“Having a Republican Governor is associated with low Economic Growth”

Posted: May 9, 2011 | Author: | Filed under: academia, Domestic Policy, Economic Develpment, Economy, Republican politics | Tags: , , , | 13 Comments

The Miser Brothers as Republican Governors. Honey, we shrunk the state's prosperity but saved us a few pennies in tax dollars.

There’s a new academic study by professors from Tulane University and the Nevada state Department of Planning and Budget that’s sure to become the source of some very hot political debate.  I didn’t bury the lead.  It’s up there in the banner header, however, I’m sure you want to know the supporting evidence and tests.  There’s a brief overview of this study at The Atlantic written by Richard Florida who is the Director of the Martin Prosperity Institute at the University of Toronto

The basic research question for the authors was “What factors influence state economic growth?”.  Basically, the authors look at a state’s fiscal policy and regress it against various policy choices and factors.  Then, they run some Monte Carlo simulations to see what happens under various scenarios. It’s complex statistics but their findings  are somewhat intuitive to me for years as well as true to my experience working with the state of Nebraska as a consultant to its Economic Development Department. However, this is a solid academic study with oodles of data.  It’s the kind of study that will be talked about for some time in economic circles.

This is what I learned from my time dealing with people in state governments whose jobs are attracting and retaining companies.  Businesses tend to relocate to states with good public services and low cost, employees that come from good educational systems.  They look for decent public school systems and state universities that do research in their area.  They want good state recreational facilities and even professional sports teams and cultural venues.  Omaha used to lose out to all kinds of places over things like lack of recreational facilities and cultural venues all the time.  It lost two fortune 100 companies and possible new ones over no recreational facilities or sports venues.  They offered hugely attractive tax packages and ready to build land but they always lost out on the same reason that makes me not want to live there.  There’s really very few things to do there and you don’t spend your life at work.

If you haven’t figured out that all of those things people and corporations seek basically come from public tax dollars, you must be a Republican.  A state’s tax giveaways and tax rates aren’t as high up on the list of things attractive to business as most die-hard Republicans want you to believe.  That’s pretty much what this study shows.

A new study by Tulane’s James Alm and Janet Rogers of Nevada’s Department of Budget and Planning (h/t Ryan Avent, whose deadpan tweet noted that it was likely to spark a “lively discussion”) takes a close look at the effects of tax and spending policies at the state level.  Entitled  “Do State Fiscal Policies Affect State Economic Growth?”, it examines  50 years of data  (from 1947 to 1997),  tracking  the effects of state tax policies, spending policies, and political orientation on economic growth. Looking at the different policy approaches and strategies that have been pursued at the level of states and cities and comparing their results provides a useful lens through which to examine pressing national issues. Alm’s and Rogers’ main findings are certainly interesting; “lively” is quite likely an understatement for the sort of debate their findings should inspire.

There are two major take-aways. First, a “state’s fiscal policies have a measurable relationship with per capita income growth, although not always in the expected direction.” Tax impacts, they report, are “quite variable”; “expenditure impacts are more consistent.”

This particular statement is right up there in the author’s abstract.

Of some interest, there is moderately strong evidence that a states political orientation has consistent and measurable effects on economic growth; perhaps surprisingly, a more \conservative” political orientation is associated with lower rates of economic growth.

Wow. Austerity doesn’t work.  Not only does it NOT work, it’s detrimental to the state’s economic well being and future.  Again this should be pretty intuitive.  If you have a business, you need customers with paychecks. The higher the paycheck, the more they customer spends on nonessentials which  many business sell.  Also, you need good, happy, creative employees.  If you rely on professional people, these folks like good restaurants, entertainment, schools, and sports venues.   Every  one needs good transportation infrastructure like well maintained roads and airports.  Again, a lot of this must be provided by government for a variety of reasons having to do with the nature of public goods.

Their conclusion is pretty damning to current policy prescriptions.

… there is strong evidence that a state’s political orientation, as indicated by whether the governor is Republican or Democrat, whether the state has enacted tax and expenditure limitation legislation, and whether the state frequently elects a governor of the same party as the incumbent, have consistent, measurable, and significant effects on economic growth.  Perhaps surprisingly, having a Republican governor is associated with lower rates of growth.

I’m not the least bit surprised. This is good old fashioned, no-nonsense Keynesian results. Also, growth rates compound over time like interest compounds your savings account.  If the rates of growth are low during one administration, the state will fall farther and farther behind so one or two administrations of bad fiscal policy means that slow growth compounds over time and makes the results more noticeable as you go along.  This seems to be how they capture some of their significant differences.

That trend brings us back to the extremely low growth we had during the Dubya years and the paltry recovery we have now.  Traditional fiscal policy always tells us that the multiplying effects of tax cuts are less strong than increases in government spending because the first round of government spending gets spent 100 percent and because it usually is targeted at infrastructure or other types of spending that has long reaching impact.  Yes, you can actually see economic benefit from building football stadiums or airports.   When you give money to rich people or even business in tax rebates or tax cuts, there’s no way of controlling where it goes  or where  it’s spent.  That degrades the impact of  the stimulus as well as leads to lost revenues.  And, at the moment, those tax cuts at the state level are being coupled with excuses to raid basic government services like public education.  The result is basically a drain on the state’s capacity to grow as well as no stimulation to the economy.

Anyway,  I imagine the Cato Institute or the Heritage Institute will try to rush out some distorted studies of their own shortly depending on how much circulation this gets.  I would like to add that the state of Nevada is not exactly Massachusetts and even though Tulane is referred to as the Harvard of the South, it’s still Louisiana.  Let’s hope this does stir up some debate and that this study attracts attention in all the right places.

Still no answers for the Jobs Crisis

Posted: May 5, 2011 | Author: | Filed under: Domestic Policy, Economy, Equity Markets, Federal Budget, Federal Budget and Budget deficit, jobs, The Great Recession, U.S. Economy, unemployment | Tags: , | 27 Comments

It’s difficult for me to watch the job market continue to dither knowing full well that nothing is being done about it.  Just in case you’ve missed the other headlines today, U.S. jobless claims “unexpectedly” jumped.  It wasn’t unexpected on my part.

Applications for jobless benefits jumped by 43,000 to 474,000 in the week ended April 30, the most since August, Labor Department figures showed today. A spring break holiday in New York, a new emergency benefits program in Oregon and auto shutdowns caused by the disaster in Japan were the main reasons for the surge, a Labor Department spokesman said as the data was released to the press.

Even before last week, claims had drifted up, raising concern the improvement in the labor market has stalled. Employers added 185,000 workers to payrolls in April, fewer than in the prior month, and the unemployment rate held at 8.8 percent, economists project a Labor Department report to show tomorrow.

“We’re seeing so many distortions in the claims numbers week to week that it’s hard to say, but I’m willing to be patient and wait and see,” said Stephen Stanley, chief economist at Pierpont Securities LLC in Stamford, Connecticut. “Other reports show an improvement in the labor market. It’s going to take a while to dig out of the hole we have in relation to the jobs the economy lost during the recession.”

Yes, it is a hole, and there’s very little being done to fill it.  There are quite a few factors that contribute to the current appalling job market.  The Fifth Fed District’s Macroblog looks at the contribution of offshoring.  Offshoring basically means that part of a production process is moved to an overseas location.  That can mean anything from a call center to manufacturing of a good.  You can see that the impacted industries include both service and manufacturing sectors.  The nifty table up there in the left hand corner will give you an idea of the impact of offshoring by industry.  The numbers are tabulated from data during the years of 1999 – 2008.  The changes and content of the ‘other’ category is further elucidated in the macroblog piece. It includes another table that you may review too.

Sixty-nine percent of the foreign employment growth by U.S. multinationals from 1999 to 2008 was in the “other industries” category, and 87 percent of that growth was in three types of industries: retail trade; administration, support, and waste management; and accommodation of food services. Some fraction of these jobs, no doubt, reflect “offshoring” in the usual sense. But it is also true that these are types of industries that are more likely than many others to represent production for local (or domestic) demand as opposed to production for export to the United States.

This is a bit interesting.  There are two main types of Foreign Direct Investment that involve ‘offshoring’.  One is called vertical and the other is horizontal.  Horizontal FDI means that one segment of the process is moved to another country but the final good or service still goes to the consumer in the company’s home country.  The last analysis from macroblog implies that a substantial part of that offshoring is actually Vertical FDI.  This means that the company is moving itself over to the country to take advantage of end consumers in the other country.

This finding isn’t surprising if you consider the number of countries that are experiencing booms in the number of middle class citizens.  There are more middle class Chinese than there are US citizens, as an example.  There is also the fact that the middle class in the US has been losing income and purchasing power for nearly 30 years.  It only figures that these companies would look for greener pastures elsewhere.  Why expand here when your customer base is unlikely to be expanding and unable to afford your products in any meaningful way?

Macroblog points out that this is unlikely to explain all the doldrums in the US job market, but it does provide one factor and and interesting one at that.  I would say that this analysis basically says that US businesses are much more bullish on foreign markets than they are on their own. (Capital flows for investment suggest this too.) This should give all of us pause.

Interestingly enough, another FED President also suggested that the economy and the US job markets weren’t as stable as they could be and suggested more stimulus.   Three Fed Presidents rotate in and out of the Open Market Committee–that’s the monetary policy decision body–and each district is a world unto itself in many ways.  Fed Boston is not in the current rotation.

Federal Reserve Bank of Boston President Eric Rosengren yesterday said record stimulus is necessary to spur the “anemic” economy and that raising interest rates to combat increasing food and fuel prices would impede growth.

“With significant slack in labor markets, stable inflation expectations, and core inflation well below our longer run target, there is currently no reason to slow the economy down with tighter monetary policy,” Rosengren said during a speech in Boston.

Not surprisingly, equity markets seemed to be caught a bit off guard with this news.  Right now, I think the market seems to be in one of those periods where it’s not paying much attention to fundamentals. Bloomberg.com notes that Futures Fell on the news. Some times Wall Street thinks as long as their churning out fees and capital gains, all is right with the world.  This is definitely not the case. It does explain why their economists tend to get caught off guard though.  Hello?  Real World anyone?

Stock-index futures dropped after the report. The contract on the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index maturing in June fell 0.6 percent to 1,334.8 at 8:58 a.m. in New York. Treasury securities rose, sending the yield on the benchmark 10-year note down to 3.18 percent from 3.22 percent late yesterday.

Dean Baker from CEPR is pretty pessimistic about the entire thing.

Weekly unemployment claims jumped to 474,000 last week, an increase of 43,000 from the level reported the previous week. This is seriously bad news about the state of the labor market. It seems that the numbers were inflated by unusual factors, most importantly the addition of 25,000 spring break related layoffs in New York to the rolls due to a changing vacation pattern, however even after adjusting for such factors, claims would still be above 400,000 for the fourth consecutive week.

This puts weekly claims well above the 380,000 level that we had been seeing in February and March. This suggests that job growth is slowing from an already weak level. This is news that should be reported prominently.

Unfortunately, the lackadaisical job market is off the front pages. Much of the political focus on the economy remains honed in on the federal debt.  Again, this is the silly because one of the best ways of increasing tax revenues and closing the debt is for people to be employed.  It’s an uphill battle to expect the deficit to close with this unacceptable level of unemployment.  I still can’t figure out where they’ve placed their heads back their in Washington, D.C.   Oh, well, look over there … it’s a dead Osama Bin Laden and we’ve not got any pictures yet!

Aftermath: The Torture Apologist tour and other Un-pleasantries

Posted: May 3, 2011 | Author: | Filed under: 2012 presidential campaign, Barack Obama, Central Intelligence Agency, Civil Liberties, Democratic Politics, Diplomacy Nightmares, Domestic Policy, Elections | Tags: , | 55 Comments

I talked to Bostonboomer last night about the time John King–sober this time–was on the air. Piers Morgan is a cup of tea that I don’t want to know exists, but I did go back to look for a pattern during the Anderson Cooper show.  I even checked out Fox News a bit.  There it was.  The Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld torture policy apologist tour.  It was inevitable that a few Bushies would show up to offer the ‘balance’ to the Osama story. I’m not sure if Dubya wants to be able to visit the South of France without fear of being arrested for crimes against humanity or it’s just a bunch of guilty consciences trying to find equilibrium, I just see the meme and it’s appalling.

The Bushies have jumped on the Bin Laden courier narrative as a way to justify their treatment of Kahlid Sheikh Mohammed and other detainees from the War on Terror. I must’ve not been the only one that saw this unfolding because today’s RealClearPolitics has a pretty good set of videos up with both the meme mongers–like NY’s Congressional Ninny Peter King— and the ones that say this isn’t so.  I’d say John Brennan’s word on the matter is a pretty authoritative one.  SOS Clinton speaks on this too. Brennan was on Morning Joe this morning try to  kill the meme among other things.

Here’s a taste from TPM on what I sensed during last night’s news cycle.

Like so many memes that persist in politics, this one started on the Internet. The morning after President Obama announced that Osama bin Laden had been killed in Pakistan, conservatives started crowing that credit should be given to President George W. Bush — specifically, for having the foresight and courage to torture the people who provided the initial scraps of intel that ultimately led the CIA to a giant compound just north of Islamabad.

The most prominent of these conservatives was Rep. Steve King (R-IA), who took to Twitter to ask sardonically, “Wonder what President Obama thinks of water boarding now?

About two hours later, the Associated Press published a brief story claiming that the CIA obtained the initial intelligence it needed to find bin Laden from Khalid Sheikh Mohammed — the so-called mastermind of 9/11 — and his successor, Abu Faraj al-Libi at CIA black sites in Poland and Romania.

Those secret prisons, which the Obama administration contends to have abandoned, were the facilities where Mohammed and al-Libi were waterboarded. There, the detainees supposedly identified by nom de guerre a courier who would years later be located by American intelligence officials, and lead them to bin Laden’s compound.

“The news is sure to reignite debate over whether the now-closed interrogation and detention program was successful,” the AP wrote. “Former president George W. Bush authorized the CIA to use the harshest interrogation tactics in U.S. history. President Barack Obama closed the prison system.”

There’s just one problem. The key bit of intel wasn’t acquired via torture, according to a more fleshed out version of the same report.

The morning after the day after the ghoulish Booyah Death celebrations just reminds me that there are parts of being an American that really dismay me because there are things about American Society that are just over the top.  It’s our inability to separate our modern reality from spaghetti westerns and other Hollywood genres.  This entire thing is unfolding like a series of badly written, thinly plotted Hollywood movies.  Don’t even get me started on the actors.

I’d like to think that we could take this time to reflect on the last ten years of blowback rather than join a mosh pit of grave dancers.  We now have trillions of dollars sunk in two seemingly endless wars.  Many Americans and others have died as a result.  This adds to the already too high death toll of the Cole and the World Trade Centers.  We got a second Bush term because of all this.   We have made flying commercial airlines a complete exercise in fascist humiliation right down to bullies in uniform doing unspeakable things to the elderly and young.  Bin Laden’s death gives us reason to recheck our reactions and values, not create a set of worse ones.

First, before we go any further down Conspiracy Lane, the President will release the graphic photos of the dead Osama Bin Laden.   I suppose that my hope is that we don’t see this abused to the point that it puts people serving in countries with religionists that are offended by this sort of thing in danger.  This will probably set off a series of extremist sites debunking the photo but if this puts some people’s minds at rest, so be it. Maybe Donald Trump will get another poll boost by calling for more evidence than is rationally necessary.  Part of the problem with the photos release seems to be that Bin Laden’s skull was blown apart which makes this a particularly gruesome set of photos. They’re not sure what reaction folks will have to it.

I suppose it’s got to be released eventually, but count me lucky that I’m going to be sitting in my house for awhile and not traveling about or serving anywhere dangerous.  This is not me being an Obama apologist either, this is me being a realist.  Pope Dark Ages just canonized a barely dead pope who supposedly did miracles.  We’ve seen martyr’s funerals turn into all kinds of unpleasant things recently. We can’t even get a bunch of nuts from Kansas to stop harassing people at funerals and one nut in particular to quit grandstanding by burning Qurans.  Rational behavior is not exactly a hallmark of religion. We’ve seen the nuttiness from humanity BC forward.  It’s not going to stop, unfortunately.

A second question will come from the Wag-the-Dog plot.  Will the poll bounce that Obama has gotten from this be enough to get people’s minds away from the myriad of problems that are not solved?   Again, I think that depends on the size of those lesser,  shallow spaghetti western angels that comprise our society.   Torture, wars, Gitmo, and the TSA can only bring on so much false sense of security.  I think we’ve learned some of that over the past decade.  Hopefully, I’m not just being optimistic.  Most of us know that  Osama Bin Laden’s death will not get us out of Afghanistan and Iraq any quicker.  It will not solve our unemployment problem and it’s not going to stop the finance sector from draining every penny it can out of businesses and households.  It certainly is not going to solve our problem with Pakistan or hopefully, define our policy on the nations undergoing the Arab Spring.

You can gleefully dance on a watery grave for only so long before you have to go back to chopping wood, carrying water, and cooking dinner.  Eventually, you have to come back from the adrenaline rush and face the problems that are not dead.   Osama Bin Laden has been one very small problem recently. It’s nice he’s out of the way, still …

The Corps of Engineers is blowing up a levee on the Mississippi River as we speak. It will flood parts of Missouri.   You remember those guys, they are the ones that brought us the Katrina aftermath.  Canada just had an election with some astounding results.  The UK is considering completely changing the way they vote and achieve majorities.  They’re not getting a consensus on governance any more than we’ve been able to find bi-partisanship.  What does this mean for democracy?   Their parliamentary system is at the root of as many governments as our republic. Governments are being overthrown in a part of the world where we get most of our oil.  When will that impact Saudi Arabia?  Is Japan’s nuclear reactor any closer to safe?   Are you eating Gulf seafood yet?  Does it bother you that two ecosystems have been utterly destroyed by the energy industry with a year?  What have we learned about these things over the last two days?

Unfortunately, the public forum to work out all these issues is going to be our very corporate, very broken media and the nether reaches of the internet where hopefully some less-captured voices prevail.  I think we all have the duty to get beyond the hooplah and search out the facts because these things have a tendency to shape policy as well as conversations.  I’m concerned that our two second attention span–which fixates on personalities and symbolic events–will take our eyes away from the real deal.  Does it matter if Bin Laden is dead or alive?  What problem does that really solve?

Barney Frank on Morning Joe

Posted: April 28, 2011 | Author: | Filed under: Democratic Politics, Domestic Policy, Foreign Affairs, Health care reform, Iran, Libya, U.S. Economy, U.S. Military, U.S. Politics | Tags: , | 9 Comments

Barney Frank was on Morning Joe Tuesday. The interview was wide ranging and involved serious discussion of issues. Because of his seniority as the former chairman of the House Finance Committee and current ranking member, he can bring insight to the discussion. When he speaks, I make it a point to listen. He provides framing of subject in a manner that is understandable by the public. Also, we gain insight into what a major leader of the House is thinking.

Key issues discussed were:

  • federal debt is a result of past mistakes by both parties
  • NATO is a mechanism for Europe to outsource their military costs to the US
  • we need a new model of medical care which involves more than Medicare
  • clarifying end of life care considerations
  • the need to re-evaluate the utility of NATO
  • putting a missile shield in Poland to protect them from Iran is not our problem
  • problems of Libya are more germane to countries within spitting distance of Libya while NATO wants us to step up with more
  • Less defense spending could leave more money for health programs.

The  Morning Joe, Barney Frank segment can be viewed here. The first part of the segment is information to set up for the discussion with Barney which starts at 4 minutes. The video is about 17 minutes which enables a good discussion. Joe basically conducts the interview and generally lets Barney make his points.  He typically interrupts the conversation only for agreement or clarity.

Obama’s Political Leanings (pssssttttt … he’s no liberal)

Posted: April 26, 2011 | Author: | Filed under: 2012 presidential campaign, abortion rights, Barack Obama, Democratic Politics, Domestic Policy, Environment, Environmental Protection, Reproductive Rights, Republican politics, Republican presidential politics, right wing hate grouups, Surreality, Team Obama, The DNC, The Media SUCKS, the villagers, U.S. Economy, U.S. Politics, Voter Ignorance, We are so F'd, WE TOLD THEM SO, Women's Rights | Tags: , , , | 7 Comments

Time to trot out the Unity Pony

I’m having an interesting day reading all the links out there and discussions on several Ezra Klein blog posts. Some one should’ve noticed Obama’s hero-worship of Reagan during the primaries about three years ago. Some one should’ve read his books that were gleeful about past Republican policy initiatives. But no, we were too busy discussing other things to notice how far to the right Barrack Obama really is.

Here’s one of Klein’s posts that’s getting netplay now: The shocking truth about the birthplace of Obama’s policies. Some people just have not been paying attention at all.

President Obama, if you look closely at his positions, is a moderate Republican from the early 1990s. And the Republican Party he’s facing has abandoned many of its best ideas in its effort to oppose him.

If you put aside the emergency measures required by the financial crisis, three major policy ideas have dominated American politics in recent years: a health-care plan that uses an individual mandate and tax subsidies to achieve near-universal coverage; a cap-and-trade plan that attempts to raise the prices of environmental pollutants to better account for their costs; and bringing tax rates up from their Bush-era lows as part of a bid to reduce the deficit. In each case, the position that Obama and the Democrats have staked out is the very position that moderate Republicans staked out in the early ’90s — and often, well into the 2000s.

I’ve been saying for years–literally–that the Obama Health Care Plan was more conservative than Nixon’s and basically was grabbed from Lincoln Chaffe’s Heritage Plan in the 1990s which was later called Dolecare and then later morphed into Romneycare. That’s just Klein’s first example.  He also provides evidence on cap and trade which was supported by George H.W. Bush and Newt Gingrich when it was applied to ‘acid rain’ instead of  ‘global warming’.  He then moves to tax policies. Obama’s obvious proclivities to voodoo economics even showed up in the first stimulus which was top heavy with tax cuts and not big enough on job creation measures.  Klein doesn’t even touch the increasing military budgets and interventions, the GLBT and women’s rights issues that get bargained away, FISA, Gitmo, etc., etc., etc. …

Here’s Mark Thoma’s take on the Klein piece and a follow-up by Andrew Samick.  Samick considers Obama to be a Rockefeller Republican of all things.  I’d say Obama’s even more to the right than that because that’s pretty much the side of the Republican party that raised me. Rockefeller Republicans love Planned Parenthood among other things. Warren Buffet is a great example.  Hell, Charlton Heston loved Planned Parenthood.  I even heard him speak on population control issues in Omaha, Nebraska in the mid 1970s sponsored by–gasp!–Planned Parenthood.  The most interesting part is Thoma’s ending question.  Why are we moving so far to the right now?

What’s left unexplained is why movements to the right by both parties — and these aren’t marginal moves — haven’t alienated the middle of the road, swing voters that seem to make a difference in elections. I don’t think I have a good answer for why. In the present case, there is some voter remorse — Obama is far more conservative than many thought — but I don’t think that explains the larger trend.

The original Ezra Klein piece is here: ‘Obama revealed: A moderate Republican’.  Believe me, the conversation has gone viral with folks like The National Review (Be forewarned if you go there, it’s a  putrid thread.) on line taking the bait.  Booman  even twists himself into a world class logic pretzel trying to say this is good news because it means Obama’s policies are “mainstream”.  Joseph Romm at The Grist   discusses the climate policy even further.

In the climate bill debate of the past two years, Obama and the Democrats embraced Republican ideas in an effort to minimize or avoid the partisanship inherent in other approaches that had been explicitly rejected by Republicans, including a tax and a massive ramp up in clean energy funding, as I’ve argued.

But Klein makes an effective case that it simply didn’t matter how reasonable or centrist or business-friendly a strategy environmentalists and progressive politicians pursued (or might have pursued). The Republicans simply were committed to stopping Obama from appearing bipartisan.

The Dems keeps getting suckered by Republicans the way Charlie Brown keeps getting suckered by Lucy. But the difference is that the GOP’s strategy wasn’t even a secret.

Ah, here’s the deal. Romm ties back to Thoma’s question. Why all this goose stepping to the right?  Easy.  It was the Republican strategy of say not to everything.  They had to go further right to say no.  Now, we’re in policy measures that are from John Birch Society land. Finally, the Democratic Congress said no more compromises when Planned Parenthood went on the chopping block. They also decided to get what they could get done before Boehner took over the house.  We saw a few last minute Democratic Policies get passed but it was only due to the folks in Congress. Obama just went along because, hell, a win is a win, right?

Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell told The New York Times in March 2010, “It was absolutely critical that everybody be together because if the proponents of the bill were able to say it was bipartisan, it tended to convey to the public that this is O.K., they must have figured it out.” Why? As McConnell blurted out right before the 2010 midterm elections, “The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president.”

Obama kept proposing “conservative” policy at the onset. The Republicans announced they would sabotage it from the get go.  This is something we complained about and pointed out here and elseblog for years.  Obama’s opening policy moves were always a compromise position for real Democrats.  He never was worried about putting policy out there with a real Democratic stamp on it because issues aren’t important to him. This President  desperately wanted to pass anything with his name on it that would be called success.  I frequently argued he wanted to makes sure there was a Health Plan that went through just to show he could do it when the Clintons couldn’t do it. He threw the Democratic plans over board almost immediately including the wildly popular single payer option.  Dumping women’s access to private insurance with access to abortion was his final compromise maneuver to pass the silly thing.  He’s thrown policies to the wind that have been basic Democratic Platform staples every chance he’s been in office. The Republicans were never going to act satisfied and were going to keep goosestepping further right. It was their announced strategy.  He was more than willing to go right along with them because his proclivities are rightish anyway and he just wants the win.

So, my big question is why didn’t these folks see this coming all along like we did?  Then a follow-up, what good does all this discovery now do three years too late?

Of course, if you read the Republican blogs, they’re still screaming Obama’s a socialist and Klein’s a fool.  If you hit the partisan Democrats, the pretzel logic maneuvers are as obvious as Booman’s trying to find the sunny side up.

I’ll I can say is we told them so.  Follow that up by a we are so f’d.

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