Boehner’s VooDoo Economics Memes

Posted: May 11, 2011 | Author: | Filed under: Domestic Policy, Economy, Federal Budget, Federal Budget and Budget deficit, John Birch Society in Charge, Republican politics, voodoo economics, We are so F'd | Tags: , , , , | 27 Comments

Bloomberg is reporting that “Boehner’s Views on Economy Contradicted by Studies”.  It’s about time some business magazine did this.  Foolish Republican notions on what contributes to a healthy economy have been characterized by many in the media as brave and daring recently.  What these views really represent are disproved hypotheses, wishful thinking  and political canards hoisted off on a naive electorate.

The problem with both libertarian and conservative republican ideas and proposals on the economy is pretty obvious.  They have no basis in fact or data what-so-ever.

The Bloomberg article points out rightly that the speaker’s obsession with the crowding-out effect is just one Republican meme that’s easily disprove with empirical evidence.  Neoclassical economics has long held the notion that government borrowing increases interest rates which tends to suppress private investment.  Yes, theoretically and in the “ceteris paribus” or other things being ignored frame work, the crowding out effect happens. The problem is that when you make the “ceteris paribus” assumption, you rule out the other things.  The other things are what’s important here.  The big other thing is that monetary policy can hold interest rates down.  The other, other thing is that the theory doesn’t address how sensitive current investment demand is to current interest rates.  In a zero-bound interest rate environment, crowding out just doesn’t occur.  Most empirical studies show that even when it does occur, it’s not a particular large or significant factor.  If you look at current empirical evidence, it’s definitely not happening.

Boehner said in his May 9 speech to the Economic Club of New York that government borrowing was crowding out private investment, the 2009 economic-stimulus package hurt job creation, and a Republican plan to privatize Medicare will give future recipients the “same kinds of options” lawmakers have.

With Democrats and Republicans sparring over legislation to extend the government’s $14.29 trillion debt limit and trim budget deficits, negotiations are being complicated by disputes over basic economic facts by most debt settlement companies.

“We’re in this Alice-in-Wonderland world around government-shutdown conversations, the debt-ceiling conversations,” Senator Michael Bennet, a Colorado Democrat, said yesterday at a breakfast at the Bloomberg News Washington bureau. The debate “has not established a shared understanding of the facts” about the nation’s economic problems, he said.

Boehner’s statement in his Wall Street speech that government spending “is crowding out private investment and threatening the availability of capital” runs counter to the behavior of credit markets.

Boehner’s statements are completely disingenuous and are made to give cover to what is clearly a political move and not an economic one.  Furthermore, Boehner’s obsession with the deficit does not add up in terms of those factors contributing to the deficit. Ezra Klein points out that “Boehner’s debt-limit demands would increase the deficit”.  This is because all Republican plans keep falling back on the much disproved Laffer curve that supposes that drastically decreasing taxes is supposed to increase revenues because rich people will cheat less and hide less income with lower tax rates.

John Boehner’s new line on the deficit negotiations is that raising taxes — by which he appears to also mean closing tax expenditures — “is off the table. But everything else is on the table.” This is a bit like telling your doctor, who’s worried that you’ve gained weight and are out-of-shape, that exercise is off the table, but everything else is on the table. Well, it’s nice that you’re prepared to diet, but you need to exercise, too. Otherwise, you’re not going to get where you need to go.

And without revenue, we’re not going to get where we need to go — at least if you think where we need to go is towards a balanced budget. Over the past 10 years, the Bush tax cuts have increased the deficit by about $1.3 trillion. They’re the single largest policy contributor to our recent deficits. Due to the growth of the economy and the creep of the alternative minimum tax, they’ll cost the Treasury closer to $4 trillion over the next 10 years. They’re the single largest policy contributor to our projected deficits.

Extending the Bush tax cuts over the next 10 years, which Boehner favors, will increase the deficit by twice as much as the $2 trillion in spending cuts he’s calling for will reduce the deficit. Conversely, adding the revenue increases in the Simpson-Bowles plan to his spending cuts would bring the deficit reduction to more $3 trillion. But Boehner isn’t using the debt-ceiling vote to reduce the debt. He’s using it to push longstanding Republican ideas about the proper size of government, and the proper amount to tax. This has been clear for awhile, of course, Remember CutGo? But it’s worth being straightforward about it. Boehner’s plan doesn’t get our finances back in shape. He wants us to spend less, but he also wants us to cut taxes by more. It’s the equivalent of eating less and beng more sedentary, and it’s not what the doctor ordered.

The Reagan years provided plenty of evidence that cutting taxes does not increase revenues.  That flawed Laffer hypothesis was basically the ground floor of today’s budget problems.  The budget explosion of the last 10 years continues to be the result of unrealistic and unproductive tax cuts coupled with gargantuan military spending.  Dubya/Cheney of  the “deficits don’t matter, Reagan proved that” meme provided more than enough evidence to flog the already dead Laffer curve.

Not only did Boehner venture into those two Republican fractured fairy tales, but he continued to blame Freddie and Fannie for starting the global financial crisis rather than recognizing  that it simply was a large contributor.  Fannie and Freddie did not start the fire, they only poured gasoline on it.  This oversight allows Republicans to gloss over the real instigators.

Boehner also repeated familiar Republican political criticisms that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the two government mortgage companies, “triggered the whole meltdown” of the U.S. financial system.

That differs from the conclusions earlier this year of the Democratic majority on the congressionally appointed Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission. It reported that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac “participated in the expansion of subprime and other risky mortgages, but they followed rather than led Wall Street and other lenders in the rush for fool’s gold.”

Three of the panel’s four Republicans, while faulting Fannie and Freddie, didn’t place the blame squarely on the two mortgage giants.

“They were part of the securitization process that lowered mortgage credit quality standards,” said a dissenting report by Keith Hennessey, Douglas Holtz-Eakin and Bill Thomas, former chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee. In a Wall Street Journal essay, the three said laying primary blame on government intervention is “misleading” and cited 10 reasons, taken together, for the crisis.

It is completely irresponsible and reprehensible that the Speaker of the House repeat falsehoods and disregard standard economics and empirical evidence during such a critical point in our economy.  We have a jobs crisis.  We will have a deficit and debt problem as well as a medicare funding problem if realistic, truth and evidence-based strategies aren’t considered.  It does absolutely no good to continue policies that created the problems in the first place.  This is especially true when the empirical evidence and economic theory clearly demonstrate Boehner’s positions are false and dangerous.

Here’s an example of the data rather than the meme.

The speaker didn’t mention a 1993 tax increase that raised the top individual marginal rate to 39.6 percent, where it stood until 2001. In 1998, the government recorded its first budget surplus in almost 30 years.

The U.S. economy grew at an annual rate of 4.1 percent in 1994, the year after Congress passed the second tax increase of the decade. The growth rate dropped to 2.5 percent in 1995, and thereafter rose to 3.7 percent in 1996. The economy grew more than 4 percent a year from 1997 through 2000.

Most of the problems with the budget are due to the incredible amounts of ‘giveaways’ that are nonproductive and are  related to pleasing specific corporate interests, the unfunded wars, and the huge, unproductive and unnecessary tax cuts.  Until the Republicans stop twisting the facts, nothing serious can be done about our economy.  Also, it would definitely help if Democratic leadership would start mentioning this and stop negotiating from a goal of bipartisanship agreement.  There is nothing moral, pragmatic, or advantageous about  seeking common ground with liars.

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!

Tuesday Reads: Osamarama

Posted: May 3, 2011 | Author: | Filed under: Afghanistan, Barack Obama, Federal Budget, Foreign Affairs, morning reads, Pakistan, the blogosphere, U.S. Economy, U.S. Military, U.S. Politics | Tags: , , , , , , , | 43 Comments

Good Morning!! Grab your coffee and pull up a chair. I’ve got some interesting links for you this morning. It’s mostly Osama-related with a few non-Osama links thrown in.

I guess we need to brace ourselves for 24/7 Osama bin Laden news until further notice. The White House is leaking information in dribs and drabs, the corporate media is in hysteria mode, and the conspiracy theories are already spreading like wildfire.

The biggest problem for the Obama administration is going to be the supposed “burial at sea.” Let’s hope they have extensive photo and video evidence that that actually took place. Some 9/11 relatives are very upset about this. They wanted to see the body.

Rosaleen Tallon kissed her three children good night and went to sleep feeling at peace. The terrorist responsible for the death of her brother, New York firefighter Sean Patrick Tallon, was dead. Her two boys and her little girl had been assured that the “bad man” behind the attacks that claimed their uncle was gone.

But when Tallon awoke Monday to the news that Osama bin Laden had been buried at sea, she was stunned. That was one corpse she would like to have seen for herself, Tallon said, her fiery words underscoring the change this suburban science teacher has undergone in the last decade.

“I wouldn’t be honest if I didn’t say I was a little dismayed — a lot dismayed,” Tallon said as her 20-month-old son, Paddy, nestled in her arms while savoring a red lollipop. “I think that was too hasty. I would’ve liked the American people to say without a shadow of a doubt, ‘Yes, that’s him.’ “

Hey, why didn’t they put bin Laden’s body in the Capital rotunda and let people view it until they had their fill? But seriously, the “burial at sea” thing is really problematic. At Corrente, Lambert isn’t buying it.

But how are we going to drag the body through the streets, if it’s floating in the Indian Ocean somewhere? Can’t anybody here play this game?

NOTE On the bright side, this does explain why the corpse wasn’t a festive centerpiece at the White House Correspondents Dinner. I’d been wondering about that.

Perhaps Lambert will be pleased to know that the folks over at Alex Jones’ Infowars agree with him. Here’s a sample of the posts going up over there.

Inside Sources: Bin Laden’s Corpse Has Been On Ice For Nearly a Decade

A multitude of different inside sources both publicly and privately, including one individual who personally worked with Bin Laden at one time, told us directly that Osama’s dead corpse has been on ice for nearly a decade and that his “death” would only be announced at the most politically expedient time.

That time has now come with a years-old fake picture being presented as the only evidence of his alleged killing yesterday, while Bin Laden’s body has been hastily dumped into the sea to prevent anyone from finding out when he actually died.

In April 2002, over nine years ago, Council on Foreign Relations member Steve R. Pieczenik, who served as Deputy Assistant Secretary of State under Henry Kissinger, Cyrus Vance, and James Baker, told the Alex Jones Show that Bin Laden had already been “dead for months”.

Pieczenik would be in a position to know such information, having worked directly with Bin Laden when the US was funding and arming the terror leader in an attempt to drive the Soviets out of Afghanistan in the late 70′s and early 80′s (a documented historical fact that talking heads in the corporate media are actually denying today in light of developments).

“I found out through my sources that he had had kidney disease. And as a physician, I knew that he had to have two dialysis machines and he was dying,” Pieczenik told Jones during the April 24, 2002 interview.

Intel Chief: They Killed “Make Believe Osama”

Former Pakistani intelligence chief Hamid Gul went on the Alex Jones Show today and characterized the unverified assassination of Osama bin Laden as symbolic theater.

Gul said the event was a “make believe drama” designed to be used for Obama’s upcoming re-election campaign.

The supposed hit as described by the government and the corporate media is the “stuff of folk lore, for legend-making and the ballad,” Gull explained.

Hamid Gull went on to cite the late Prime Minister of Pakistan, Benazir Bhutto, who told David Frost in late 2007 that Osama bin Laden was murdered by Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh, who is also one of the men convicted of kidnapping and killing journalist Daniel Pearl.

Apparently the right wing blogs are also claiming the Navy Seal secret operation was a complete fake, except they think Osama is still alive. Here’s a report at Think Progress: Meet The Deathers: Andrew Brietbart Website Pushing Conspiracy Theory That Osama Might Not Be Dead

Mere hours after President Obama announced the death of Osama bin Laden, supported by incontrovertible DNA evidence, the conspiracy theorists are hard at work. Andrew Breitbart, a prominent right-wing commentator with close ties to the Republican Party and the Tea Party, is pushing the theory on his website Big Peace.

On Breitbart’s website, J. Michael Waller, suggests Obama take a number of extraordinary steps so he can “make sure [Osama] is dead.” Pictures are apparently not enough. Walker asserts that he needs to be able to “walk right up to bin Laden’s corpse and view it.”

See? They needed to lay the corpse out in the Capital rotunda so that every American who wanted to feast his or her eyes on it. Hell, maybe Lambert’s right–they should have dragged it through the streets to satisfy the more bloodthirsty among us. {Sigh….} I have a feeling that pretty soon I’m going to get very tired of hearing about Osama bin Laden.

In case you believe that Osama was really killed by Navy Seals in the past few days, here is a fascinating article at Wired’s Danger Room blog on the advanced technology used by the folks who hunt terrorists. Apparently they carry around thumb and eye scanners to identify the culprits they are looking for. That’s in addition to taking DNA samples.

At the Wall Street Journal, Ralph Gardener asks, “Is fist-pumping the right reaction?” He never really answers the question, but I found myself disturbed by the reactions last night too. But hey, Americans are generally pretty tacky–just look at the TV shows they watch nowadays. Hoarders? American Idol? Geeze.

At CNN there is an article about the “spending spree” that followed the 9/11 attacks.

In the decade between Sept. 11, 2001, and the death of Osama bin Laden on Sunday, the U.S. government has spent hundreds of billions of dollars with the aim of making Americans safer.

Agencies were created, expanded or given new missions. The government hired thousands of new employees to analyze intelligence, track terror financing and support the nation’s rapidly expanding national security apparatus.

Gee, can I get a dispensation from paying for all that–like all the religious nuts who don’t want to pay for abortions or dispense birth control pills or provide medical care for women who get abortions?

I’ll end with a few non-Osama-related news stories. A former Chicago Bears player who committed suicide by shooting himself through the heart (to preserve his brain for study) has been found to have had severe brain damage.

On Monday, scientists at Boston University who examined Duerson’s brain tissue said he suffered from a “moderately advanced” case of chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), a degenerative brain disease associated with repeated blows to the head.

His brain showed pronounced changes in the frontal cortex amygdala and the hippocampus, which control judgment, inhibition, impulse, mood control and memory, said Dr. Ann McKee, a co-director of the Center for Study of Traumatic Encephalopathy at the Boston University School of Medicine and director of the Bedford VA CSTE Brain Bank.

“When you look at it microscopically, it’s undisputable,” said McKee, who has detected CTE in approximately 40 of the 50 brains she has examined, a pool that includes athletes and military veterans.

Known for his aggressive and hard-hitting defense, Duerson is the 14th of 15 former NFL players studied at the brain bank to be diagnosed with CTE. Overall, the condition has been found in more than two dozen deceased professional football players.

Football should really be banned, at least for kids. It will never happen though.

Astronomers create 3D map of 3-Billion-Year-Old Universe

Using light from 14,000 distant yet powerful cosmic beacons, astronomers have pieced together the largest and most detailed 3-D map of the ancient universe.

Previous versions plotted the locations of galaxies within 7 billion light-years of Earth. The new version, however, charts clouds of hydrogen in a swath between 10 billion and 12 billion light-years away — farther in distance and deeper in time than any 3-D map before it.

The hydrogen clouds could help answer some of astronomers’ more profound questions about the universe, including the nature of dark energy.

“We’re looking for a bump in the data that may tell us how fast universe is expanding,” said cosmologist Anže Slosar of Brookhaven National Laboratory, one of the researchers who presented the map May 1 at the American Physical Society meeting in Anaheim, California. “We don’t have enough data to see the bump yet, but we expect to get there in a few years.”

Julian Assange says that Facebook is an “appalling spying machine.”

Asked about his thoughts on the role that social media has played in shaping the recent revolutions in the Middle East, the WikiLeaks founder went in another direction. “Facebook in particular is the most appalling spying machine that has ever been invented,” he said. “Here we have the world’s most comprehensive database about people, their relationships, their names, their addresses, their locations and the communications with each other, their relatives, all sitting within the United States, all accessible to U.S. intelligence. Facebook, Google, Yahoo — all these major U.S. organizations have built-in interfaces for U.S. intelligence. It’s not a matter of serving a subpoena. They have an interface that they have developed for U.S. intelligence to use.”

He continued, still not answering the question: “Now, is it the case that Facebook is actually run by U.S. intelligence? No, it’s not like that. It’s simply that U.S. intelligence is able to bring to bear legal and political pressure on them. And it’s costly for them to hand out records one by one, so they have automated the process. Everyone should understand that when they add their friends to Facebook, they are doing free work for United States intelligence agencies in building this database for them.”

If you like to look at the night sky, there will be a nice show this month when Venus and Jupiter appear very close to each other. May 11 is the day to check them out, I guess.

That’s all I’ve got for today. What are you reading and blogging about?

Monday Reads

Posted: May 2, 2011 | Author: | Filed under: Afghanistan, Barack Obama, Federal Budget, Federal Budget and Budget deficit, Foreign Affairs, Iraq, morning reads, Pakistan | Tags: , , , , | 68 Comments

Good Morning!

Well, the biggest news is the killing of Osama Bin Laden in a US operation.  The President announced the news on TV last night.  There were few details other than Bin Laden was killed in a US operation and was in Pakistan.  Spontaneous celebrations erupted across the U.S.  The entire statement can be read at NPR. The State Department has warned that there may be increased potential for violence against US citizens and a security alert has been announced for travelers.    WAPO is reporting that this was a Navy Seals operation that involved the CIA and Pakistani intelligence.

Obama said the operation took place in Abbottabad, a city of about 100,000 in Pakistan’s Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, about 100 miles north of Islamabad. Named for a British military officer who founded it as a military cantonment and summer retreat, it is the headquarters of a brigade of the Pakistan Army’s 2nd Division.

Bin Laden had long eluded U.S. forces throughout George W. Bush’s presidency, and the former president said Sunday that he congratulated Obama and the military and intelligence personnel who “devoted their lives to this mission.”

After weeks of chasing conspiracy stories about the President and dropping the F-bomb numerous times in a speech,  Donald Trump becomes the arbiter of good taste calling the White House correspondent’s dinner “inappropriate”.  I guess he really does like jokes about his nasty hairdo after all.

At the event, Obama made light of Trump’s repeated calls for him to release his birth certificate, something he did Wednesday, and Meyers made fun of everything from his hair to his presidential ambition. Although Trump appeared unamused during Saturday’s dinner, he said he was honored “in a certain way” to be a focal point.

“I really knew what I was getting into last night. I had no idea it would be to that extent where, you know just joke after joke after joke,” the mogul said. “It was almost like, is there anyone else they can talk about?”

He also found the event “inappropriate in certain respects” and spent the evening thinking about how “the American people are really suffering and we’re all having a good time.”

And what was his assessment of Meyers’ comedic timing?

“His (Meyers) delivery was not good. He’s a stutterer and he really was having a hard time,” Trump said of the “Saturday Night Live” star.

Is any one else but me still offended by Trump calling Rosie O’Donnell a pig?   So, first misogyny and now attacks on disabilities. So, now Seth Meyer is a ‘stutterer’. Stay classy, The Donald!   Guess he can dish it out but he can’t take it!

Reagan Budget Director David Stockman once more calls for raising taxes to take care of Federal budget problems.  It’s been interesting to watch all these Republican officials come out and tell other Republicans to do the responsible thing.

Asked by Reuter’s Chrystia Freeland if the economy could “sustain” a tax increase, Stockman said “absolutely,” noting that the economy only recovered under Reagan once he raisedtaxes in 1982 after “cut[ting] taxes too much” the year before:

FREELAND: You worked for Ronald Reagan. Do you think the American economy — so you’re, like, a red-blooded capitalist — could it sustain higher taxes than it has now?

STOCKMAN: Absolutely. In 1982, we were looking at the jaws of the worst recession since the 1930s. We overdid it in 1981, cut taxes too much. We came back with a big deficit reduction plan in 1982. Unemployment’s at 10 percent, the economy is in dire shape, and we raise taxes by 1.2 percent of GDP, which would be $150 billion a year right now — not 10 years down the road — but right now

Here’s one of those ‘Only in Washington, D.C” stories from The Hill.  Here’s another example of no funding for a delegated task.

President Obama launched a task force last week to look into oil and gas price manipulation, but a spending bill he signed into law earlier this month would prevent the government’s top statistical agency from analyzing that very issue.

The fiscal year 2011 spending legislation – a product of tense negotiations between Republicans and Democrats – cuts the Energy Information Administration’s budget by 14 percent.

Michelle Bachmann Godwins.  She compared the federal debt levels to the holocaust.  Ever wonder if there’s any actual history classes in her past?  How on earth can you compare anything that trivial to the mass slaughter of innoncent people in such a systemic and horrific way?

Bachmann, careful to note that there was no direct analogy in today’s times to the Holocaust, still tied the loss of “economic liberty” that Americans face today to the systematic killing of six million European Jews.

“We are seeing eclipsed in front of our eyes a similar death and a similar taking away,” Bachmann said. “It is this disenfranchisement that I think we have to answer to.”

In a reference to the Obama administration’s new health care law, the likely presidential candidate and tea party favorite said creating new entitlement programs that “there was never any hope or chance of being able” to pay for was an exercise in “fantasy economics.”

“All of the problems we’re facing with debt are manmade problems. We created them. It’s called fantasy economics,” she told Republicans gathered at Southern New Hampshire University. “Fantasy economics only works in a fantasy world. It doesn’t work in reality.”

If any one would know about fantasy worlds, I suggest it would be Michele Bachmann.

Project Syndicate is one of my favorite sites these days and this is a very descriptive headline by Pimco’s CEO Mohamed El-Erian: Sleepwalking through America’s Unemployment Crisis.

Let us start with the facts:

·         At 8.8% almost three years after the onset of the global financial crisis, America’s unemployment rate remains stubbornly (and unusually) high;

·         Rather than reflecting job creation, much of the improvement in recent months (from 9.8% in November last year) is due to workers exiting the labor force, thus driving workforce participation to a multi-year low of 64.2%;

·         If part-time workers eager to work full time are included, almost one in six workers in America are either under- or unemployed;

·         More than six million workers have been unemployed for more than six months, and four million for over a year;

·         Unemployment among 16-19 year olds is at a staggering 24%;

·         With virtually no earned income and dwindling savings, the unemployed are least able to manage the current surge in gasoline and food prices, they are effectively shut off from credit, and many have mortgage debt that exceed the value of their homes.

These and many other facts speak to an unpleasant and unusual reality for the United States. The country now has an unemployment problem that is large in magnitude and increasingly structural in nature. The consequences are multifaceted, involving immediate personal anguish, rising social and political tensions, economic losses, and budgetary pressures.

This is much more than a problem for the here and now. High and intractable unemployment has serious negative long-term consequences that threaten to become exponentially worse. This is a crisis.

So, there’s some headlines to think about!  What’s on your reading and blogging list today?

updated for this thread:  NationalJournal.com has some information on “The Secret Team that Killed Obama” that you  may want to check out. There’s also a timeline or tick tock for Bin Laden’s life.

From Ghazi Air Base in Pakistan, the modified MH-60 helicopters made their way to the garrison suburb of Abbottabad, about 30 miles from the center of Islamabad. Aboard were Navy SEALs, flown across the border from Afghanistan, along with tactical signals, intelligence collectors, and navigators using highly classified hyperspectral imagers.

After bursts of fire over 40 minutes, 22 people were killed or captured. One of the dead was Osama bin Laden, done in by a double tap — boom, boom — to the left side of his face. His body was aboard the choppers that made the trip back. One had experienced mechanical failure and was destroyed by U.S. forces, military and White House officials tell National Journal.

Were it not for this high-value target, it might have been a routine mission for the specially trained and highly mythologized SEAL Team Six, officially called the Naval Special Warfare Development Group, but known even to the locals at their home base Dam Neck in Virginia as just DevGru.

TGIFriday Reads

Posted: April 29, 2011 | Author: | Filed under: Barack Obama, Federal Budget, Republican politics, Violence against women, Women's Rights | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , | 47 Comments

Good Morning!

Well, it’s getting to be the silly season.  Now we have Republicans who were for oil subsidies before they were against them or against them before they were for them.  Evidently, angry town hall participants can’t figure out why oil companies that keep making record profits while gouging at the pump deserve huge tax breaks. So, Republicans are making up their minds as they go along.  Here’s one such example from the Wonk Room:  Paul Ryan Endorses Ending Oil Subsidies, Even Though He Voted For Them

Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) agree.d to end subsidies to oil companies during a town hall in Waterford, Wisconsin, this morning, eliciting great applause from an overflow crowd in a very conservative section of his district. “We also want to get rid of corporate welfare,” Ryan insisted. “So we propose to repeal all that”

…

But Ryan voted twice this year to actually extend subsidies to oil companies, once on a motion to recommit on a shorter-term continuing resolution and again when he supported an amendment to the initial House CR. The Ryan budget, meanwhile, doesn’t specifically target oil subsidies, but only generally promises to end “corporate welfare.”

Earlier this week, House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) also indirectly endorsed ending subsidies to the oil industry, before walking back his support.

CBS Reporter Lara Logan is offering up more information on her ‘merciless’ assault  during the Egyptian uprising.  Logan was separated from her colleagues for about 25 minutes.

She declined to go into more detail about the assault but said: “What really struck me was how merciless they were. They really enjoyed my pain and suffering. It incited them to more violence.”

After being rescued by a group of civilians and Egyptian soldiers, she was swiftly flown back to the United States. “She was quite traumatized, as you can imagine, for a period of time,” Mr. Fager said. Ms. Logan said she decided almost immediately that she would speak out about sexual violence both on behalf of other journalists and on behalf of “millions of voiceless women who are subjected to attacks like this and worse.”

It appears the Lake Havusu Arizona Newspaper filed to see Barack Obama Senior’s immigration file.  Their EXCLUSIVE–“Dad’s Immigration File Offers More Evidence Of Obama’s Birthplace” is an interesting read.  Sounds like Harvard couldn’t get rid of this particular Obama soon enough.  This really brings an interesting contrast to the President’s Book “Dreams of my Father”.

The documents also show that the CIS investigated the elder Obama as a polygamist, having a wife in Kenya and a “wife and child in Honolulu.” Dahlim’s memo adds that “Polygamy is not an excludable or deportation charge as Subject is a non-immigrant.”

Documents show that Obama, Sr. was denied an extension on his student visa in July, 1964, in part because Harvard University, where Obama, Sr., was a Ph.D. candidate, sought his removal. Obama Sr. eventually left the United States willingly after becoming an illegal alien for remaining in the country past the expiration of his visa.

An INS investigator, M.F. McKeon, wrote “They (Harvard officials) weren’t very impressed with him and asked us to hold up action on his application until they decided what action they could take in order to get rid of him. They were apparently having difficulty with his financial arrangements and couldn’t seem to figure out how many wives he had.”

Documents show that Harvard officials considered Obama, Sr. to be a “slippery character,” and conspired with the INS to have him deported.

After raising nearly every racist dogwhistle in the play book,  Donald Trump Bristles at Claim He’s a Racist.  Gee, why would anyone think that when the guy questions how the President–a legacy who graduated summa sum laude from Harvard–got into Harvard in the first place.

Trump tells TMZ … “That is a terrible statement for a newscaster to make.  I am the last person that such a thing should be said about.”

Bob Schieffer delivered a scathing statement against Trump Wednesday night on the “CBS Evening News,” reacting to Trump’s insinuation that President Barack Obama may not have had the grades to get into Harvard.

Schieffer said, “That’s just code for saying he got into law school because he’s black.  This is an ugly strain of racism that’s running through this whole thing.”

We asked Trump if he was suggesting Obama got into Harvard Law School through affirmative action.  He said, “Affirmative action is out there.  It’s a program that is available. But I have no idea whether it applies in this case.  I’m not suggesting anything.”

Politically-motivated accusation and innuendo is nothing new–as pointed out by Politico–but does Trump’s birther agenda shift the practice to a new low because it rose to the level of a media feeding frenzy?

Lurid conspiracy theories have followed presidents for as long as the office has existed. Yet even Obama’s most recent predecessors benefited from a widespread consensus that some types of personal allegations had no place in public debate unless or until they received some imprimatur of legitimacy — from an official investigation, for instance, or from a detailed report by a major news organization.

“There are no more arbiters of truth,” said former White House press secretary Robert Gibbs. “So whatever you can prove factually, somebody else can find something else and point to it with enough ferocity to get people to believe it. We’ve crossed some Rubicon into the unknown.”

It’s hard to imagine Bill Clinton coming out to the White House briefing room to present evidence showing why people who thought he helped plot the murder of aide Vincent Foster— never mind official rulings of suicide — were wrong. George W. Bush, likewise, was never tempted to take to the Rose Garden to deny allegations from voices on the liberal fringe who believed that he knew about the Sept. 11 attacks ahead of time and chose to let them happen.

Well, at least it’s Friday!  So, what’s on your reading and blogging list this morning?

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