Quote of the Day

Conservative author and economist Bruce Bartlett*:

The truth is that Republicans don’t care anything about the deficit. They made that abundantly clear when they controlled Congress during the dismal George W. Bush years. What all of the current budget discussion is about is defunding programs that benefit Democratic constituencies and if possible destroying institutions, such as labor unions, that historically support the Democratic Party. In other words, it’s all about political power; any concern for the deficit is purely for show, window dressing to disguise the true Republican agenda.

* Bartlett has served on the staffs of Congressmen Ron Paul and Jack Kemp and Senator Roger Jepsen; as staff director of the Joint Economic Committee of Congress; senior policy analyst in the Reagan White House; and deputy assistant secretary for economic policy at the Treasury Department during the George H.W. Bush administration.

Shutdown averted - but the GOP hostage-takers are still firmly in control of our "debate!"

I'm glad that a potentially disastrous, hurtful government shutdown was averted, but it was averted largely on terms the GOP set out early on - with Democrats agreeing to larger spending cuts than Boehner had initially proposed (before his "Tea Party" wing weighed in with their extremist agenda.) Paul Krugman, I think, makes a valid point for Democrats and the White House to consider on the deal's implications and aftermath:

The GOP "negotiates"

(I)t’s one thing for Obama to decide that it was better to give in to Republican hostage-taking than draw a line in the sand; it’s another for him to celebrate the result. Yet that’s just what he did. More than that, he has now completely accepted the Republican frame that spending cuts right now are what America needs.

It’s worth noting that this follows just a few months after another big concession, in which he gave in to Republican demands for tax cuts. The net effect of these two sets of concessions is, of course, a substantial increase in the deficit.

There has to be a better way to get this fundamental message across to the public - that the GOP, consumed for over thirty years with an ideology of tax cuts as the solution to every problem, is NOT even serious about the deficits they brandish like a club, so much as attacking government's role in helping seniors, the disadvantaged and increasingly a struggling middle-class which has seen their wages stagnant, their homes devalued and their jobs at risk.

Update: Steve Benen has a bit more "nuanced" view than Krugman's, HERE.
More:  The Winners? - "Tea Party Activists Give Boehner a Nod of Approval" - Wall Street Journal, HERE.

What can the Affordable Care Act do to contain out-of-control health care costs?

US vs. France-Switzerland-Germany-Belgium-Canada...

Ezra Klein, the Washington Post blogger who wrote extensively and cogently on the health insurance reform debate, had some excellent analysis yesterday at his "Wonkbook" of precisely how the Affordable Care Act to overhaul and extend health insurance can work to begin bringing down our country's exorbitant health care costs.

(You can see by the chart above right that this is a uniquely "American" problem, due primarily to  the system's reliance on profit-driven insurance/health care industries, in comparison to other countries with universal coverage and excellent health outcomes, but better-regulated insurance and delivery systems.)

Klein was looking at ACA in contrast to the Paul Ryan/GOP budget plan - which intends to strip seniors of Medicare in favor of a voucherized private insurance scheme - but his outline is useful as a general overview of just what direction the new health care reform will take in beginning to control costs.

Rapid rise in health care $$$ are the big "fiscal" issue.

Anyone who is truly serious about the future of budget deficits and rational allocation of our GDP understands that the only truly difficult "crisis" looming over the nation's finances is in health care costs - whether they come out of the public or private "pocket" - not the more general fiscal issues that are subject more to demagogy than serious discussion.

Here are the essentials on how ACA can help, from Klein:

The Affordable Care Act’s central hope is that Medicare can lead the health-care system to pay for value, cut down on over-treatment, and cut out treatments that simply don’t work. The law develops Accountable Care Organizations, in which Medicare pays one provider to coordinate all of your care successfully, rather than paying many doctors and providers to add to your care no matter the cost or outcome, as is the current practice. It also begins experimenting with bundled payments, in which Medicare pays one lump-sum for all care related to the successful treatment of a condition rather than paying for every piece of care separately. To help these reforms succeed, and to help all doctors make more cost-effective treatment decisions, the law accelerates research on which drugs and treatments are most effective, and creates and funds the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute to disseminate the data.

The Federal Reserve - Some background and perspective

In their "Breakdown" podcast, American Prospect blogger Matt Yglesias and The Nation's Washington DC editor Chris Hayes explain much of what you need to know about the Federal Reserve, the most obscure and murky enormously powerful institution in the country - and one which isn't easy to understand in terms of its central role in the economy.  Listen HERE.

Current & former Fed Chairs, Bernanke & Greenspan

"I know you think you understand what you thought I said but I'm not sure you realize that what you heard is not what I meant" - former Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan.

After listening to the Yglesias/Hayes podcast, if you want to dig deeper, follow up with Yglesias' useful article HERE in "Democracy" on why progressives should pay more attention to the Fed.

"Money quote" as to why we should care?

Government shutdown looms...Boehner & Company's strategy of "trickle-down" sacrifice

Now is the time for your tears...

In the likely event of a "shutdown of the government," John  Boehner, Paul Ryan, Eric Cantor, et. al. - who have refused to compromise even with their own opening offer of $33 billion in spending cuts to avert a crisis - will continue to get their paychecks.

While the troops in Iraq and Afghanistan may not.

Senate Democrats have passed a bill to impose  "shared sacrifice," denying Congress and the President pay if there is a shutdown,  but so far the GOP-majority House are deferring to their preferred notion of "trickle-down sacrifice" and will keep their own money coming.

(Troops link via commenter "Seth" at Ta-Nehisi Coates/Atlantic.)

"Starve the Beast" made taxpayers poorer (and killed conservatism in the bargain)

Self-proclaimed fiscal conservative and blogger extraordinaire, Andrew Sullivan, has been praising Paul Ryan and the budget proposal he's hatched for the GOP - and he's been taking a lot of well-deserved flak for embracing an agenda that Paul Krugman has correctly identified as "ludicrous and cruel" (HERE in an excellent fact-based column.)

E.D. Kain, writing at Forbes quotes one of Sullivan's readers in response:

[Ryan’s budget] is the culmination of about a thirty year Republican strategy called "starve the beast," by which Republicans have worked to reduce taxes and increase the national deficit as large as possible -  all to create the supposed "deficit crisis" that we now face and to use that crisis to eliminate programs like Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security and a slew of other programs (EPA, SEC, Planned Parenthood, collective bargaining, etc.) that the Republican class has never been able to eliminate through the democratic process.  This "starve the beast" Republican strategy has been openly acknowledged for years and I know you are well aware of it.  And the Ryan "budget plan" is transparently an attempt to cash in on this long-standing political agenda.

Interestingly, also at Forbes, last year the conservative commentator Conor Friedersdorf clearly offered an analysis that should be obvious to anyone like Sullivan who touts "fiscal conservatism" as a guiding principle. In short, "Starve the Beast" proponents - the kind of reckless "conservatives" like Paul Ryan, who voted for the Bush tax cuts and wants  even bigger breaks for high earners - are themselves responsible for the growth in debt and the ensuing obligations on average taxpayers to sustain fiscal balance over the long run, a prospect which no sane person believes can be done without increases in progressive taxation. Fiedersdorf "headlined" his piece forthrightly - "How 'Starve the Beast' Made the Taxpayer Poorer."

Phony inflation hysterics...and ice-skating in Hell today

Yes, apparently it's frozen over Down Under, as I'm agreeing with The National Review.

Senior Editor Ramesh Ponnuru has written something sensible on the false inflation fears that are being paraded in many circles as opposition to the "quantitative easing" policy of the Fed to get more money moving in a lagging economy:

Talking back to the Banksters - Keep the Cap on Debit Card Fees!

Spot from American Family Voices

Simon Johnson has the story in today's NYT on grassroots efforts to push back against the Banksters' lobbying operation to water down Dodd-Frank financial reform:

As a lobbying group, the largest American banks have been dominant throughout the latest boom-bust-bailout cycle – capturing the hearts and minds of the Bush and Obama administrations, as well as the support of most elected representatives on Capitol Hill.

Their reign, however, is being seriously challenged – finally – by an alliance of retailers, big and small, on whose behalf a variety of ads are now running, including on television (such as this one, by Americans for Job Security), the Web (such as the one above, by American Family Voices) and a powerful radio spot directly attacking the too-big–to-fail banks.

The Common Sense Guide to the Great Deficit Debate - Part 6

The 6th segment of our "Common Sense" deficit primer is up today at Winning Progressive, HERE. This part focuses on solutions moving forward.  Thanks to the folks at Winning Progressive for their great work and for helping to make the "primer" more accessible and available.

One more Paul Ryan post...

Government is evil - selfishness is the only virtue.

"The reason I got involved in public service, by and large, if I had to credit one thinker, one person, it would be Ayn Rand," Ryan said at a D.C. gathering five years ago honoring the author of Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead.

Quote via Digby.

The Congressional Budget Office rains cold water on poor, screwy Paul Ryan

"But if you turn it this way..."

Wisconsin Representative and GOP Budget Czar Paul Ryan is becoming something of an obsession here at  "Titanic."  But his plan to privatize Medicare and shrink the government is getting serious kudos in the press.  David Brooks, in a NY Times column, has attempted to sanctify Ryan's scheme as the "adult in the room" - an earnest voice that "serious" people ignore at their peril.  (In better than average form,  he's about half right.  Attention must be paid to the GOP's extremist foray into social nihilism.)

Brooks writes: 

The Ryan budget will not be enacted this year, but it will immediately reframe the domestic policy debate.

His proposal will set the standard of seriousness for anybody who wants to play in this discussion. It will become the 2012 Republican platform, no matter who is the nominee. Any candidate hoping to win that nomination will have to be able to talk about government programs with this degree of specificity, so it will improve the G.O.P. primary race...

Paul Ryan has grasped reality with both hands. He’s forcing everybody else to do the same.

This assessment - described by one wag as a "wet kiss" - is typical of the "serious" face being painted in the media and throughout the Beltway on the hustle that the zealous Congressman has hatched and that the GOP has chosen as it's fiscal cris de coeur.  And as further testament to Ryan's seriousness, serious Sarah Palin has Tweeted in with, "Serious and necessary leadership has rolled out serious and necessary reform proposal." It doesn't get more serious than that!

But sooner or later reality intrudes on most of these purely ideological enterprises and in Ryan's case it's come sooner - in the form of the staid, non-partisan Congressional Budget Office beginning to crunch his numbers. Here's the scoop from TPM Muckraker:

Ringing endorsement of Ryan's Roadmap

Andrew Sullivan, who has moved his blog over to The Daily Beast, is one of those pundits who has been offering praise of the unhinged Congressman from Wisconsin, Paul Ryan and his fiscal Roadmap - now the official GOP scheme and apparently designed as a guide for anyone interested in driving America off the cliff.  But in one telling line, Sullivan offers a great example of the old cliche about "having friends like these, you don't need enemies":

What I admire is Ryan's willingness to cop to the suffering and sacrifice that the Bush years made inevitable in its fiscal irresponsibility.

GOP Pols: "A government shutdown for thee - but not for me!"

 "Shared sacrifice!"

Rep. Paul Ryan*, our current poster boy for GOP wing-nuttery, whoppers and wackiness, is on record as stating that the looming government shutdown by Congresss "sounds worse than it probably is." But...uh...Congressman, for starters  government workers will go without paychecks and that's tough for them and their families.  Right?

Well, that's sort of true. Despite the shutdown, which cuts off funds to most federal operations, at least one group of government workers will still be getting paid.  Guess who?  The answer is HERE.  (Hint: Paul Ryan is one of them.)

* Note: Today is our fun-filled "Ryanathon," so there'll be no commentary here that doesn't include his name.  I promise to come up with something tomorrow morning that doesn't necessitate another picture of the congressman's vacant stare.

Where's the "fierce urgency of now?"

"Yes, we can!"

As President Obama begins his Campaign 2012 for re-election against a GOP field that ranges from the terminally disingenuous to the dangerously demagogic, we have a "must-read" commentary from Ezra Klein (the WaPo's Wonkbook), reflecting on some undeniable weaknesses of the administration's approach to dealing with its opposition - most notably a failure to take a compelling counter-argument directly and dramatically to the American people:

I don’t blame Obama for being unable to change Washington. I don’t blame him for being unable to pass cap-and-trade. But I blame him for ceasing to try. And for sometimes letting what can be done distract from what needs to be done...

Back when Obama won the South Carolina primary, he warned of a “status quo that extends beyond any particular party and right now that status quo is fighting back with everything it’s got.” If anything, he was understating his case. But he was right to try to inspire voters to cast away their skepticism, to say that “where we are met with cynicism and doubt and fear and those who tell us that we can’t, we will respond with that timeless creed that sums up the spirit of the American people in three simple words — yes, we can.”

Lately, the administration’s creed can be summed up more modestly: “Hopefully, the Senate won’t let them.”

The contrast with the 2008 campaign — which correctly saw some virtue in ambition, even if what it promised was unrealistic — is stark.

Read Klein's entire piece, "What happened to the 'fierce urgency of now?'", HERE.

GOP budget czar Paul Ryan proposes killing Medicare - and replacing it with "Obamacare" for seniors

Forbes' columnist & health care consultant Rick Ungar has the story:

Ryan, 3/23/10: "Obamacare is a fiscal Frankenstein, it’s a train wreck."

Despite the Republican propensity to compare the Affordable Care Act to something akin to the antichrist, word is that GOP budget leader, Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI), will propose a dramatic change in the Medicare program that will closely mirror the key features of Obamacare – only for seniors.

The proposal would do away with (for everyone presently under 55 years of age) the current single payer government system for senior medical care and replace it with a program whereby seniors would choose private health insurance coverage from a menu of approved private health insurers. The government would subsidize the program by giving seniors a voucher to be used in purchasing coverage, the amount of such payment to be defined according to need.

The columnist then asks, "Does this sound familiar?"  Well, yes.  It's a government subsidized exchange system following the model of what the GOP derisively dubbed "Obamacare" - the Affordable Care Act of 2010 that reformed our health insurance system for those under 65. But there's a poison pill in this "Ryancare" bill. A Congressional Budget Office study last November determined that seniors would likely either face higher premiums or less extensive coverage under Ryan's scheme to kill Medicare. 

Forbes' Ungar explains:

Unfortunately, while Ryan has emulated a number of features from the ACA, he’s forgotten to make the adjustments the law makes to actually ensure that health care is more accessible to beneficiaries rather than more profitable to health insurance companies.

Making private insurance work for the younger demographics is far easier than trying to make it work for the elderly due to the most basic tenant of health insurance – the insurance pool must be balanced by having 80 healthy people in the pool to pay for every 20 who are ill.

Given that most Americans 65 and older are a walking pre-existing medical condition, it is difficult to imagine how functioning insurance pools can be constructed from a universe filed with these people.

Shutdown! - the "Tea Party GOP" plays a dangerous game in a fragile economy

The Financial Times' Clive Crook weighs in on the GOP holding the country and the economy hostage to their destructive agenda:

Rep. Paul Ryan: "It sounds worse than it probably is."

Republicans in Congress are playing an outrageous game of brinkmanship over the budget for the current fiscal year.

Some Tea Party supporters happily contemplate a shutdown of government at the end of this week....

(W)ith the US labour market at a turning point, whatever Congress can do to undermine confidence and add to uncertainty, it is doing. Just as the private sector shows signs of reviving, Capitol Hill is threatening to drag it back down.

'Tis the season - A tax chart

Be sure to keep this one in mind over the next ten days...

    Center for Budget and Policy Priorities

This is from the New York Times "Economix."  There is no indication what external events such as periodic upswings in profits or specific tax policies affected the "bumps" within the overall decades-long decline in corporate taxes as % of GDP, but as a general trend the article's author, Nancy Folbre, an economics professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, notes:

In 2008, the Government Accountability Office reported that 83 of the 100 largest publicly traded corporations in the United States had subsidiaries in jurisdictions listed as tax havens; it cautiously emphasized that this did not prove that their decisions to locate there were motivated by tax minimization.

The British journalist Nicholas Shaxson takes a bolder and more aggressive swipe at the issue in a new book, “Treasure Islands,” arguing that the globalization of tax evasion is undermining fiscal and economic stability in developed and developing nations alike...

The most vivid character in Robert Louis Stevenson’s beloved adventure story “Treasure Island” was the one-legged sailor Long John Silver. He never described himself and his colleagues as pirates. No, they were “gentlemen of fortune.”

We Are One!

In memoriam, Martin Luther King. Stand up!

Via Digby.

E.J. Dionne takes on anti-government radical Paul Ryan's "Budget Roadmap"... and challenges the President

A "must-read" column from The Washington Post's E.J. Dionne, focusing on the GOP budget being hatched by Paul Ryan of Wisconsin:

Americans are about to learn how much is at stake in our larger budget fight, how radical the new conservatives in Washington are, and the extent to which some politicians would transfer even more resources from the have-nots and have-a-littles to the have-a-lots.

"I won't return to the failed theories..."

And you wonder: Will President Obama welcome the responsibility of engaging the country in this big argument, or will he shrink from it? Will his political advisers remain robotically obsessed with poll results about the 2012 election, or will they embrace Obama’s historic obligation — and opportunity — to win the most important struggle over the role of government since the New Deal.

Ryan: "Who is John Galt?"

This week, Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) will announce the House Republicans’ budget plan, which is expected to include cuts in many programs for the neediest Americans.

["Titanic" ed. interjects:  Ryan - a House denizen who has supported every tax-cut measure that drove up deficits during his tenure, except those targeted to middle and lower income folks in the President's stimulus package - is perhaps most notable to date for having his staffers read the hysterically anti-government Ayn Rand pot-boiler, "Atlas Shrugged." This bizarre indulgence in ideological zealotry by an elected official could only be matched on the liberal side by, say, a revelation that Bernie Sanders was passing  out "The Communist Manifesto" to his Senate aides. The extremist Rand and her followers preached that progressive taxation, for instance, is "immoral."]

Dept. of Aghast at Executive Bonuses

 Appropriately, from the Wall Street Journal:

"Heckuva job..."

Transocean Ltd. had its "best year in safety performance" despite the explosion of its Deepwater Horizon rig (leased by British Petroleum) that left 11 dead and oil gushing into the Gulf of Mexico, the world's largest offshore-rig company said in a securities filing Friday.

Accordingly, Transocean's executives received two-thirds of their target safety bonus. Safety accounts for 25% of the equation that determines the yearly cash bonuses, along with financial factors including new rig contracts...

In a filing on executive pay, Transocean said, "Notwithstanding the tragic loss of life in the Gulf of Mexico, we achieved an exemplary statistical safety record." Based on the total rate of incidents and their severity, "we recorded the best year in safety performance in our company's history."

 No further comment.  Article here.

Jobs, jobs jobs...

Here - "Hidden Bad Signs in a Good Job Report" - the Wall Street Journal digs a bit deeper into the latest relatively optimistic jobs stats:

1/08-3/11 jobs growth - Steve Benen, Political Animal

(An) overarching issue is the number of people who remain unemployed. Though the rate is dropping, there are still 13.5 million people who would like to work, but can’t get a job and that doesn’t include those who dropped out of the labor force. The broader U-6 unemployment rate that includes people marginally attached to the labor force continued to decline but still remains at 15.7%. So much slack in the job market means that employers don’t feel as much pressure to increase wages.

Finally, there are still some lagging sectors. Amid the broader jobs increases, construction continued to shed jobs, a reminder that the housing market continues to struggle. Meanwhile, local governments facing budget crunches are shedding jobs, 15,000 last month, and more cuts are on the table across the country.

Sing it again, Woody: "Some men rob you with a six-gun..."

  "Some rob you with mortgage securitization... 

"I've yet to see an outlaw drive a family from their home..."

a computer database... 

and a fountain pen!" 

 Too Big to Jail? 

The robo-signing crime wave -
    "60 Minutes" is on it!
Watch HERE.   Via Atrios.

Part 5 of "Common Sense" Guide to the Great Deficit Debate at "Winning Progressive"

Winning Progressive has another segment of the "Common Sense" Deficit Primer up at their site this morning - HERE. Today's focus is on the "deficit hype" as cover for the right-wing strategy to shift political power to the economic elite.

Again, thanks to WP for spreading the word!

Unionism, perceptions and gender

Natasha Vargas-Cooper has an insightful take in today's New York Times on an underlying gender issue in the ongoing protests of public employees and their supporters in the Midwest - one that is embedded in the current weakened position of the union movement.

"What did you do in the war, Mommy?"

WHEN a couple dozen brawny, uniformed and helmeted firefighters, led by a bagpipe player, marched through a crowd of pro-union protesters in Madison, Wis., last month, I knew, almost to a certainty, that Gov. Scott Walker had picked a fight with the wrong crew.

As the firemen assembled on the Statehouse steps, the swelling, boisterous crowd, which had raucously encircled and occupied the Capitol for days, pushing back against Governor Walker’s plan to strip public employee unions of their collective bargaining rights, all of a sudden slipped into silent reverence.

(pic via proud Dad, Marc Cooper)

While the plan exempts policemen and firemen, the first responders rallied under the oldest first principle of militant unionism: An Injury to One is an Injury to All. And the presence of these mostly white, husky, mustachioed firemen — many with soot still speckling their uniforms — had highlighted a major issue that generally goes undetected by the news media when covering labor conflicts 

In short, it’s what my old union called “the Husband Issue.”

Allow me to explain.

The real story of the original Tea Party - a revolt against tax breaks for a mega-corporation

Very illuminating bit of true "Boston Tea Party" history from Thom Hartmann -



Via Crooks & Liars.

This is insane

"Slackers!"

Four - count 'em, FOUR! - Tea Party-GOP state senators have been able, via filibuster, to deny 34,000 unemployed residents of Missouri $105 million in extended unemployment benefits, after the federally-funded extension passed the GOP-led state House 123-14 two months ago and had the support of Republican Senate leaders and Democratic Gov. Jay Nixon.  More HERE.  Words fail...

Via Dan O at Beautiful Horizons.

Update: And, unfortunately, the context for that bit of political pathology is THIS news from Economix @ NYTs:  "Average length of unemployment rises again..."

"There is no US federal debt crisis"

"Dangerous subversives!" or just...uh...Republicans?

Harvard professor of political economy emeritus, former aide to Pres. Johnson and consultant to the US Treasury Francis Bator states it flat out in the Financial Times: "There is no federal debt crisis (as distinct from a governance crisis and a tax-phobia crisis.)" Well worth checking out  (HERE) for some realistic perspective in contrast to the hysterics, half-truths and anti-government demagogy that are routinely injected into the  politics of deficits, taxes, spending and debt.  Key excerpts below:

In 2010, CEO Pay Went Up 27% While Worker Pay Went Up 2%

I've got nothing to say.  More at "Think Progress."

Of the 1%, by the 1%, for the 1%

Nobel-Prize winner and former chief economist for the World Bank, Joe Stiglitz takes on the dramatic  increase in disparities of income and wealth in the US @ Vanity Fair:

Americans have been watching protests against oppressive regimes that concentrate massive wealth in the hands of an elite few. Yet in our own democracy, 1 percent of the people take nearly a quarter of the nation’s income—an inequality even the wealthy will come to regret.

It’s no use pretending that what has obviously happened has not in fact happened... In terms of wealth rather than income, the top 1 percent control 40 percent. Their lot in life has improved considerably. Twenty-five years ago, the corresponding figures were 12 percent (of income) and 33 percent (of wealth.) One response might be to celebrate the ingenuity and drive that brought good fortune to these people, and to contend that a rising tide lifts all boats. That response would be misguided.

Graph - Lane Kenworthy

While the top 1 percent have seen their incomes rise 18 percent over the past decade, those in the middle have actually seen their incomes fall. For men with only high-school degrees, the decline has been precipitous—12 percent in the last quarter-century alone. All the growth in recent decades—and more—has gone to those at the top. In terms of income equality, America lags behind any country in the old, ossified Europe that President George W. Bush used to deride. Among our closest counterparts are Russia with its oligarchs and Iran. While many of the old centers of inequality in Latin America, such as Brazil, have been striving in recent years, rather successfully, to improve the plight of the poor and reduce gaps in income, America has allowed inequality to grow...

The good news - Jobs numbers were up in March

Ezra Klein takes a second look...

I have no idea if Tim Pawlenty is really this foolish!

"I have respect for Michelle Bachmann."

Ryan Avent @ The Economist catches former Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty - one of those GOP candidates deemed "serious" by pundits - issuing a pronouncement based on "thoroughly discredited fringe beliefs."  What Avent dubs his "strange ideas" indicates TeePaw apparently doesn't have any more of a clue about economic policy than that other noisesome GOP 2012 hopeful & Tea Party icon Michelle Bachmann, whose whacky screeds suggest she's the insistent voice of Loony Toons Town in our public discourse.

The Economist's Avent:

TIM PAWLENTY, former Minnesota governor and potential Republican presidential candidate, has thoughts on money:

The former Minnesota governor said the administration has devalued the dollar by injecting "fiat money" into the economy. Former Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty (R) predicted Tuesday that the U.S. will face a double-dip recession that could last all the way until the 2012 elections. The likely presidential candidate said the government, under President Obama, has devalued the dollar by injecting "fiat money" into the economy in an attempt to boost it — a plan he said will be damaging in the long-run.

This is unfortunate. Let's review the reasons why:

The Titanic's April Fools link

"I'm pretty sure there will be duck-hunting in Heaven."

Except it's not...

It's former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee - HERE - doing his 24/7 FOX Star fool thing.

 Update: Steve Benen has a lot more on this bit of fake "history" Hucksterism.

No fool...

"Darkness on the edge of town..."

Springsteen writes a letter to his hometown newspaper, which is something more of us should be doing:

Thank you for your March 27 front-page story by Michael Symons, "As poverty rises, cuts target aid." The article is one of the few that highlights the contradictions between a policy of large tax cuts, on the one hand, and cuts in services to those in the most dire conditions, on the other. 

Also, you've shone some light on anti-poverty workers and analysts such as Adele LaTourette, Meara Nigro, Cecilia Zalkind and Raymond Castro, among others, all of whom have something important to add to the discussion: real information and actual facts about what is happening below the poverty line. These are voices that in our current climate are having a hard time being heard, not just in New Jersey, but nationally. 

Finally, your article shows that the cuts are eating away at the lower edges of the middle class, not just those already classified as in poverty, and are likely to continue to get worse over the next few years. I'm always glad to see my hometown newspaper covering these issues.

Bruce Springsteen

COLTS NECK

(Click here to see the article: As poverty rises, NJ cuts target aid.)      Via WitnessLA.

Mississippi mud pie: Haley's Lil' White Lie...

"Where I come from the White Citizens Council were town leaders."

Ezra Klein notes Mississippi Governor Haley Barbor claiming he'd “dug out of a $720 million budget hole in two years without raising anybody’s taxes."

Klein: The problem? Barbour had raised a couple of taxes. But give him his credit: He hadn’t raised income taxes. Rather, he’d raised cigarette taxes and taxes on facilities for the mentally disabled — taxes, in other words, that fall fairly regressively.

Turns out he’s working in a time-honored tradition in the South.

The Gap

Image courtesy of Super Yachts, Lustre Ltd.

25% of home-owners are "under water."

As has been noted with a certain sense of alarm by those among us who believe that a rising economic tide should "lift all boats" rather than just luxury yachts, the income gap between the middle class and even "upper-" and "upper-upper-" middle class as well as lower income folks,  and the economic elite has become much greater over the last 30 years.    

Between 1980 and 2005, more than 80% of the increase in total incomes went to the top 1%.  

Eighty per-cent of the growth in incomes went to one per-cent - a fact that is in my view stunning and at least part of the reason we're in such precarious economic straits.  When wealth doesn't "trickle down," everything from our tax policies to our political discourse gets skewed by the resulting imbalance of economic power and the country suffers.  (Authentic conservatives, incidentally, should take note of this and be as alarmed as liberals or "progressives", because radical increases in economic inequality totally undermine the social cohesion, stable communities and family life, and moderation in our political system that traditionally draws folks to the  "conservative" promise - as distinct from the radicalism of free-market ideologues and right-wing extremists or self-serving agendas of the economic elite that "normal" conservatives often find themselves in bed with.)

Institutional inflation-mongering: bogus hysterics in service of special interests & the economic elite

                                   David Leonhardt @ NYTimes' Biz Day writes: 

 

(Y)ou might think Fed officials would now be doing everything possible to ensure a solid recovery. But they’re not. 

Once again, many of them are worried that the Fed is doing too much. And once again, the odds are rising that it’s doing too little. 

Founders' feud

"My country is the world, my religion is to do good."

Given the Tea Partiers' feverish hijacking of American history, with their largely ignorant "WWTJD?" dogmatics ("What would Thomas Jefferson do?") offered as a simple-minded panacea to current problems, it's useful to look back at the complex and flawed human beings who occupied the "origins" piece of our complicated and often painful history. 

For example, "founding fathers" John Adams and Thomas Paine hated each other. Adams called Paine's clarion 1776 manifesto "Common Sense," an "ignorant, malicious, short-sighted, crapulous mass."  Paine's opinion of Adam's tenure in the White House?  "Some people talk of impeaching John Adams, but I am for softer measures. I would keep him to make fun of."

Historian William Hogeland has a fascinating essay (posted at Naked Capitalism & New Deal 2.0) on the roots of this mutual antipathy, entitled "How Thomas Paine and John Adams Clashed Over Income Inequality." He brings Paine, in particular, into clearer focus and in regard to one of our very real and pressing current problems that has not been solved in the ensuing 200-plus years - a problem that, in truth, is getting much worse.

Some excerpts from Hogeland's piece that are especially interesting:

The Paine-Adams antipathy wasn’t just personal. Its sources lay in the founding generation’s deep political divisions over economic equality...

Part 4 of "Common Sense" primer on the deficit hype is up at Winning Progressive

This piece focuses on the attacks on Social Security and the real need to control rapidly rising health care costs as a piece of our overall spending, whether the government is providing insurance via Medicare or not.  Thanks to the folks at Winning Progressive for spreading the word!

"Shoeless Joe" Stiglitz vs. the Alan Simpson & Erskine Bowles Deficit Reduction Proposal

“Macroeconomic policy can never be devoid of politics..."

Joe Stiglitz is a Nobel-Prize winning economist, currently professor at Columbia University, who chaired Bill Clinton's Council of Economic Advisors from 1995-97 and was Chief Economist at the World Bank.  He won the Nobel Prize in economics in 2001 for his work on "market imperfections." He's long been a critic of free market theorists - who he regards as market "fundamentalists" - and has written extensively on the destabilizing effects of economic globalization.

Stiglitz plays in powerful circles, but he's not a "team player."  He left the Clinton administration after losing an ongoing duel with Larry Summers. In an American Prospect profile ten years or so ago, entitled "Shoeless Joe" and highlighting the often-disheveled professor's unorthodoxy, Jonathan Chait quoted Stiglitz' take on his stint as CEA chief:   

"When I was in the lawyer- and politician-dominated White House environment, I often felt that I had arrived in another world," he recounted. "I had expected lower standards of evidence for assertions than would be expected in a professional article, but I had not expected that the evidence offered would be, in so many instances, so irrelevant, and that so many vacuous sentences, sentences whose meaning and import simply baffled me, would be uttered."

Stiglitz' intellectual credibility and experience combined with his tendency to tell unwelcome truths in high places is why he's such a valuable voice. What this little panegyric is getting to is a broadside that Stiglitz has just fired contrary to other former presidential CEA chairs who had banded together in a joint "letter" to promote the much-touted opinions of Deficit Commission co-chairs Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson - pushing an agenda of "compromise" cutbacks to reduce budget deficits long-term. 

"Social Security is a milk cow with 310 million tits!"

Commission co-chair Alan Simpson, you might recall, is the terminally grouchy public scold who makes cracks like, "Social Security was never a retirement" and "it was a good idea when it started, but may no longer be so" - that is when he's not babbling about "the green weenie","sparrow belch" or how "a lot of blood, hair, and eyeballs have to lay on the floor before we (the Simpson-Bowles commission) finish." (Simpson's lips are so loose and he's so dyspeptic there's a StuffAlanSimpsonSays.com website.) Why President Obama chose  - along with "corporate Democrat," former Clinton staffer and investment banker Bowles - this disgruntled old coot to head a key commission looking at the future of Social Security, among other major long-term budget issues, is one I'll never understand.

But back to Joe Stiglitz.  Arguably he's no more the diplomat than Simpson, but his tongue is connected to his brain, not his spleen.  Stiglitz calls the Simpson-Bowles proposals a "near suicide pact" and "a set of unprincipled political compromises that would lead to a weaker America — with slower growth and a more divided society."

Strong stuff. And the substance of Joe Stiglitz' "counter-letter" to his fellow former CEA chairs regarding the deficit commission is compelling:

Terrible Democratic strategy on the budget...

Think Progress reports - a "Tea Partyized" GOP win is likely in current budget "negotiations":

Unfortunately the administration backed away from its budget even before the negotiations started, and the Tea Party is calling the shots in the House. So instead of negotiation between the president’s original level and House leadership’s original level, we’re stuck negotiating between the Tea Party’s $100 billion, and the new status quo’s $50 billion. That means the likely compromise is right where the House Republican leadership always wanted it: around $74 billion.

That’s not much of a compromise if we end up with what the House Republican leadership wanted in the first place.

The full "Think Progress" analysis is HERE.  "The Tea Party is calling the shots in the House" - OMFG! But bending to the crazies seems to be working for the GOP, which is getting it's original offer as the "compromise" with weakened Democrats. This apparent failure is the fruit of the mid-term debacle, of Democratic timidity and - among the base that worked hard for Obama - of our having let the Tea Party activists take center stage at the grass-roots and in the media circus after our guy won the Presidency.      (via Ezra Klein, Wonkbook)

Update: Steve Benen has more on this at Political Animal, HERE.  Up-update: Can GOP over-reach give the Dems leverage?  Brian Beutler, HERE at TPM, has the latest on the potential for a government shutdown.

The unbearable hypocrisy of being a GOP "deficit hawk"

Exhibit A:
Sen. Richard Shelby, Republican, Alabama

At left we have Sen. Shelby expressing his concern over mounting deficits, by pointing his finger at the year before they began growing out of control - 1980. 1980 was, of course, the year the great anti-government fiscal conservative Ronald Reagan was elected President - and proceeded to initiate the Gospel of Tax Cuts, a scheme hatched by the economic elites and which got the federal  deficit ball rolling big-time. 

Thank you Senator Shelby, for reminding us of "the good old days" before the GOP's "Starve the Beast!" strategy to break government took hold.

Currently Shelby - when he's not attacking consumer advocate Elizabeth Warren or fighting regulation of the banking industry - is railing against the dangers of the deficit with public statements such as this:

“Washington must put its fiscal house in order. American taxpayers are rightly infuriated by the federal government’s disregard for the same economic principles that govern every household and business budget.”  

Aside from the nonsensical simplification that the federal government should adhere to identical budgeting principles as "every household," at least let's acknowledge that's a clearly expressed point of view.

But behind the hot air, we find "fiscal conservative" Shelby inserting the pork-barrel “Shelby provision” into the 2010 budget extension.  The "Shelby provision" forces NASA to spend $1.4 million daily on the Constellation moon program, which it already canceled and doesn’t even want:

3rd part of "Common Sense" Guide to the Great Deficit Debate at "Winning Progressive"

 Winning Progressive has the third segment of our "Common Sense" deficit primer up today.  This segment focuses on the drastic growth in income inequality over the last 30 years.  Thanks to WP for spreading the word!

How did GE pull it off ? - "Some people rob you with a six-gun..."

"...some people rob you with a fountain pen"

And some people rob you with lobbyists re-writing the tax laws.

It's been reported widely - including here - that General Electric paid zero taxes on over $14 billion in profits for 2010. What's gotten a bit less attention is the part of the story where GE not only doesn't pay any taxes, but got a "tax benefit" of $3.2 billion - which presumably means that Uncle Sam owes GE a multi-billion dollar credit against future taxes (assuming the sharks at GE ever are liable for any.)

As the New York Times story explains in painful and anger-inducing detail, GE is typical of large corporations - although obviously more skilled than many - in employing a small army of well-funded lobbyists to work Washington for tax breaks, loopholes, "incentives", "credits", etc. - ad nauseum.

This is the background to what are called "tax expenditures" - i.e. money that the US Treasury forgoes on taxable income and corporate profits because of various "work-arounds" as fine print  written into the tax code.  It is a huge issue for corporations like GE, but it's an imbalance in our tax system that comes into play with taxation on wealthy individuals as well.