They have no serious policy agenda in the face of our jobs crisis - other than  recycling the most stale, disreputable and evidence-free assertions about taxes and federal regulations "killing jobs," despite all evidence to the contrary.

Lingering extreme unemployment is driven by lack of consumer demand - there's not enough spending to sustain full recovery.  Businesses - small businesses in particular - are not hiring because they're not making sales. Taxes are lower than ever and government regulations have nothing to do with the extended crisis - other than regulatory failure in the financial sector helping to trigger the economic collapse three years ago.

Conservative commentator and former Reagan White House aide Bruce Bartlett, writing at NYTs Economix, takes the regulation hysterics apart and finds an empty shell of an argument lodged by opportunistic politicians totally comfortable with fabrication and misdirection: