"Economically, Could Obama Be America's Best President?"
By Jennifer Rubin January 17 at 10:00 am 655Comments [700 now]
Jim DeMint, president of the Heritage Foundation and founder of the Senate Conservatives Fund (Evan Vucci/Associated Press)
For some time, the right-wing has been trying to paint mainstream Republicans as amenable to keeping Obamacare. No, really. They suggest the John Boehners and Mitch McConnells of the political world would be content to keep the health-care law .. http://www.redstate.com/2014/01/16/republicans-begin-ground-work-to-walk-away-from-obamacare-opposition/ , maybe just fiddle around the edges. (One of those accused of such treachery, Doug Holtz-Eakin of the American Action Forum, says that is hogwash: “Nobody has written, researched, testified, or whined more about . . . ObamaCare than me.”) The far right accused opponents of the shutdown as, in effect, voting for Obamacare. This is all poppycock, but it’s worth asking what the hard-liners are up to.
As a starting point, every GOP congressman and senator has voted multiple times to get rid of Obamacare, defund it, eliminate the individual mandate as a way of gutting it, stall it or offer “outs” from the mandate to, again, undermine the exchanges. It’s a ruse, a sneaky way of “accommodating” Obamacare, I guess. Moreover, if you look at all the Republican proposals for replacing Obamacare, they focus on creating patient-centered health care, eliminating the individual mandate and removing a minimum definition of “insurance.” This is true of everyone from Yuval Levin of the Ethics and Public Policy Center to Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) to Rep. Tom Price (R-Ga.). There is no “Obamacare lite” anywhere to be seen. These and other conservatives (including every single House member in two budget votes) want to limit increases in Medicaid, block grant it and let the states experiment with various cost-effective methods for providing health care to the poor.
In other words, the right-wing echo chamber is making this up. Shocking, I know, from people who said all Republicans had to do was “not blink” in order to win the shutdown fight. A GOP operative involved in the Senate races says, “This is an incredibly disingenuous and false charge that highlights the extent to which some on the right are willing to blatantly mislead conservatives in order to advance their own agenda. It’s also sad that instead of keeping the focus and the fire on [Senate Majority Leader] Harry Reid and the Democrats, the Senate Conservatives Fund and its few remaining allies are willing to cannibalize the Republican Party at all costs.”
The rationale for making up such a story is simple: If RINOs are for the very same thing that “real” conservatives are, then there is no need for “real” conservatives to attack the “squishy” Republicans. Heaven forbid this should come down to tactics or judgment; if it did, voters would recall the immensely destructive shutdown, compare that to the full-court press possible only after the government shutdown ended and conclude the “real” Republicans can’t be trusted to go down to the corner drug store, let alone win nominations in states the GOP could capture.
There are real differences in the party on issues such as the National Security Agency, immigration reform and even gay marriage, but you can bet the ranch that you will find zero Republicans in 2014 running for House or Senate vowing to “mend, not end” Obamacare. The need to create disunity and ill feelings even when there is perfect consensus is one unfortunate habit of the far right. It’s also a giveaway.
These groups, bloggers and radio talkers thrive when the GOP loses and when they can gin up their followers against fellow Republicans. I suppose if they ever tried to gin up opposition merely to Democrats there would be nothing special about them, and they’d get no attention. But, as we know, Heritage Action, Madison Project and, especially, the Senate Conservatives Fund make a tidy living getting donors to give them money to attack incumbents and incumbents’ good-faith efforts to, with only a House majority, curtail the Obama agenda.
The desire for confrontation for the sake of confrontation is at odds with what the majority of the electorate wants, and the GOP vs. GOP fight instigated by the far right is like manna from heaven for the Democrats. They don’t need to run nasty ads against Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) when the Senate Conservatives Fund does it for them.
The 2014 election will be critical not only for control of Congress, but also for control of the party. The shutdown, a plugged-in GOP activist pointed out to me, convinced main-street Republicans, business leaders and party loyalists that the far right was beyond reason. There is no accommodating the far right, they figured out, because the far right yearns for fights and is not amenable to logical arguments. Therefore, the only way to save the party and prevent its destruction at the hands of radicals is to win. A novel concept — beating the other guys in an election!
There are legions of pragmatic conservatives stepping up to the plate to guide the party back onto the rails and rally voters behind a banner of conservative reform. You now see a crop of solid, electable Senate candidates. You see groups like the Chamber of Commerce engaging in primaries. And you see elected leaders, including House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) and McConnell pushing back against nonsense spread by the far right.
In actuality, it will be over, one way or another, in a few months when the primary results are all in. If the Senate Conservatives Fund goes to the mat on its crop of tea party candidates and loses decisively, it would suggest that it is out of touch, not the “establishment.”
This doesn’t mean there aren’t good-faith disputes between more-conservative and less-conservative members of the GOP. There certainly are. But it does point out that some right-wing operatives (bearing little resemblance to actual home-grown conservatives engaging with their leaders) may fall on their faces. Once the element dedicated to dissension and dissembling about fellow Republicans fails before the only people who really matter (voters), the gig is up.
Now don’t lose any sleep over how Senate Conservatives Fund will pay the rent. It and others will spin a tale of “big money,” betrayal and goodness knows what else to keep on plying the base for cash. But elaborate conspiracy theories no longer will work. They will cease to be taken seriously. There is nothing, in the end, as compelling as an election — especially one in which the margin of victory is substantial.
Just for my own reference: since the IMF has concluded .. http://www.ieo-imf.org/ieo/pages/CompletedEvaluation227.aspx .. that it loved austerity not wisely but too well, I thought I would add another austerity/growth chart to the file. Instead of using changes in structural budget balance, I thought it might be useful to just look at spending. This one uses data from the IMF’s World Economic Outlook database .. http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/weo/2014/01/weodata/index.aspx .. to compare changes in total government spending (in national currencies — I didn’t correct for inflation, but that won’t matter) with changes in real GDP; I look at advanced countries, dropping the very small ones like San Mario. The picture looks like this:
Prima facie, cutting spending depresses economies.
.. that last is the one this one replies to .. i like the title, lol, and it's "See also"s are a worthy, 'austerity when it is spending which would help? nahnah', brunch ..
"Economically, Could Obama Be America's Best President?"
Paul Krugman NOV. 6, 2014
The race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet midterms to men of understanding. Or as I put it on the eve .. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/03/opinion/03krugman.html .. of another Republican Party sweep, politics determines who has the power, not who has the truth. Still, it’s not often that a party that is so wrong about so much does as well as Republicans did on Tuesday.
I’ll talk in a bit about some of the reasons that may have happened. But it’s important, first, to point out that the midterm results are no reason to think better of the Republican position on major issues. I suspect that some pundits will shade their analysis to reflect the new balance of power — for example, by once again pretending that Representative Paul Ryan’s budget proposals are good-faith attempts to put America’s fiscal house in order, rather than exercises in deception and double-talk. [see Ludicrous and Cruel, below] But Republican policy proposals deserve more critical scrutiny, not less, now that the party has more ability to impose its agenda.
So now is a good time to remember just how wrong the new rulers of Congress have been about, well, everything.
First, there’s economic policy. According to conservative dogma, which denounces any regulation of the sacred pursuit of profit, the financial crisis of 2008 — brought on by runaway financial institutions — shouldn’t have been possible. But Republicans chose not to rethink their views even slightly. They invented an imaginary history .. http://www.ritholtz.com/blog/2011/11/examining-the-big-lie-how-the-facts-of-the-economic-crisis-stack-up/ .. in which the government was somehow responsible for the irresponsibility of private lenders, while fighting any and all policies that might limit the damage. In 2009, when an ailing economy desperately needed aid, John Boehner, soon to become the speaker of the House, declared: “It’s time for government to tighten their belts .. http://www.cbsnews.com/news/boehner-government-needs-to-tighten-its-belt/.”
So here we are, with years of experience to examine, and the lessons of that experience couldn’t be clearer. Predictions that deficit spending would lead to soaring interest rates, that easy money would lead to runaway inflation and debase the dollar, have been wrong again and again. Governments that did what Mr. Boehner urged .. http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/11/06/spending-and-growth-2009-13/, slashing spending in the face of depressed economies, have presided over Depression-level economic slumps. And the attempts of Republican governors to prove that cutting taxes on the wealthy .. http://www.cbpp.org/cms/index.cfm?fa=view&id=4110 .. is a magic growth elixir have failed with flying colors.
Then there’s health reform, where Republicans were very clear about what was supposed to happen .. http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/01/opinion/paul-krugman-the-medicare-miracle.html: minimal enrollments, more people losing insurance than gaining it, soaring costs. Reality, so far, has begged to differ, delivering above-predicted sign-ups, a sharp drop in the number of Americans without health insurance, premiums well below expectations, and a sharp slowdown in overall health spending.
And we shouldn’t forget the most important wrongness of all, on climate change. As late as 2008, some Republicans were willing to admit that the problem is real, and even advocate serious policies to limit emissions — Senator John McCain proposed a cap-and-trade system similar to Democratic proposals .. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/13/us/politics/12cnd-mccain.html. But these days the party is dominated by climate denialists, and to some extent by conspiracy theorists who insist that the whole issue is a hoax concocted by a cabal of left-wing scientists. Now these people will be in a position to block action for years to come, quite possibly pushing us past the point of no return.
But if Republicans have been so completely wrong about everything, why did voters give them such a big victory?
But the biggest secret of the Republican triumph surely lies in the discovery that obstructionism bordering on sabotage is a winning political strategy. From Day 1 of the Obama administration, Mr. McConnell and his colleagues have done everything they could to undermine effective policy, in particular blocking every effort to do the obvious thing — boost infrastructure spending — in a time of low interest rates and high unemployment.
This was, it turned out, bad for America but good for Republicans. Most voters don’t know much about policy details, nor do they understand the legislative process. So all they saw was that the man in the White House wasn’t delivering prosperity — and they punished his party.
Will things change now that the G.O.P. can’t so easily evade responsibility? I guess we’ll find out.
Many commentators swooned earlier this week after House Republicans, led by the Budget Committee chairman, Paul Ryan, unveiled their budget proposals. They lavished praise on Mr. Ryan, asserting that his plan set a new standard of fiscal seriousness.
Well, they should have waited until people who know how to read budget numbers had a chance to study the proposal. For the G.O.P. plan turns out not to be serious at all. Instead, it’s simultaneously ridiculous and heartless.
How ridiculous is it? Let me count the ways — or rather a few of the ways, because there are more howlers in the plan than I can cover in one column.
First, Republicans have once again gone all in for voodoo economics — the claim, refuted by experience, that tax cuts pay for themselves.
Specifically, the Ryan proposal trumpets the results of an economic projection from the Heritage Foundation, which claims that the plan’s tax cuts would set off a gigantic boom. Indeed, the foundation initially predicted that the G.O.P. plan would bring the unemployment rate down to 2.8 percent — a number we haven’t achieved since the Korean War. After widespread jeering, the unemployment projection vanished from the Heritage Foundation’s Web site, but voodoo still permeates the rest of the analysis.
In particular, the original voodoo proposition — the claim that lower taxes mean higher revenue — is still very much there. The Heritage Foundation projection has large tax cuts actually increasing revenue by almost $600 billion over the next 10 years.
A more sober assessment from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office tells a different story. It finds that a large part of the supposed savings from spending cuts would go, not to reduce the deficit, but to pay for tax cuts. In fact, the budget office finds that over the next decade the plan would lead to bigger deficits and more debt than current law.
And about those spending cuts: leave health care on one side for a moment and focus on the rest of the proposal. It turns out that Mr. Ryan and his colleagues are assuming drastic cuts in nonhealth spending without explaining how that is supposed to happen.
How drastic? According to the budget office, which analyzed the plan using assumptions dictated by House Republicans, the proposal calls for spending on items other than Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid — but including defense — to fall from 12 percent of G.D.P. last year to 6 percent of G.D.P. in 2022, and just 3.5 percent of G.D.P. in the long run.
That last number is less than we currently spend on defense alone; it’s not much bigger than federal spending when Calvin Coolidge was president, and the United States, among other things, had only a tiny military establishment. How could such a drastic shrinking of government take place without crippling essential public functions? The plan doesn’t say.
And then there’s the much-ballyhooed proposal to abolish Medicare and replace it with vouchers that can be used to buy private health insurance.
The point here is that privatizing Medicare does nothing, in itself, to limit health-care costs. In fact, it almost surely raises them by adding a layer of middlemen. Yet the House plan assumes that we can cut health-care spending as a percentage of G.D.P. despite an aging population and rising health care costs.
The only way that can happen is if those vouchers are worth much less than the cost of health insurance. In fact, the Congressional Budget Office estimates that by 2030 the value of a voucher would cover only a third of the cost of a private insurance policy equivalent to Medicare as we know it. So the plan would deprive many and probably most seniors of adequate health care.
And that neither should nor will happen. Mr. Ryan and his colleagues can write down whatever numbers they like, but seniors vote. And when they find that their health-care vouchers are grossly inadequate, they’ll demand and get bigger vouchers — wiping out the plan’s supposed savings.
In short, this plan isn’t remotely serious; on the contrary, it’s ludicrous.
And it’s also cruel.
In the past, Mr. Ryan has talked a good game about taking care of those in need. But as the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities points out, of the $4 trillion in spending cuts he proposes over the next decade, two-thirds involve cutting programs that mainly serve low-income Americans. And by repealing last year’s health reform, without any replacement, the plan would also deprive an estimated 34 million nonelderly Americans of health insurance.
So the pundits who praised this proposal when it was released were punked. The G.O.P. budget plan isn’t a good-faith effort to put America’s fiscal house in order; it’s voodoo economics, with an extra dose of fantasy, and a large helping of mean-spiritedness.
"Economically, Could Obama Be America's Best President?"
Apples - The Year in Charts
Steven Rattner DEC. 30, 2014
Although developments on the political front were certainly dispiriting, for the first time in years, the economic news was not all gloomy. But with the economy improving, there was less focus on the continuing need to address flagging incomes, rising inequality and unbalanced government spending. Below are 10 charts to illustrate the crosscurrents of the past year in economics and politics: .. am sorry i cannot out the charts .. http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/31/opinion/the-year-in-charts.html
THE Democrats’ drubbing in the midterm elections was unfortunate on many levels, but particularly because the prospect of addressing income inequality grows dimmer, even as the problem worsens.
To only modest notice, during the campaign the Federal Reserve put forth more sobering news about income inequality: Inflation-adjusted earnings of the bottom 90 percent of Americans fell between 2010 and 2013, with those near the bottom dropping the most. Meanwhile, incomes in the top decile rose.
Republicans Don’t Care About Income Inequality Or Basic Human Needs
By: Tim Libretti more from Tim Libretti Thursday, October, 30th, 2014, 10:02 pm
We have come to serve the economy rather than the economy serving us. We ask people to suffer to save the system that produces suffering, instead of creating a system that seeks to eliminate suffering.
I have a confession to make. In the series of articles I have supposedly been writing about income inequality, I have really been writing about something else: need. Let’s not fool ourselves or think I have been naïve. Raising the minimum wage or making minor redistributions of wealth, while likely to help many in materially significant ways, will not even minimally move us toward something remotely resembling income equality. The average American workers or unemployed and underemployed souls wouldn’t suddenly find themselves rubbing shoulders with Jamie Dimon or some other fabulously wealthy CEO, even if such an infinitesimal narrowing of the wealth gap were politically orchestrated. What we are really talking about when we engage the issue of income inequality is finding a way to help those in “low-wage” jobs or in need of work earn enough to meet their basic needs, not actually equalizing incomes.
I am coming clean because I feel our political discourse is decidedly impoverished because of the absence of discussion about NEED. We dance about it in indirect ways, talking about raising the minimum wage, helping small businesses so they can hire, lowering taxes, creating middle-class jobs, etc.; but rarely, if ever, do we hear anyone talk about creating, or re-creating, an economy designed to meet basic human needs.
Perhaps ironically, New Jersey Republican Senate candidate Jeff Bell most recently and unwittingly raised the issue of need when analyzing why he trails Democratic incumbent Cory Booker in the polls. “Single mothers particularly,” he said, “are automatically Democratic because of the benefits. They need benefits to survive, and so that kind of weds them to the Democratic Party.”
Did a Republican just admit that we have people experiencing real need in this country who really do require what meager assistance is available just to survive? While it easy to hear, as some have .. http://www.politicususa.com/2014/10/10/gop-senate-candidate-losing-lazy-single-women-dependent-government.html , in these comments the same old tired Republican rhetoric lambasting the poor and lazy for their dependence on government handouts, his exact words actually mark a telling departure from typical Republican double-speak regarding need.
Routinely issues of need get recast in our limited bi-partisan political discourse into the vocabulary of jobs; and when Republicans speak about jobs, they typically do so with forked tongue, at once berating individuals for being unwilling to work (and hence opposing the extension of unemployment benefits because they disincentivize work) and also excoriating President Obama for his failed economic policies for not creating jobs. Obviously, the approach begs the question, how can we blame people for not working when there is a scarcity of jobs?
Quite glibly, apparently. Just take Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker who in a recent gubernatorial debate, defended his record of having created only 5,800 jobs (against a loss of 13,000!) when he promised 250,000 for Wisconsin, by asserting, “We don’t have a jobs problem; we have a work problem .. http://www.politicususa.com/2014/10/13/scott-walker-joins-gop-crusade-denigrating-americans-work-ethic.html .” If Wisconsin citizens weren’t so lazy and possessed some initiative, Governor Walker would have created another 250,000 jobs!
Similarly, Republican lightning rod Newt Gingrich, in the height of the Great Recession in November 2011, dismissively admonished Occupy Wall Street protesters to “take a bath” and “get a job,” .. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/11/19/newt-gingrich-occupy-wall-street-job-bath_n_1103172.html .. while around the country, from 2009 through 2012 the country witnessed the following scenes: in May 2012, 20,000 people applied for one of 877 jobs at a Hyundai plant in Montgomery, Alabama; in Summer 2011, 18,000 people applied for one of 1,800 jobs at a Ford plant in Louisville; also in 2011, more than 41,000 people applied for one of 1,300 jobs at a new Toyota plant in Tupelo, Mississippi; in 2009, 65,000 people applied for one of 2,700 jobs at a Volkswagen plant in Chattanooga .. http://www.cnbc.com/id/47614988 .
The approach is akin to blaming thirsty people in a desert for not looking hard enough for water—except with this key difference: in our world we arguably have enough water, but our system withholds it from those who can’t find jobs in an economy in which jobs are scarce, operating on a logic that not only defies social reality but is illogically punitive and inhumane.
If we were to recognize the reality of need in our country and understand that our current economic system actually generates inequality and deprivation, as Jeff Bell unwittingly did, we might actually begin to focus policy-making on re-making the economy to meet rather than exacerbate human need.
At times we almost get there, but the habit of political thinking in U.S. culture tends almost invariably to retreat from critique of our economic system, into blaming people for not doing enough to succeed in a system that affords little opportunity.
For example, a recent Harvard Business School study “An Economy Doing Half Its Job .. http://www.hbs.edu/competitiveness/pdf/an-economy-doing-half-its-job.pdf ,” as you can tell from its title, highlights a malfunction in our economy manifested in the fact that working-class and middle-class citizens continue to struggle coming out of the recession while large and mid-size businesses are faring quite well. The study calls this divergence “unsustainable.” Despite its critique of our current economic system, the main recommendation has nothing to do with repairing the system or even with redistributing wealth; instead, the study calls for American workers to increase their value by acquiring skills to compete in the global economy.
The folly of this approach, as well as its prevalence as a default habit in American political discourse across the board, is evident in a rather conventional speech President Obama gave in April 2012 at the University of Iowa .. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7XjxVzNdRws . While addressing college students and discussing the need to address the debt burden caused by student loans, Obama expressed his desire for everyone to graduate college and succeed. U.S. culture loves this story of the individual’s rise to success through education, ingenuity, or pure hard work. We love it so much it clouds our thinking. Certainly we can agree we live in a society in which anybody can make it. We see evidence of this fact all the time. But we don’t live in a world in which everybody can make it. Even if every person earned an advanced degree, would there be jobs for everyone? Additionally, we would still need people to perform the socially necessary though stigmatized “low-wage” work. Yet we neglect to recognize this reality that our economy generates inequality and need, that it is inveterately an economy that does only half its job.
During the Great Depression, while people stood and starved in breadlines, farmers poured milk down sewers and burned crops in order to create scarcity to raise prices; that is, in order to get the economy working again, food was destroyed while people went hungry. This scenario presents quite a contradiction and underscores the degree to which our economy has become more important than the people living in it. We have come to serve the economy rather than the economy serving us. We ask people to suffer to save the system that produces suffering, instead of creating a system that seeks to eliminate suffering.
When will we fully recognize there is a problem with our economy and work to create a system that works for people and stop asking people to suffer to prop up an economy that doesn’t work for people?
The primary thrust of any strategy under current circumstances must be an attack on the wealth and power of the financial sector and the 1 per cent (for practical purposes, these may be treated as one and the same). That means more progressive taxation, an increase in total levels of taxation and expenditure and a substantial tightening of regulation of the financial sector, with the aim of making that sector much smaller and less rewarding than it is at present. Such a strategy would represent a transformation of capitalism similar to that which occurred after 1945 and, in reverse, in the 1970s. This would be a great achievement in itself. More speculatively, it might, given the public good nature of much of the Internet, lay the basis for a further transformation in which the power of private capital ceased to dominate the global economy. .. http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=109493464
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