Some times being Right doesn’t always make you Feel Good
Posted: October 3, 2009 Filed under: Global Financial Crisis, Team Obama, The Bonus Class, The Great Recession, The Media SUCKS, U.S. Economy, Voter Ignorance | Tags: balanced budget amendment, DeLong, Krugman, Obamanomics, Reaganomics, Stiglitz, stimulus plan, unemployment Comments Off on Some times being Right doesn’t always make you Feel Good
You may remember back in January that I was not happy and very outspoken about the size of the Obama Stimulus plan. I was not impressed by the content or with the mix between tax cuts and direct government spending. You may recall that the Blue Dogs interminable resistance to do anything that might wake their sleeping Republican voters and the desire on the part of POTUS to appease the unappeasable remnants of the Republican party led to a very watered down plan. At the time, all that I could hope was that it might be enough to get the ball rolling. However, I felt that the historical multiplier –especially for taxes– was not going to kick in the way it had in the past.
The release of the miserable unemployment data yesterday (not all that unexpected as you’ll recall) as well as an estimate of our output gap now clearly squares with my earlier view as well as the earlier views of Brad deLong, Paul Krugman, Mark Thoma and Joseph Stiglitz among others. The stimulus was clearly not the blue pill the economy needed. (That last link is from me saying this same thing in July.)
The Washington Monthly says the decision to appease centrists and Republicans looks even worse in retrospect. Now, the media gets it. Color me completely unsurprised because I told you so back then that it wasn’t going to be enough. I even mentioned it recently when it appeared the stimulus plans of German, France, and Japan had already lifted those economies from the worst of it last spring. These countries emphasized direct government spending. We mostly shuffled a few funds as stop gaps and the created a bunch of tax cuts that no one really needs right now.
In February, when the debate over the economic stimulus package was at its height, a handful of “centrist” Senate Republicans said they’d block a vote on recovery efforts unless the majority agreed to slash over $100 billion from the bill.
The group, which didn’t have any specific policy goals in mind and simply liked the idea of a small bill, specifically targeted $40 billion in proposed aid to states. Helping rescue states, Sen. Collins & Co. said, does not stimulate the economy, and as such doesn’t belong in the legislation. Democratic leaders reluctantly went along — they weren’t given a choice since Republicans refused to give the bill an up-or-down vote — and the $40 billion in state aid was eliminated.
At the time, it seemed like a very bad idea. That’s because it was a very bad idea.
In the past, government hiring had managed to somewhat offset losses in the private sector, but government jobs declined by 53,000, with the biggest number of cuts on the local and state levels. Even the Postal Service, which is included in the public-sector job statistics, dropped 5,300 jobs.
“The major surprise came from the public sector, where every level of government cut back,” Naroff said. “The budget crises at the state and local levels have caused an awful lot of belt-tightening.”
Losing Ground
Posted: September 1, 2009 Filed under: president teleprompter jesus, Team Obama, Voter Ignorance | Tags: polls, Presidential Job Approval, Rasmussen Comments Off on Losing Ground
Whatever AxelRahm and POTUS are doing, it’s not working. CNN reports that the majority of registered independents in the country now disapprove of how President Obama is doing his job.
A majority of independent voters disapprove of how Barack Obama’s handling his job as president, according to a new national poll.
Fifty-three percent of independents questioned in a CNN/Opinion Research Corporation survey released Tuesday say they disapprove of how Obama’s handling his duties in the White House, with 43 percent in approval. That result marks the first time in a CNN poll that a majority of independents give the president’s performance a thumbs-down.
The issues that appear to be responsible for the downward momentum include health care, the economy, the budget deficit, and taxes. Majority support is still holding for national security (terrorism) and foreign affairs which are being managed by the still popular SOS Hillary Clinton. It would seem the most obvious downer numbers should come from the health care fight, but other issues also weigh in.
Is the fight over health care responsible for the downturn in Obama’s numbers?
“Yes, in part, but his standing on some other issues has taken an even bigger tumble,” adds Holland. “Among all Americans, his rating on health care has dropped 13 points since March. Compare that to his 16 point drop on the deficit and 17 point dip on taxes and it looks like there is growing discontent with Obama’s overall domestic agenda — not just his health care policy.”
According to the poll, Obama’s approval rating on how he is handling the war in Afghanistan also fell 18 points since March.
Another interesting poll was released by Rasmussen today where Republican Voters Say their GOP Reps in Congress are still out of touch. However, it appears out of touch means too liberal for their tastes.
Seventy-four percent (74%) of Republican voters say their party’s representatives in Congress have lost touch with GOP voters nationwide over the past several years. The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that just 18% of GOP voters believe their elected officials have done a good job representing the base.
Most Republican voters (55%) say that the average Republican in Congress is more liberal than the average Republican voter. Twenty-four percent (24%) say the average Republican in Congress holds views about the same as the average Republican voter while just 17% think the Congressional Republicans are more conservative than GOP voters.
The Administration shouldn’t expect Republican voters to cooperate much as eighty-four percent (84%) of them believe it is more important to stand for what their party believes in rather than trying to work with President Barack Obama. Only 14% favor bipartisan cooperation with the President.
Overall, 45% of voters say they at least somewhat approve of the President’s performance. That’s down a point from yesterday and the lowest level of total approval yet measured for Obama. Fifty-three percent (53%) now disapprove. See recent demographic highlights from the tracking polls.
In addition to our daily tracking, Rasmussen Reports has released a month-by-month review of the President’s Approval ratings. This allows a longer-term look at trends. In August, President Obama’s full-month ratings fell below 50% for the first time.
I wouldn’t want to be an incumbent in this atmosphere. These are some ugly, ugly numbers. I’m guessing the Dems are on their way to losing the senate and possibly the house if this keeps up.
You can talk about this or consider this an open thread. Have a good evening!
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Borrowing a turn of Phrase …
Posted: August 23, 2009 Filed under: just because, president teleprompter jesus, Team Obama, Voter Ignorance | Tags: Marc Ambinder, Paul Krugman, Racist meme, trust Comments Off on Borrowing a turn of Phrase …Paul Krugman’s Saturday blog post takes a defensive tone with Marc Ambinder who once called Krugman and a group 
of other liberal thinkers “reflexively anti-Bush”. Krugman expected a better apology from Ambinder after it was confirmed by former Bush Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge that the White House did, in fact, play politics with the Code Orange terrorist warnings. Evidently, there was an email between the two and Krugman felt the exchange wanting. Here’s his rationale.
But I’d like to return to one point: even after retracting his statement about people who correctly surmised that terror warnings were political being motivated by “gut hatred” of Bush, he left in the bit about being “reflexively anti-Bush”. I continue to find it really sad that people still say things like this.
Bear in mind that by the time the terror alert controversy arose in 2004, we had already seen two tax cuts sold on massively, easily documented false pretenses; a war launched with constant innuendo about a Saddam-Osama link that was clearly false, and with claims about WMDs that were clearly shaky from the beginning and had proved to be entirely without foundation. We’d also seen vast, well-documented dishonesty and politicization on environmental policy. Oh, and Abu Ghraib was already public knowledge.
Given all that, it made complete sense to distrust anything the Bush administration said. That wasn’t reflexive, it was rational.
I’d like to borrow the example and phrase because some of us around here are perpetually called “reflexively anti-Obama” or, of course, called racist because it’s a much more pejorative and personally damaging label. This is simply because we see similar patterns of behavior in Barrack Obama and his administration. Notice that Krugman has a laundry list right there in that second paragraph of things that made him rationally distrust anything the Bush administration said. I personally have my own laundry list of things that makes me rationally distrust anything the Obama administration says. It starts (but does not end) with the pledge to vote against FISA.
I’m with him …
Posted: August 18, 2009 Filed under: Health care reform, president teleprompter jesus, Surreality, Team Obama, Voter Ignorance | Tags: James Carville, Paul Krugman, Politico, Public Option Comments Off on I’m with him …
I have to say, I’m with my neighbor James Carville on this one … put a decent health care reform out there and let the Republicans kill it. I’ve said over and over that without a vital public option, it’s neither about the health care or the reform. It’s about the lobbyists and an administration win and I don’t think we should go for it. Carville thinks it would send a good signal to the country about how little Republicans are willing to come to the table in the name of what’s good for American and bi-partisanship if they fight health care reform vehemently. Let them show themselves as obstructionists while we trot out people bankrupted by underinsurance, folks who lost relatives to insurance companies who ration health care, and people who can’t even access the basics enough to be treated for the most treatable of diseases. Let them all be seen on TV saying no well baby care and prenatal care to their fetus fetishists.
On CNN’s “State of the Union,” Democratic strategist James Carville became the first leading Democrat to suggest publicly that there might be political advantage in letting Republicans “kill” health care.
“Put a bill out there, make them filibuster it, make them be what they are, the party of no,” Carville said. “Let them kill it. Let them kill it with the interest group money, then run against them. That’s what we ought to do.”
This weekend’s comments by White House officials simply acknowledged the long-obvious reality that the idea of a government-run insurance plan was partly a bargaining chip.
Bargaining chip? WTF? What exactly do we get if the public option is off the table?
Krugman says the public option may be a signal on Obama’s trustworthiness that not every one is seeing. Okay, finance/economics lesson time again. Signaling theory is based on the idea that that market reacts rationally to publicly available information. So, for example, if I want to signal that my company is worth more than the average company, I want to find a way to signal that to the market I’m superior so they’ll run up my stock price to recognize me as a superior company. Then I can rake in bonuses and capital gains. I could borrow money in the commercial market, for example, that gives me a Aaa rating. This signals raters who are assumed to be in the know find my company to be a good bet compared to others that they rate lower. This signal should push up my stock price.
So what kind of signal do we have here? Well, Krugman argues that the public option is one of the ways Obama can ‘signal’ that he’s still a progressive democrat and he’s signaling that he’s a sell out without realizing it. He points out that the public option debate has turn into a signal on who should buy stock in what Obama says. Signals are based on the market knowing what actions can be trusted, however. You have to trust that some one who gives a company the Aaa rating really has some inside proprietary information and believe they are a reliable, trustworthy source of rating. Krugman says the Obama administration is sending out bad signals and doesn’t even realize it.
If progressives had real trust in Obama’s commitment to doing the right thing, the administration would have broad leeway to do deals. But the president doesn’t command that kind of trust.
Partly it’s a matter of style — as many people have noted, he has been weirdly reluctant to make the moral case for universal care, weirdly unable to show passion on the issue, weirdly diffident even about the blatant lies from the right. Partly it’s a spillover from his other policies: by appointing an economic team that’s Rubin redux, by taking such a kindly attitude to the banks, he has squandered a lot of progressive enthusiasm.
Add in the dealmaking as part of the health care process itself, and progressives can be forgiven for having the impression that Obama (a) takes them for granted (b) is way too easily rolled by the other side.
So progressives have their backs up over one provision in health care reform that’s easy to monitor. The public option has become not so much a symbol as a signal, a test of whether Obama is really the progressive activists thought they were backing.
And the bizarre thing is that the administration doesn’t seem to get that.
So, who’s signals should we trust? Carville? Krugman? Obama?
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Enough is Enough!
Posted: August 17, 2009 Filed under: A My Pet Goat Moment, Health care reform, Surreality, Team Obama, U.S. Economy, Voter Ignorance | Tags: Howard Dean, Kent Conrad, Paul Krugman, Rep. Eddie Bernice Johnson, The Hill Comments Off on Enough is Enough!Left Blogistan is alive with the sounds of open dissent. I can only say, it’s about time. Here’s a good example from TheHill.com aptly headed Obama picks fight with left on Health Reform. The news, however, is this fact. A public option is not a liberal option. It’s the option that every advanced economy in the world has chosen in some form. We already have a public option for seniors. We’re the majority, in every sense of the word, on this issue. This fight is not with the Left. This fight is with our babies who die in bigger numbers than most countries, our families bankrupted by inadequate insurance, and the many many ill people who are simply numbers on a spreadsheet that provide a mark-up of 30 percent or more for a industry based on always saying no!
Even in the real Socialized medicine haven of the. U.K., former Prime Minister Maggie Thatcher knew she had an unassailable object because it makes peoples lives much improved and they wouldn’t give it up once they had it. Here in the U.S., we’re not even talking socialized medicine despite the bleating of the right wing media machine. 
We’re talking about extending something we already have–Medicare– reformatting it so it benefits doctors, hospitals and patients rather than a superfluous, bonus paying, extraordinary profit making, third party payer. How can you lose the high ground on an issue that’s been so easily solved in nearly every other country that’s not an economic or political basket case? How can you lose momentum on an issue that polls showed people supported until you botched the policy so badly?
Liberal Democrats have insisted a public insurance option is necessary to ensure competition for private insurers. Just this week, former Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean predicted there could be Democratic primary challenges if a healthcare bill without a public option is approved by Congress.
Dean also told liberal bloggers gathered last week at the “Netroots Nation” convention that the only piece of reform left in the House bill that is worth doing is the public option.
The left wing of the Democratic party already has been irritated by concessions its leaders have made on healthcare to centrists in the House and Senate.
Rep. Eddie Bernice Johnson (D-Texas) told CNN on Sunday it would be “very difficult” for her and other
liberals to support legislation that does not include a public option.
“The only way we can be sure that very low-income people and persons who work for companies that don’t offer insurance have access to it, is through an option that would give the private insurance companies a little competition,” she said.
The last word in the Sunday TV Spin Zone was given to North Dakota Senator DINO Kent Conrad. This man has fewer folks in his entire state than do most neighborhoods in any major city in America. Why does he get to frame the debate?
In an interview on Sunday, Mr. Obama’s senior adviser, David Axelrod, said the president remained convinced that a public plan was “the best way to go.” But Mr. Axelrod said the nuances of how to develop a nonprofit competitor to private industry had never been “carved in stone.”
On Capitol Hill, the Senate Finance Committee is expected to produce a bill that features a nonprofit co-op. The author of the idea, Senator Kent Conrad, Democrat of North Dakota and chairman of the Budget Committee, predicted Sunday that Mr. Obama would have no choice but to drop the public option.
“The fact of the matter is, there are not the votes in the United States Senate for the public option,” Mr. Conrad said on “Fox News Sunday.” “There never have been. So to continue to chase that rabbit, I think, is just a wasted effort.”
So, that’s it. The high rate of infant mortality we have here in the U.S. (worse than many developing nations), the appalling number of personal bankruptcies due to folks with either no insurance or underinsurance, and the number of people that have no access to even the most basic services other than the emergency rooms are simply Axelrovian ‘nuances’. TheHill.com continues to describe the back pedal, the sell-out, the cave-in, or what ever pejorative metaphor for the big Obama cop-out.
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