And even then it won’t stick because someone will get bitten by a shark or a little blonde girl will get kidnapped:
Deficit Hawks Don’t Care About The Deficit
Some just want to cut spending that might benefit poor brown people, most just want to cut taxes paid by rich people. They don’t actually care about the deficit. Nobody does except maybe CBO actuaries.
If they cared about the deficit, Dick Darman and the elder George Bush and Bill Clinton would be heroes. They care about tax cuts for the rich. Period.
FlipYrWhig
I have long wondered if people think, erroneously, that the deficit is the total amount of money Americans owe to their creditors. Because sometimes in the media discussion of the issue there’s a bit about how each individual’s share of the deficit is $X thousand or whatever, and it occurred to me from time to time that people might think that their own rolling credit card balance was being counted as a share of the deficit.
freelancer
John,
Don’t you want to attribute that first
“Also.”
link to Michael?
El Tiburon
Total nonsequitor (or maybe not) but was listening to NPR this morning as they were discussing GM and how they are becoming profitable again.
According to NPR, GM had become profitable again by trimming $10 billion in costs, consisting of “…wage cuts, job cuts and paying less in health care costs.”
They then added that GM was getting ready to offer stock for sale again.
It was so ho-hum that jobs, wages and health care was being cut. Perhaps later in the broadcast this was discussed, but it goes without saying the way to become profitable is to cut jobs and wages, not CEO compensation, etc.
Indie Tarheel
Doesn’t matter. I’m convinced that we as a nation are going to have to go through the skull-f*cking that we will richly deserve when we allow the NeoConFederates back at the wheel.
__
Of course, many of us may very well not survive that. And that is the GOOD news.
General Stuck
This is false. Republicans do care about deficits, and especially under Bush/Cheney/Delay/Rove. They cared so much, they ran up as big a ones as they could. The reason is likely two fold, after their number one concern was met, after giving the oligarchs their rightful bounty with huge tax cuts for rich folk, there wasn’t enough left over to sate Cheney’s blood lust in Iraq and the world. So the lizard brains calculated two birds in hand is better than one Bush.
We will borrow till we can’t borrow nomo, and make murrica broke, so people like Mitch Mcconnell can whine about handouts to po people that ain’t right cause we wingnuts done spent all the cash bombing furriners cause we could. Maybe that’s three fold. nevermind.
Unfortunately, now, progressives tell us to get back at Cheney and the neo cons, we ought to borrow tons more, not just for po people, but because we can, and that’ll show George what’s what.
The saga of stoopid goes on.
Ash Can
They made that abundantly clear when they were nowhere to be seen or heard while the Bush/Cheney clusterfuck-on-wheels spent money like a couple of high school juniors who had run off to Acapulco with their parents’ credit cards, after having slashed their source of income in the form of tax cuts (for the wealthy, of course).
That they don’t really care about the deficit is obvious. The only thing newsworthy about it is that there are actually people who believe them (who are allowed to roam freely and handle sharp objects, yet).
El Cid
Harry Reid is a fringe firebagger hippie.
cleek
say it all you want. won’t matter.
this narrative is set in stone, and facts are powerless against it.
Reid:
a vicious understatement.
FlipYrWhig
@El Cid:
Of course the lesson everyone knew from 1993 and repeated ad nauseam was that the White House should stay out of HCR next time so that Congress could feel more ownership. Pfft.
The Dangerman
I would trade a lot of useful spending for a marginal tax rate similar to one during the Eisenhower era (90+%); sure, people will threaten to go Galt, to which I say … go Galt. I could give a shit.
Ash Can
@El Cid: Not to categorically deny that Reid has a point, but isn’t head-cracking in the Senate supposed to be his job?
General Stuck
Bring on the angry black man if that’s what progs and watb’s like Reid want, who by the way, has the passion of wall paper.
But he has a point. It’s getting time for Obama to realize he is but a one term president, when even his allies are picking up the wanking memes from left to right, and whip out his package and pistol whip the lot of them into doing what’s right. David Brooks will faint, Glenn Greenwald will disappear down into his rabbit hole looking for a new dubious charge, and Rush Limbaugh will masturbate himself to death.
GO Teem America!!
FlipYrWhig
@The Dangerman: It would be nice if most people understood the concept of marginal rates, like, at all. If a 90% marginal rate came to pass, some nincompoop on the radio would say that because the top rate was 35% and is now 90%, the Democrats had passed a “55% tax increase.” Or a “157% tax increase” if you calculate it as a percentage of a percentage.
Jeff Fecke
I refuse to take anyone seriously as a deficit hawk unless they advocate taking a long, hard look at what can be cut in the Department of Defense. Ergo, I refuse to take anyone seriously as a deficit hawk.
Rommie
About 5 nanoseconds after the President gets forceful about a topic (3 if it’s about the deficit) is when a week’s worth of the MSM going hoof-and-mouth about him getting uppity starts.
I think the President knows this, and is either unwilling to go there, or is waiting for the right time to concentrate the attention. At some point his 1/3 of the power has to weigh in before it’s too late.
Zifnab
That’s not entirely true. One of the most effective arguments against the Bush Administration involved pointing at the rapidly ballooning federal deficit and screaming “No Bueno!”
It was a compelling argument to end Medicare Plan C. It was a compelling argument to end privately managed student loans. It was a compelling argument against both Asian Land Wars. When Barack Obama was bringing in a shockingly high rate of older white male voters in states like Indiana and Michigan and Florida, it’s hard to argue that the GOP’s squandering of public monies didn’t factor in. Hell, the “Bridge to Nowhere” was a devastating blow exactly because these deficit hawks were lining up to vote.
Now, the politicians might always swing towards spending. But if you want to know why deficit hawk is a media buzzword, it’s because the voting public and the representative politicians don’t see eye-to-eye on government spending at all. And deficit hawks are always ready to punish the party in power.
The Democrats are making big headway in reigning in public debt, but they are going to have to be way louder about their efforts and their successes. And they need to make it clear that liberated tax dollars are going towards an economically good cause in the process.
Democrats can do this. They did it in ’08 when they pushed hard for health care and for stimulus. They need to get back into campaign mode and out of “Lets make friends with Republicans” mode. The sooner the better.
jl
Interesting to see the alternative plan pushed by Republican Rep Ryan, the only GOP plan I know of, and that Ferguson praised at the Aspen soiree: it results in an increase in the US federal debt to GDP to between 100% and 180% between 2040 and 2050 (depending on whose numbers you believe) before declining.
The fact is that the drop in the tax base due to the financial panic and the recession is one of the major causes of the current federal deficits, larger than planned future expenditures on fiscal stimulus. I am not aware of a plan short of reducing government role to early 19th century levels (including military spending levels, when we had dragoons and were too cheap to get them horses to ride) that gets the US through the next few years without increased deficits.
See US fed debt burden under Ryan plan from recent Krugman blog post:
Further Adventures in Fake Deficit Hawkery
Krugman, NY Times, July 8
http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/07/08/further-adventures-in-fake-deficit-hawkery
See contributing factors to current deficit, conveniently big picture from DeLong’s blog:
Sources of Our Current Deficit
Brad DeLong, July 12
http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2010/07/sources-of-our-current-deficit.html
And what is this stuff about people wanting to increase the deficit just to ‘show George what’s what’? Who is saying that? That is certainly not my motive.
One could, Congress certainly could, design a second stimulus that would be useless and do nothing but redistribute money to people who do not particularly need it right now, and increase the deficit with no long run economic benefit whatever. I would not support that kind of second stimulus.
asdf
As cleek said, “this narrative is set in stone, and facts are powerless against it.”
The truth does not matter. What matters is that a little less than half of all voting Americans think that the Republican Party is the party of “small government”. Nothing could be further from the truth. You have to give the Republican Party a lot of credit, though, they have been selling chicken shit as chicken salad for a very long time. Federal income taxes are at an historic low. The big corporations are paying very little; oh, to have an army of lobbyists at my command! All I have is the one vote.
It seems to me that belief in Republican ideals have become an article of faith to many people and faith, as we all know, is not dependent on facts. Saint Ronnie began this trend. He used borrowed money, increasing the debt, to buy votes with low taxes. It’s that simple.
Oh well, I will shut up. You ladies and gentlemen already know all this. The only light at the end of the tunnel is the much hoped for Palin candidacy in 2012. That’s going to be some funny shit.
david mizner
Americans don’t care about the deficit either, not compared to jobs and personal economic security. In fact, concerns about the deficit are mostly a proxy for concern about personal economic anxiety.
Dems’ fatal mistake is to validate fears about the deficit, thinking they could out-deficit hawk the GOP. Thinking that Dems are going to somehow make headway pointing out GOP hypocrisy — that’s delusional.
The answer, the only answer, is to refuse to play on their turf. Too late.
Nick
@david mizner: We went through this is another thread…the fears on jobs are tied to fears on the deficit because too many people erroneously think the deficit is what’s stifling job growth, which is what many winning (and competitive) GOP candidates are running on. That FORCES us to play on their turf.
How long before we finally come to terms with this?
jl
Dang. Got the links messed up in comment above. Krugman’s blog post is at
http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/07/08/further-adventures-in-fake-deficit-hawkery/
Mark S.
Jesus, from the FDL link:
If the Democrats had any balls, they could absolutely slaughter the Republicans on this issue. They won’t, though.
El Cid
@Ash Can: Reid isn’t making such a statement simply out of his commitment to objective political analysis. Of course he wants to suggest that outside forces hinder or fail to assist him in his endeavors.
Mike in NC
This quote needs tweaking:
“GOP is still the same greedy, lying old pricks
guys, with the same old discredited, mendacious ideologyideas, and if they scam their waygetback into power, the same old disastrous, insane, shitty things are going to happen to our country.”El Cid
@FlipYrWhig: They have always lied and spoke as though marginal tax rates were simply tax rates, like bear traps: let your income go above a certain level, and, BAM! You’re now only keeping 10% of your income, and instead of being an extremely wealthy corporate executive you’re reduced to a pauper getting $50 – $200K or so a year. The resultant Galt-going damage to our economic productivity is incalculable.
Mnemosyne
@El Tiburon:
Ronald Reagan showed them the way in the 1980s, and Wall Street hasn’t deviated from the faith ever since. Notice how Apple announcing massive profits always causes their stock price to fall but a company announcing layoffs can always expect to see their stock price go up.
Sure, it’s irrational, but since when has Wall Street ever been rational?
General Stuck
@david mizner:
this is true, but paradoxically not when they are feeling insecure about their jobs and personal economic security. Demagogueing the deficit is pure political theater, and the wingnuts know that they can always count on some good ole bipartisan support from their step children the blue dogs. They can also count on the media to grant them at least one issue, no matter how twisted they make it, to keep even keel with the dems in the great party wars that attract viewers and readers that fill the kitty of the media.
There is nothing much serious liberals can do but develop sane factual based arguments concerning the debt and try and present them, as say, like Obama does every single day. It also doesn’t help to kneejerk from the left that deficits don’t matter, justifying it on that’s what the wingnuts used to say. There is no other road to take but tell the fucking truth, day in and day out and let the cards fall where they may. Developing your own false meme to counter all the other false memes might win a news cycle or two, but only carries us all down further the river crazy. But BAM’s the messaging from serious libs and dems has to be convincing and persistent. But that is about it. The rest is up to the mighty FSM.
Zifnab
@david mizner:
But that doesn’t matter if the voters don’t believe that government spending will actually create jobs. If voters believe federal policy is job-neutral or job-negative (and the Republicans are pushing this claim hard) then they won’t vote Democrat no matter how much the deficit doesn’t matter.
The Recovery Act was probably the best short-term legislation the Democrats have passed since the election. But if they’re too afraid to extend it, what reason do independents and progressives have to turn out to the polls?
El Cid
Almost all my coworkers, bosses, neighbors, and many family members think that the deficit and looming hyperinflation and coming gigantic tax hikes are what’s killin’ the jobs.
STOP ALL THE SPENDIN’!
kdaug
@Indie Tarheel: And in 200 years the last few breeding pairs of humans will be living above the Arctic Circle. What’s your point?
El Cid
TeaTard Republicans letting you know where the real threat lies.
I think we face a real terrorist threat (though not anything like an existential threat) from Al Qa’ida, and no real threat from Iran. Quibbling. But the liberals/progressives are clearly soon to be flying federal spending right into various states’ skyscrapers so we better stop ’em soon.
Meanwhile, CNBC jackass Trish Regan [“The Call”] declares that making the rich paying higher taxes is “un-American”.
Dave
What is most annoying about this deficit-hawk bullshit is that these same douchebags, when Bush was running up the deficit, would tell us not to worry because the deficit was so small compared to their metric of choice (GDP, GNP, Jesusdollars). The fucking basic insincerity of the Republicans would doom them to irrelevance in a society that valued truth. Which is why we’re fucked.
Comrade Javamanphil
What sad times are these passing ruffians can say “Tax Cuts for the rich” at will to old ladies.
somethingblue
Well, Harry, maybe you should send him a sternly worded letter about it.
debbie
@ Ash Can:
Even more egregious than Republicans’ crocodile-teared show of concern for the deficit is the ballsiness of their assertion that they are in fact the party of responsibility and fiscal excellence, considering how they constructed the Medicare prescription plan and mandated that the government not be able to negotiate for lower prices. Now there’s real business acumen!
jl
@Comrade Javamanphil: From my days doing voter registration, there are quite a few crazy little old ladies and crazy little old men who think that Roosevelt was a commie agent who wrecked America and that the New Deal should be dismantled. All that spending will wreck as and put us back into caves any day now.
They started talking really crazy when I would ask them where they thought their social security and Medicare checks came from.
If memory serves, a tidy, if often dusty and hot, little yard with artificial grass and artificial flowers surrounded by a plastic white picket fence was sure tip off that a crazy little old lady or a crabby little old man with white hair in a buzz cut would come out and start lecturing.
Ash Can
@El Cid: Ah. Of course! :)
lamh32
@El Cid:
Harry Reid is full of shit. He didn’t mind Obama playing “peacemaker” when Obama essentially made sure the “light-skinned” Negro comment didn’t derail Mr Reid’s leadership, did he.
He sure didn’t mind Obama being peacemaker when both Michelle Obama and Barack Obama travelled to NV (numerous times) to fundraise for Sen Reid did he…
ya know what, Harry Reid better be happy that Obama ain’t like the Clintons or Bush/Rove and likes to hold grudges, or withhold support…
Reid needs to thank his lucky stars Obama ain’t that petty. Hell, that is the main reason why I could never go into politics. I may just be too petty. I’d only serve one term too, cause by the end of it, people would probably hate me.
BTW, I sure don’t see Reid knocking any damn heads himself…hypocrite
Nick
@Zifnab:
Becaue if the election is a referendum on the Recovery Act, which it will be partially, progressives and independents turning out at the polls to deliver the GOP a stunning defeat will be their way of saying “more please and make it work better this time”
Rather if they don’t, the message will be “no more spending for the love of God!”
libarbarian
OBAMA VIOLATES CONSTITUTION AGAIN!!!!!
The Daily Libarbarian has learned that, in another arrogant and unconstitutional powergrab, Obama as “ordered” a private company to not only provide his family with food but to deliver it to their very door as well. While we do not yet know the exact contents of the approx. 8pm phone call from the White House to the nearby Dominos Pizza, company insiders have informed us that the phone call concerned an “order”, issue by Obama, for the private company to supply an unspecified number of pizzas to his house.
“I was completely amazed” said delivery driver John Smith. “I’m just a working man trying to make ends meet and here comes this arrogant president ordering me to bring him food like some servant. I know I didn’t go to Harvard like he did, but does that mean I deserve this kind of disrespect? I don’t think so”.
“Even if Obama did compensate the company and the driver for the pizzas in question, that doesn’t make it acceptable or consentual” said conservative analyst Ann O’Malkin. “Obama is the president of the US and no private company is going to fail to feel the kind of pressure an ‘order’ from such a person brings. There is nothing in the Constitution that empowers him to bring that kind of governmental pressure on a private company. It just shows his hostility to the free-market and the American system.
One influential GOP Congressman took the step of publically apologizing to Dominos. “I think it’s a real shame that an American company should have to be ‘ordered’ to the White House and forced to furnish food to a president who is clearly addicted to the kind of chicago-style shakedowns taught by his mentor, Alinsky. I want to apologize to Dominos and say that this kind of behavior from a president is un-American”.
Sources from within Dominos tell us that the toppings specified by the Obamas included items like arugela and prosciutto and was conspicuously lacking in old fashioned American toppings like pepperoni. “This just shows what Obama thinks of America. Millions of Good Americans eat Pepperoni pizza everyday but this president obviously thinks he is better than those people” said O’Malkin. “I mean, ordering a private company to bring food to your door is bad enough, but ordering them to forgoe the kind of toppings that millions of Americans love adds insult to injury. The level of disrespect he shows towards everyday working Americans is sickening.”
While the Liberal Media has tried to bury this story, the Daily Libarbarian will continue to follow it and bring you all the updates on the unfolding Pizza-gate scandal as they emerge.
Nick
@Mark S.: As if anyone will understand it anyway?
Hunter Gathers
I wish this country would just go ahead and collapse already. The sooner we reach Rule By ThunderDome, the better.
Fenster
With the blogosphere, cable news talking heads and fact-deficient robo-pundits (i.e. Ed Gillespie) all going on the spending attack, it seems that Deficit Hawkery to some has become the “most sophisticated art form ever” (right next to cannibalism, orangutans tap-dancing, and wombat fisting). But in reality, it all plays about as nice together as North and South Korea after a mighty close game of volleyball.
FlipYrWhig
@lamh32: I wouldn’t be surprised if Reid was saying things like this with Obama’s sub rosa approval. He’s in a tough reelection fight and establishing some distance from Obama probably helps him.
Ash Can
@libarbarian: LOLZ! That’s great!
jl
@Hunter Gathers: And it looks like Mad Max Gibson is ramping up for the challenges ahead.
Viva BrisVegas
Roman Polanski has been set free by Swiss authorities.
Get out your outragometers, prepare for mass wingnut brain explosion.
lamh32
@FlipYrWhig:
Maybe, but if so, then like I said Reid better be happy the Clintons did not prevail, cause they sure would remember his love for Obama, and you can bet, he’d be on their shit list. He probably already is. We shall see. If Bill eventually goes to stump for Reid, then I’ll believe he’s not on their list.
Who exactly does this help Reid with? The other side sure as hell dont’ care if Obama is knocking GOP heads. And wouldn’t it help Reid more if he actually did knock heads with or without White House support????
A comment like this from Nancy Pelosi, who is really getting shit done with or without WH support, would make more since.
El Cid
@libarbarian: Chicago deep dish style shakedowns?
cleek
@Rommie:
i think you’re being too optimistic.
i’ve seen nothing in the last 24 months of watching Obama that makes me think he’s going to jump up and start swinging at the last minute.
and even if he does, it’ll be too late: he’ll be playing defense, after years of letting the GOP arrange the pieces on the board.
david mizner
@Nick:
Nothing (but fear and stupidity) forces us to play on their turf.
Look, this is deep problem that traces back to early Clinton, when the ascendance of Rubin and the desire to woo Perotistas, created a Democratic fixation of budget deficit. But it’s a bad issue for Dems, because it hamstrings their ability to deliver jobs and other social programs, and because the GOP, despite their hypocrisy, owns it.
So what to do? Long-term we need a full frontal assault on the cult of fiscal austerity (Which would require an ideological transformation.)
Short-term Obama should stop saying things like “government can’t create jobs” and start talking about the GOP’s blocking unemployment benefits and aid to states. Obama, Dems, and their allies should be talking about nothing else. The word “deficit” should never leave their lips.
Elisabeth
@lamh32:
It was also Reid who proclaimed early on that he didn’t work for Obama and who the very day after Obama said, during his primetime presser last summer, that he wanted health care reform done before the August recess shot that idea down. Maybe if he’d had the president’s back a bit ~ quid pro quo and all that.
kay
I always think Americans tell pollsters they care about the deficit because you’re supposed to care about the deficit.
They also exercise 20 minutes/three times a week, drink no more than two beers at any one sitting, and go to church “frequently” but not “weekly”.
Indie Tarheel
@kdaug: Just feeling a little grumpy at the apparently inherent stupidity of the American electorate.
FlipYrWhig
@lamh32: I agree that the actual statement about cracking more Republican heads wouldn’t help win over Republicans. But it might help create a vibe where Reid gets to talk about how he’s his own man, not Obama’s puppet. And against Angle Reid’s best, um, angle is going to be to tell voters something like “You and I might not agree on every issue, but you’ve known me long enough to be confident that I do what’s best for Nevadans. My opponent, on the other hand, has radical views and is more concerned with sending a message than with getting our state back to work,” etc.
IMHO being independent of Obama helps Reid localize the contest; Angle wants to nationalize it. So does Paul, BTW; he didn’t even talk about Kentucky in his victory speech.
If I were a Democratic strategist I might go all in with the idea that this year’s Republican Senate candidates are a bunch of crazy people who have lost sight of the real challenges and hard choices that face America today. Tie them to one another and run against all of them at once. Do it to “moderates” Castle and Kirk as well as the more hardcore Angle, Paul, Buck, and Rubio. Democrats are working hard and being grownups; you might not agree with every decision but you can trust that they’re on the case. By contrast, Republicans are doing nothing but making spectacles of themselves and wasting time.
Nick
@david mizner:
We didn’t have a choice in the matter. Clinton won with 42% of the vote, to form a governing coalition, he had to appeal to either Republicans or Perotists. That’s how democracy works.
No shit. But it’s the country we live in. We have to deal with it.
Which, so far, for anyone who has done it, has yielded 0 results. I linked a Boston Globe article yesterday about a study done that showed people’s opinions cannot be changed by facts. Our full frontal assault will yield nothing, I’m sure of it. We don’t get to win the argument until the Reagan generation dies out.
Obama didn’t say that, he said;
which is true. Government doesn’t create jobs, except in it’s own bureaucracy. We can’t create a bureaucracy that can employ 150 million people, it’s just not possible. Government creates conditions for small businesses to grow and thrive, like he said. They can regulate lending, regulation minimum wage, regulate corporations so small businesses don’t get pushed out of business, keep jobs from going overseas, etc. That’s what they can do.
Obama has also, repeadidly, BLASTED the Republicans for holding up unemployment benefits and state aid, but this has gotten lost because the corporate media doesn’t want you to hear about it. As far as the deficit goes, Obama has only talked about when asked about it. He can’t ignore the question, so when the media repeadidly asks him and Gibbs about the deficit, which is the only thing economically they’re obsessed with, he has to answer them, otherwise he looks like he’s ignoring a problem.
Frank
Bush inherited a budget surplus and turned it into a whopping $1.3 trillion budget deficit.
Republicans didn’t see a spending bill they didn’t like when they voted yes to all the Iraq war supplementals every six months during 2003-2008.
I think Dick Cheney captured the Republican viewpoint the best when he claimed that “deficits don’t matter”
So, why should we listen to Republicans regarding deficits?
Hunter Gathers
@cleek:
The second that he does that, the GOP and the MSM will go into full on “He’s showing his true colors – He’s the Angry Black Man” mode. It will consume every bit of political oxygen from now until Election Day in 2012, when white America rejects the “Angry Black Man” and votes in Sarah Palin. The fix is in. He’s completely boxed in now. And the progressive blogospere helped.
Nick
@cleek:
he’s often shown signs of this, only to have it blow up in his face. Largely because he has no one backing him up, The liberal blogsphere is too busy being outraged over the outrage de jure to notice that he’s trying to put up a fight.
It won’t go any good. I never would have.
lamh32
@FlipYrWhig:
But am I wrong in saying that this is not the argument that Reid is trying to make. Your argument is different than his though. Your argument may work. Harry Reid who Obama and co has had to essentially bail out or transfer blame from harry not being able to keep his own dem caucus together is making the argument, that he would surely do better if Obama was more forceful??? Harry Reid who sees his caucus almost daily, and has meetings with his caucus on so many occasions can’t keep his caucus together, unless OBAMA knocks heads. I just don’t buy it.
Like I said though, your argument is a much better one than I can discern from Reid’s statement.
Nick
@Hunter Gathers: If there’s any consolation, the liberal blogsphere will be completely irrelevant after November…if it isn’t already.
Nick
@lamh32: No Democratic Majority leader has EVER kept his caucus together…none.
Actually, historically, Reid’s doing a better job than most.
cleek
@Hunter Gathers:
everybody says that, but i don’t believe it. for one thing, they’ve already called him every other name in the book – what damage could one more possibly do? furthermore, it’s almost always used as an excuse for his, umm, non-forceful leadership. and i don’t buy that either.
and even more importantly, i don’t care. if he is actually holding back in fear of being labeled with an “angry black man” tag (which i don’t think he is, but for the sake of argument…), then he has paralyzed himself, to the detriment of the country. and that’s even less of what we need from our president right now.
but again, i don’t believe he is holding anything back. what we see is what he is.
FlipYrWhig
@david mizner:
I dunno. I wonder instead about taking it head-on. How about, “Yes, it’s true that we have a budget deficit. No one feels comfortable owing money. But the fact is that we owe money because we’ve invested in some great projects. And we’re confident they will pay off. And as people get back to work, they’ll start buying things they need, and being able to make plans for the future, and as our confidence grows, little by little we’ll pay down that debt.” Basically take the government-household analogy and turn it inside out. Like being broke but using your credit card to buy a suit that gets you the job, then slowly paying off the balance.
Wile E. Quixote
I wish that Obama were more of a vindictive prick and would put together a budget for 2011 that would just totally fuck the red states and then when they bitched about it say “Look bitches, we have to cut the deficit, that means that you need to suck it up. Oh, besides, none of you fucks are paying your fair share of taxes, so the cuts have to hit you.”
I also wish that Obama were the kind of vindictive prick who would travel to Arizona and warn voters there that they would be crazy to support J.D. Hayworth and that they should support John McCain in the primary because John McCain was willing to reform immigration and worked well with Obama when he was in the Senate. Sure, it would piss McCain off, and hey, maybe Hayworth would end up in the Senate, but how the fuck would he be any worse than McCrankypants? And wouldn’t it be great to see McCrankypants crushed, because you know that if he lost his senate seat that he’d never be seen on Press the Meat ever again. I mean David Gregory sucks a lot of cock, but he draws the line at sucking the cocks of losers.
Nick
@cleek: Like I said, next time, elect a White Southern Governor.
Yes, because he’s a black man, he has to paralyze himself. That’s a fact of living in a country that is teeming with ugly racism.
But even more on the point, it doesn’t matter. if he got angry, no one will notice. (No one has noticed when he did so far except for Fox and its allies trying to label him the male Angela Davis) It won’t change anyone’s mind and won’t get anything else passed. All it would do is get people to dig in further.
Minds cannot be changed nowadays.
FlipYrWhig
@Nick:
It’s sad, though, that the Democrats have almost completely forsaken the idea of direct hiring, like in New Deal days. Because government could and did create bureaucracies that employed millions of people. It’s just that that’s considered raging pinkoism now. So we’re reduced to this condition where the government has to create pass-throughs so small businesses get the money indirectly and move it along to their employees even more indirectly.
El Cid
@Nick:
I don’t follow. In 1993 Democrats had both houses of Congress. This isn’t a Parliament, it’s a first-past-the-post electoral college. Clinton won, and was President, whether or not Republicans felt good shoving that up their ass or not.
As far as some of the ‘coalition’, Clinton chose to ramrod NAFTA over the objections and votes of the majority of Democrats in the House in Senate in favor of the majority of Republicans and a minority of conservative Democrats. Whether you like the policy or not, that isn’t something forced on a President by ‘democracy’.
cleek
@Nick:
we’re not that racist. we did elect him, after all. and pretty decisively, too.
of course they can. if they couldn’t, his approval rating would be constant. instead of constantly-decreasing.
General Stuck
I tried this once, but only ended up broke and stupid. Instead of just stupid.
Whatever the specific bad things that may or may not occur with long term large deficits, most humans know a bad idea when they see one. And living beyond your means and getting too far in debt seems like a bad idea to the public. Getting tagged, again, as the tax and spend party is absolutely lethal to democrats. No way around it. And you know what, maybe it should be. Not being smart is dumb, no ideological transformation required.
Debts are like everything else, manageable if done in moderation and for well thought out reasons./
Hugin & Munin
Ah, back to the two concurrent thought on the Left that the squishy establishment centrists(TM) here have: That the left have absolutely no power and that they are absolutely responsible for everything wrong in the Democratic party.
FlipYrWhig
@lamh32:
I think you’re correct: the _substance_ of Reid’s statement doesn’t seem like it should appeal to Republicans. But the _form_ of the statement might pay a dividend with them later.
Nick
@FlipYrWhig: Democrats foresaken them decades ago.
Anyway, those bureaucracies didn’t last though, the CCC and Civil Works Administration were temporary, and the WPA, as it was, never even passed Congress.
New Deal-like legislation passed when unemployment was 3x as high as it is now, and even then had trouble getting passed.
El Cid
And with the promised vote of Olympia Snowe and Cosmo McTruckNutz, financial reform now looks set to pass.
As Michele Bachmann said, we are all now slaves.
You know who else passed financial reform legislation?
david mizner
@Nick:
We just have a disagreement.
You think Dems have no choice, both in the short and long term, to focus on budget deficits.
I think you’re wrong, deeply wrong, but obviously there’s a lot of support for your position in the Obama admin.
Nick
@El Cid: Demcorats kept Congress on the back of Perot voters. They had to appeal to them to survive. They didn’t…in part because of NAFTA, but also because of Clinton’s budget, which spit in the face of Perotism.
lamh32
@cleek:
Either you are blatanlty delusional, or blatantly being oblivious if you truly believe cause white America elected Barack Obama, that white Americans can’t still be “that racist”, cause that’s kinda how your statement comes off. I contend that nowadays racism may not be so “blatant”, but it still going on among the same people who “elected” Barack Obama.
Time Wise on facebook said that he’s working on a companion piece to his right/conservative racism essay on the left/liberal racism. I glad he’s gonna do that, cause statements like this show how oblivious some libs are to racism that occurs on the liberal side as well. Even though
Black Power’s Gonna Get You Sucka: Right-Wing Paranoia and the Rhetoric of Modern Racism —Tim Wise piece on Right/conservative racism.
Nick
@cleek: his approval rating has been pretty constant since about November, give or take a few points.
and don’t discount the fact that racists voted for him reluctantly, because I know plenty who did
El Cid
@General Stuck: Of course, like businesses do all the time, sometimes debts now can increase revenues and profits later. That really appears to be the case with the US economy, and the incredibly stunting trough we’re in right now which looks likely to cripple further growth, and thus put us in the debt hole even more by robbing us of the sort of growth which would add back into the revenue side of deficits and debt. We’ve apparently all decided that only the spending side of the budget ledger is real, and forget current and future revenues.
Most of the people I know have 20 or 30 year mortgages and 4 or 5 year car loans and student loans they’re still paying back and credit card bills to make ends meet — we’re not talking luxuries here — and they remark how the federal government needs to balance its budget because they have to every month.
Nick
@david mizner: Well I think anyone who thinks ignoring deficit talk is a good strategy is wrong, deeply wrong, myself.
Whether rational or not, people care about the deficit, probably because they’re being told to care and don’t know why (see Linda McMahon’s ‘the deficit is causing high unemployment” crap the media is parroting)
You can pay it lip service, but you can’t ignore it.
FlipYrWhig
@Hugin & Munin: You know, you don’t have to _be_ a “squishy establishment centrist” to feel like it’s important to figure out ways to overcome or outflank the “squishy establishment centrists” who do exist. It’s much easier to declare that you’re a leftist who doesn’t believe in compromise. Badass! Suck it, Ben Nelson! Eat it, Blanche Lincoln! Jam it up your ass, Joe Lieberman! Of course trying to run a fractious political party that way would probably mean losing every vote 20-80 and never tangibly helping anyone. But that’s a small price to pay for not looking like a “squishy establishment centrist.”
Hunter Gathers
@Nick: You’re fighting a lost cause. They won’t listen to you. They just won’t. Liberals have been eating their own since the Watts riots in 1965. Pointing out the facts won’t change that. The party that created the middle class with the New Deal and ended government-sanctioned segregation with the Great Society has never come to terms with their own imbedded, passive classism and racism. Conservatives cracked their coalition in 1966 by convincing them that the racial and social unrest from 1965 on was their fault for giving black people their rights and lifting up the poor in the first place. Nixon, Reagan, and now Sarah Palin have perfected class and racial wedge politics. Nixonland lives on.
We are in a re-play of 1966. Replace the Civil Rights triumphs with Obama’s election, with the stim and health care bill taking the place of LBJ’s War on Poverty. The GOPers and the MSM have convinced a slim majority that Obama either stole/swindled/is ineligible/doesn’t deserve the office of the President, and that the stim and the health care bill were failures/benefited minorities only/government powergrabs. This occurred because movement progressives spent all of their energy fighting with Obama, Congress, and themselves seeking the perfect solution to the economy/health care/financial reform, while the GOP took their case to the airwaves, working the long con, playing on the white majority’s racial and class resentments. Just like 1966-1968
When the obituaries for Obama’s single term are written, it should be noted that his own party and so-called supporters sunk the knife in first, and whoever wins the POTUS in 2012 only twisted it in further.
El Cid
@Nick: There’s not a lot of evidence of that. There is evidence that Democratic turnout in 1994 was depressed more than in average mid-term elections, and that Perot may have damaged Bush Sr’s conservative credentials, but I still don’t know what you’re talking about with regard to Democrats depending on Perotista votes and how this is democracy.
Nick
@El Cid:
keep in mind that this isn’t true for people’s personal finances and the American people don’t have the ability to comprehend the difference between their own personal finances and those of the govt/business.
That’s why the Republicans always win with arguments like “Families have to tighten their budget, so should the government.”
Because it sounds plausiable and logical, while “because people are in debt, the govenrment needs to spend more” confuses people, requires you to explain, and when you’re explaining, your losing.
El Cid
@Nick: FDR was in part gifted (and sometimes cursed) by a section of the Democratic Party which had extraordinary seniority in Congress and faced no challenge from Republicans whatsoever: Southern (segregationist) Democrats. Combined with non-Southern Democrats, it led to a very strong coalition for the first year or so.
eemom
Can’t we go back to bashing the Swiss? Gets my mind off the depressing shit, i.e., everything else.
Though the Polanski story didn’t seem to get much traction today.
El Cid
@Nick: It is true for people’s finances. Mortgages are debts they incur for an immediate benefit and they stand no chance whatsoever to pay it off before their 20 or 30 year term. Student loans are, albeit not always correctly, incurred for predictions of future earnings, and these often aren’t paid off for many, many years, yet they cannot in any way pay them off quickly, much less in a couple of fiscal years. Car loans are routinely 3 – 5 years, an item that people need now, often to maintain jobs and income, yet they lack the capacity to pay them off in any short term.
People do not realize the level of debt they have taken on in their personal and family lives, mostly because it isn’t described as indebtedness, but ‘a mortgage’ or ‘car payments’ or ‘student loans’. They just don’t get the connection.
We grew out of the debt of the New Deal and WWII. People in the 1950s and 1960s weren’t starving. The investment of a generation before led to much greater success later on. Were there special circumstances to that success induplicable today? Sure. Does the general lesson seem to hold? Probably.
Nick
@El Cid:
Sigh, ok
Clinton won the election 43%-37.5%-18.9%. That means Clinton’s agenda only received 43% of popular support. In many districts, Clinton won with a plurality. In fact, Arkansas was the only state he won more than 50% of the vote in. In order to acheive a working majority, he had to win over at least 7% of voters who voted for the other guys and Congressmen and Senators had to be aware of those voters who voted for the other guy.
Clinton’s best chance at a working majority was to win the support of Perot voters, whose biggest concern was the deficit (along with outsourcing, which is why NAFTA killed him). Clinton’s 1993 budget blew the deficit wide open in the short term (while closing it in the long term) and there, he lost Perot voters who went back into the hands of the Republicans.
In a way, that gave the Republicans most of the 19% who had voted for Perot, thought not all, but enough to deliver them a majority in 1994.
FlipYrWhig
@El Cid:
Here’s the thing, though. I have a mortgage, a car loan, and student loans too. But it’s true that part of the way I deal with that burden is by reducing consumer spending. So the trick as I see it is conveying that what the government has been spending money on is _more like_ mortgages, car loans, and student loans than it is like buying a round and worrying about paying it off later. And the other trick is reminding people that you have a well-considered plan to _pay off_ those “good debt” loans. You’re not just running up a balance and then skipping town.
That’s why I don’t much like the idea that the “grand bargain” is spending that increases deficits now followed by cuts that reduce them later, the “bargain” being that Democrats get the former and Republicans get the latter. Fuck that. Spending-followed-by-payoff IS the Democratic plan. Democrats don’t want wild consequence-free spending forever. Thinking of future cuts as the Republican side of the “bargain” gives them way too much credit.
Hugin & Munin
@FlipYrWhig: Hey, if you aren’t trying to argue both of the aforesaid concepts at the same time, then what are you worrying about?
Brien Jackson
@Jeff Fecke:
There’s a lot of people on the center-left concerned about the long term deficit perfectly willing to cut our military budget substantially.
El Cid
@Nick: Explain again? Clinton was President. He was President whether or not he had 43% of the vote. What the hell are you talking about with a ‘working majority’?
You keep making it sound like we have a parliamentary government. “Sigh.”
Are you saying that Clinton was prevented from what he could do when assuming the Presidency in 1993 because of the Perot voters in 1994? The fact that the Democrats lost the House in 1994 because of the turnout of Perot voters who then voted Republican, show it to me. Because the polling I’ve seen showed that NAFTA caused an excessive lack of voting by Democrats, not Perot voters.
[Excuse me — the surveyed factor was a lack of turnout of Democrats more than predicted by typical mid-term drop offs, one of the frequently cited reasons being NAFTA. Not to imply a simple predicted causal link.]
El Cid
By the way — Perot voters were shit-heads.
General Stuck
@El Cid: I am not arguing against spending or deficits. I am arguing against those things as a matter of ideological reaction. I do not believe that spending profusely just for the sake of the idea is a panacea to revive our economy by itself, or absent other factors it will not affect, factors that only time can solve. I support and do, the stimulus and think it has worked, by creating a cushion so the economy didn’t go thru the floor. There are economists out there who believe the same thing.
This is not a normal downturn and even Krugman admits this, and i linked a couple of days ago , a 1996 article where he was dissing another economist for suggesting government spending is always the answer.
No one really knows the long term effect of the kinds of debt we are currently racking up. Maybe it is just like a business borrowing to grow more in the future that will allow it to be paid off. But we have a lot of other problems with our jobs base and outsourcing manufacturing jobs and other kinds of jobs, that do not bode well for the future regarding GDP.
IMHOThere is going to be contraction in our economy and our lifestyle, and it is going to be painful. We cannot continue to live under the illusion that we can create and maintain an affluent or even middle class lifestyle that is based on way to much credit both personal and national. And little or no savings. It is a mirage, and if anything could be tracked back to our current condition, I bet that's it.
And arguing to borrow the cash to keep that going is foolish imo, and only prolongs and intensifies the pain we all must face to have a healthy democracy with a healthy free market based economy. The house of cards will fall, the only questions is how hardly, or not.
Hugin & Munin
@eemom: Look, both Roman Polanski and the Swiss are Class-A dicks, but neither of them is going to bring about the end of the Republic.
Fun Swiss Conservatism Facts: Women were granted the Federal Vote in the 70s; the last canton to grant cantonal voting rights to women did so in the 80s. And we aren’t talking 1800s, we are talking the 1970s and 80s, here.
OTOH, citizenship rights still descend patrimonially; having a Swiss mother gets you a handshake and a suspicious look.
Nick
@El Cid: Perhaps trying to explain it to people this way would help.
“The stimulus is like the mortgage on your house. We need a big house, so we’re gonna take out a big mortgage.”
Although I’m skeptical…pretty sure the Republicans will say we can’t afford a mortgage and that’ll work like it always does.
Brien Jackson
@david mizner:
That was an entirely different situation, and in that context Rubin was right.
Hunter Gathers
@General Stuck:
The danger of not softening the fall as much as possible is military dictatorship. And a majority of white voters will probably take that if the house falls too hard. The military is the only institution that white voters have faith in anymore. If properly frightened, a majority will let the Joint Chiefs take over, whether the POTUS is a DEM or a GOPer.
ruemara
@General Stuck:
Thom Hartmann calls this the Double Santa Clause. And I may disagree with him and his borderline ODS passing for news, but he is bloody right on this.
@El Cid:
So let me see if I get this. The guy in charge of setting the rules and organization of the Senate, thinks the president should have come in and waved his majestirial wand over the opposition who’ve been using the arcanum of Senate rules to be dicks. If he weren’t old, I’d slap him.
El Cid
@General Stuck: I’m not saying “Whee!” either — just that right now, the much, much greater threat appears to be the collapse of employment and widespread earnings and the consumer economy on which we depended, and the continued lack of revenue it portends, revenue without which we cannot conceivably pay off our debts. Even Keynesian theory isn’t ideologically in favor of government and especially deficit spending all the time — the notion was that sometimes you would have strong economies and greater revenues and maybe even surpluses, and instead of pissing that away in tax cuts for the super-rich losing trillions in revenue, and in foreign wars which will cost trillions over the years, and in deregulatory and anti-regulating fetishism which allows a gigantic bubble based on fictional investment bets leading to the collapse of national revenues, you would use such periods to pay down debts. That’s what Clinton did. Clinton was an ideological Keynesian. He just did the growing economy side of Keynesianism.
Nick
@El Cid: The Democratic defeat of 1994 being blamed on low turnout of Democrats is historically the progressive way to trying to defend themselves from the idea that their policies didn’t sell.
Certainly that was a mitigating factor, but the GOP gained across the board in 1994, most notably winning 2/3 of Perot voters.
If you added Bush’s 37.5% to 2/3 of Perot’s total (which would be about 13.25%), that equals 50.75%, which is just about what the GOP got in 1994.
cleek
@lamh32:
and… ?
he’s the president. he has the power inherent to the office whether people think he’s an angry black man or not. he is president no matter what names the dingbats on FoxNews call him. if he’s too afraid of what demagogues and liars will say if he chooses to act forcefully to try to get the things his party wants and needs, then we are wasting our time defending him.
but again, i don’t think he is cowering in fear of someone pointing out that he’s black and angry. i think he’s just a bland centrist Dem with a non-confrontational streak.
@Nick:
well, yeah. “give or take a few points”. and McCain won in 2008, give or take a few points.
jl
@General Stuck: About zero percent of voters will care, or even notice debt hysteria if the employment situation improves. Another well designed fiscal stimulus would do that very quickly.
I agree with your comments about potential harm of another fiscal stimulus that attempts to restore the US economy to repeat the late 1990s and mid 2000s. That is why economists like Joseph Stiglitz, Roubini, and James Galbraith emphasized that stimulus should concentrate on jobs that productive investment in human and physical capital.
In previous cycles the argument that the private sector knows how to choose productive investments better might have made some sense. But the financial sector that channels savings into specific investments has become so malfunctional, and obvious effects of almost ten years worth of misdirected investment in a huge overstock of residential and commercial building kind of changes that.
A good second stimulus that does not endanger the countries long term fiscal health could easily be designed.
One reason is that the main danger to long run fiscal health of US is increasing costs of government health care programs, and private health care spending.
General Stuck
@Hunter Gathers: Everything is a risk. All I am saying is think shit through. I reject the idea that borrowing gazillions of dollars from the Chinese, or anyone else is risk free and in principle a good idea. We are lucky to have a presnit who does think things thru. It is a tightrope of survival we are walking, and ideological dogma from wherever it comes is what will take us over the edge. Maybe it is too late to save ourselves. Some days I think probably.
And I don’t think if the fabric unwinds in this country it will become one thing or another. It will split, largely along Dixie, and then there are nuclear weapons.
Nick
@jl: No, this I wholeheartedly disagree with.
the deficit will be even more of an issue if the employment situation improves because there will be another shiny object for people to be concerned about.
Then there’s gonna be talk of trying to cut the deficit before inflation sets in and ruins the recovery, which, while not entirely correct, is not entirely wrong either
and then the top debate will be ‘How do we cut the deficit?”
and the base will be pissed and the deficit hawks who now how jobs will vote Republican.
kay
@cleek:
Just be careful with approval ratings :)
It’s from Gallup.
“Reaganomics” wasn’t popular either. Democrats basically succeeded in demonizing his whole economic approach.
Which took him to 35%, at the low point.
General Stuck
@El Cid: Well, much as I like, I can’t wish away the Bush years and his tax cuts, and Iraq spending and bloodshed, and the complete failure to regulate any business that led us to tarp, among other disasters large and small. But those things did happen, and left us high and dry, and already in debt up to our eyeballs. The only point I make on government spending is to focus on where it can do some good, like maintaining the safety net for unemployed, and possibly repairing our crumbling infrastructure. And not adopt an ideological position that deficits don’t matter. Just be smart about our spending is all.
El Cid
@Nick: That may have been a ‘progressive way,’ but I was reading political science articles that weren’t published in The Nation etc. Given the stats you just gave, it wouldn’t take much in terms of Democratic turnout to change that result. I do think Perot voters — many of them natural Republican voters, many of which had not voted Republican in order to support Perot — had an impact.
But they didn’t come out of nowhere. I think it also was important that Southern conservatives at that time were still getting rid of their traditional, segregation-era support for Democrats and replacing them with the post-Southern Strategy Republicans who better fit their preferences. There is, of course, a meeting between the ‘progressive’ perspective and a perspective focusing on Perot voters — Perot was vehemently against NAFTA.
Therefore, on the theory that Clinton ‘had to’ govern with enough of a majority of Perot voters, then obviously Clinton utterly rejected that argument himself, choosing that he and Al Gore would strongly and visibly take up backing of the issue that Perot (and, presumably, his voters) hated most in 1993. Therefore Clinton in no way more than the rest of Congress can be said to have recognized the need to win over Perot voters, whether for a governing coalition or any other purpose.
Just Some Fuckhead
Or Crazy Mel will slap another bitch around.
El Cid
@General Stuck: There’s a problem with the lingo here. We’re not “borrowing” from the Chinese. The Chinese are choosing to invest in US instruments because we are the safest place to invest and because this is one of the main ways they’ve kept their currency artificially low so as to favor exports. In no way is the US going hat in hand to borrow. Investments are still coming in even given the remarkably low interest rates being paid. It’s not our weakness causing foreign governments to buy our investments, but our strengths.
Hunter Gathers
@cleek:
You obviously don’t remember the Henry Louis Gates incident. Obama didn’t really even show anger at that press conference, but he was still ‘the angry black man’ to the MSM and GOP. That shit sucked up all of the political oxygen for 3 fucking weeks, and HCR stalled during those 3 weeks. All for (correctly) pointing out that what that cop did was stupid. But black people aren’t allowed to bad mouth the police, without being tarred as some sort of Black nationalist.
El Cid
@General Stuck: I know that I don’t, and I don’t know of anyone saying that deficits don’t matter. (And even Dick Cheney when saying that was, in my view, making a point about the political costs of deficits, not an economic argument, ’cause he didn’t give a whiff of a shit about the future of the US economy as sane people would talk about it.) It’s just that in a tradeoff between doing really important things which would make people truly better off now and build our ability to restore revenue intake in the future and giving those things up to make a lame attempt to pay off debts we won’t be able to pay without the revenue we’re missing, we should choose the former. And when (more like if, if we’re lucky, in my view) we get to a healthier point, then focus on a healthier budget.
El Cid
@Hunter Gathers: Yeah, how did Obama get away with shooting those white cops anyway?
Brien Jackson
@El Cid:
I think one good way to bridge the gap in the interim is arguing for higher taxes on rich people.
General Stuck
@El Cid:
This is true and has been, until it isn’t. There is a limit to our strength, both militarily and economically. It would take a lot for our creditors to turn away, because that would cause them great pain as well. At least for China currently. But they are not our friends and are on their way to becoming a superpower themselves, especially economically. They may not be our enemies, but at some point, when they become self contained as a superpower, and they will – they would cast us to the fiscal wolves as a country in a heartbeat, imo. I don’t think it’s a good idea to help them do this if at all possible.
El Cid
@General Stuck: If they did so, they’d be losing all the money they invested. That’s not a good option, either.
El Cid
Oh, fuck. I forgot shit-bag Ben Nelson hasn’t yet committed to voting for financial reform, so I guess we have to wait until he finds out how many millions he’s going to be promised to not vote for it.
General Stuck
@El Cid: I don’t disagree with this at all. I am just hearing from liberals that borrowing large sums of money is not a big deal. It comes down to how much and for what purpose. As I said, I don’t believe we can simply spend our way out this disaster that is as close as we have come to an economic collapse since the GD. If you believe we can, then I respect the reasons why you want to borrow such money. But don’t agree on the substance of your argument.
General Stuck
@El Cid: That’s why I said it is unlikely they would turn us down right now. But at some point they will be able to sustain such a blow to themselves.
El Cid
@General Stuck:
The message, would be, that ‘borrowing money’ is indeed a very big deal, even for an economy which used to be as strong as ours.
And the message would be that how that borrowed money should be used for the greatest gain, short and long term, for the largest number of people, is a really, really big deal.
It should be a calculation: benefits now and long term versus the need to pay debts off long term.
We did, though, spend our way out of the Great Depression, via the New Deal and the gigantic New Deal known as WWII spending.
Hunter Gathers
@El Cid: Reid would be better off waiting until Manchin gets off his high horse and names a temporary Senator instead of waiting for Nelson’s ransom demands.
El Cid
@Hunter Gathers: I haven’t looked — is Nelson issuing ransom demands, or just blathering on while he’s seeking more $$$ from anti-reform sources?
General Stuck
@El Cid: It took the awesome national effort of WW2 to finally bring us out of the GD. It took ten years or so, and work projects helped people survive, and provided a safety net and self esteem for average
Americans. Spending helped, as did The New Deal, but time and restructuring our economy made the recovery sustainable.
IOW’s government spending wasn’t all of it.
Hunter Gathers
@El Cid: One of the two, I’m sure. If not both. He’ll find a reason to vote against it, if only to burnish his white man cred. Specifics aren’t available at the moment, according to the GOS.
Mark S.
@jl:
And the deficit will look better if we have actual growth.
That’s the big thing. If we could get health care spending down from 16% of GDP to 10% or something, nearly all of our fiscal problems would go away. Unfortunately, no one has ever figured out how to do such a thing . . . oh wait, the rest of the industrialized world has.
Cat Lady
@El Cid:
Awesome.
That is all.
PurpleGirl
@The Dangerman: Based on the shitty job they did in banking when not Galt… how bad could it get if they went Galt? Really?
cleek
@Hunter Gathers:
i think that’s pushing it a bit. some people made that leap, and some wanted ABM to be the story, sure. but i don’t recall it dominating. but in any case, there was already a clear racial angle to that incident.
but, more recently, Obama was said to be “furious” about McChrystal, just last month. but i don’t recall the ABM meme dominating the airways for weeks over that. i don’t recall it even coming up – i don’t troll wingnut boards, so i don’t know if they went there on not. don’t care, either.
still not buying it.
cleek
Nelson needs some primary action. bad.
El Cid
@Cat Lady: That wasn’t me, it was some other commenter on here. Or maybe it was Wonkette. I forget.
Allison W.
Refreshing to see a blog thread not splattered with Obama is not FDR jibber jabber.
Don’t think we should take Reid’s comments too seriously. He had to be asked twice, I believe, to answer the question and he did with a generic complaint. I’m sure that he and Obama probably had this discussion in private some time ago.
Can’t agree with that “24 months” comment. Obama has been the most vocal and consistently visible person in the party. We have already witnessed Obama in real fighting mode – remember the two year campaign where he vanquished his opponents little by little? It’s still in him and I will bet money that we will see that guy again in the Fall.
And for those saying Obama will be a one-term president – just a few years ago a skinny black guy with a muslim sounding name had zero chance of becoming president. Obama’s election is proof that you should never say never and that history does not always repeat itself. Please stop writing the man’s presidency before its over.
El Cid
@General Stuck: It wasn’t “government spending” in some sort of abstract. And “World War II” didn’t lift us out of the Depression by fighting or bombing. It was government investment, building, hiring, and production. That was government spending. WWII may have been a new reason to spend, but WWII did not lift the US out of the Depression directly — it was the investment and public production and employment (including military service) which did so.
It’s not just ‘government spending’ in the abstract — bringing electricity and clean water and health clinics and education and roads and defense plants and other infrastructure to the rural, impoverished, shit-hole South wasn’t ‘government spending’ in some abstract — that was what built this modern nation.
General Stuck
@El Cid: There are limits to comparing then and now, and we have nothing like a world war to focus our efforts. The amount of our GDP it would take to jump start things like with ww2 is not feasible politically. and our economy is much much larger and equally more complex. I think there is a threshold point to getting the kind of GDP committment to recreate a ww2 post boom economy, and there is no way that can be met. The other way is time and focused spending to keep us afloat.
Brien Jackson
@General Stuck:
GDP is the sum total of spending in the domestic economy, so any level of spending by the government on final goods and services will boost GDP. The argument would be whether that represented an efficient allocation of resources, not whether it could raise production.
El Cid
@General Stuck: Actually, just using Krugman’s (or Baker’s) estimate of how much it would have taken to replace lost consumer demand would have been somewhere around (I’m recalling here, not looking it up) $1.3 trillion or whatever.
We did $700 billion, much of which was fairly unhelpful tax cuts, but with the same impact on the short-term spending side of the budget. Imagine that that amount was $600 billion larger — i.e., one year’s worth of a Pentagon budget in order to make the economy return to a much, much higher level of employment and growth than we’re likely to see for a long, long time.
(Political possibilities are a real, but different matter.)
The impact of an additional $600 billion on the long-term debt situation versus the argued increase in long-term revenues was offset.
I’m not missing the fact that comparing here and now is different than then and there. One of the main differences is that much of our nation then was simply an undeveloped hellhole — including pretty much the entire 1/3rd of the nation known as the American South.
I’m not confused about the differences between two different eras. I’m not whining that OMG Obama isn’t FDR. Sometimes comparisons are inevitable, particularly when general rules are being asserted. I’m not unaware of economic changes between now and then.
But you don’t have to have the awesome transformation of society as took place in WWII in order to invest in major, needed, and very positive programs and infrastructures for the nation, ones which spend more now in order to reap more gains later.
kay
@Allison W.:
I give him a lot of credit for not going completely insane running this screeching, ungovernable, madhouse of a country.
Dealing with the Senate alone would drive me right over the edge.
General Stuck
@Brien Jackson: Okay then, I meant the G part.
GDP (Y) is a sum of Consumption (C), Investment (I), Government Spending (G) and Net Exports (X – M).
Y = C + I + G + (X − M)
General Stuck
@El Cid:
The tax cuts were mostly a temporary rebate on ss taxes, I think. Which went to mostly lower income people who were more likely to spend it. I think that was about 200 billion, some of the rest went to small bidness tax relief and other social safety net programs. The bulk of it went to long term R and D considered long term stimulus. It was a progressive bill and largest in history, even for the GD era adjusted for inflation. This was the investment in our possible new markets of alternative energy and health related research. Likely the only new markets that might save us down the road.
We have a 14 trillion dollar economy, and I maintain that the amount politically doable to get passed as stimulus is not near enough to reach any threshold by itself catapulting this economy into near term recovery/prosperity./ jobs.
Nick
@Allison W.: My money’s on that he won’t even bother running for reelection. Why? He’s probably going to have the most accomplished first term in like a century.
El Cid
@General Stuck: You’re having a different conversation on a different subject about which you think I’m addressing. I was addressing the question not of ‘whether Obama did the best he could’ or whether the stimulus ‘was a progressive bill,’ etc. That’s something you can hash out with the traditional commenters with which you go round and round. I simply discussed the size of the bill in terms of long term impacts on debt, versus the long-term impacts of a larger amount of money.
General Stuck
@El Cid:
Don’t disagree with these items, they are needed. What I am saying until other things that are wrong with the economy and our national mindset, spending on these things will not cause businesses to hire and banks to loan and shouldn’t be sold as such. We have a lot of things wrong that need fixing not related to any stimulus. It is an illusion not to think so. And will only lead to more disappointment in dems not fixing things when more spending by the government doesn’t work. Per my earlier comment, some pain is needed to focus the publics mind. That pain should be managed as we slowly contract our unrealistic lifestyle that is far too credit based, but it has to happen imo.
Hunter Gathers
@Allison W.: I may be pessimistic at the moment, but I absolutely love being proved wrong. Prove me wrong, Obama, prove me wrong. Please, for the love of Jeebus, prove me wrong.
@General Stuck:
I could be wrong, but I believe it was taken out of federal payroll taxes, $400 spread out over 52 weeks. SS, Medicare, state, and local taxes were untouched. Most people didn’t notice. A $400 check would have been better politics, but the payroll tax cut was better policy.
General Stuck
@El Cid: sorry old habits defending the stimulus. If it was just the 800 billion for that stimulus then I would agree, but there are other as big or bigger debts accrued in recent times. Whether or not you are right, on whether or not it’s something to worry much about, the fact is we are in fairly uncharted territory right now, and I don’t buy the percent of GDP argument. There are potent psychological negative effects on a country that dives this deep into debt. In the business community and elsewhere.
General Stuck
@Hunter Gathers: You are correct FICA was left alone.
liberal
@Nick:
Yeah, like all the inflation you said the Japanese economy suffered from after they had their big crash.
/snark
catclub
@jl:
In this chart: Sources of Our Current Deficit
Brad DeLong, July 12
http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/…..ficit.html
Does anyone know whether
the amount of deficit due to Bush tax cuts in the chart,
is based on the current law, which expires, or is based on the current law being extended indefinitely?
I have read that sometimes budget estimates are made assuming that the Alternative Minimum Tax fix will be applied, sometimes not.
I hope it is based on current law being extended and none of the Bush tax cuts being allowed to expire.
Nick
@liberal: Except my point is if we had spent enough money in the stimulus for a robust economic recovery, we would have had inflation.
El Cid
@Nick: Well, let’s hope that we can still have some, because we need a degree of inflation, and instead are on the verge of deflation.