Monday Reads

Good Morning!

The country is gearing up for the State of the Union Address.  We’re going to be live blogging it here.  It’s scheduled for Tuesday and my plan is to live stream it from CSPAN. It’s bad enough to watch all that stupidity in  one place.  I don’t need the echo chamber on top of it all.  It’s actually something that’s demanded by the Constitution Article 2, Section 3.

[The President] shall from time to time give to the Congress Information of the State of the Union, and recommend to their Consideration such Measures as he shall judge necessary and expedient…

If Senator Dick Durbin is to be believed, part of the speech will contain a New Obama Plan that is “part stimulus”.  I still keep hearing David Bryne speak “same as it ever was” over and over again. But, the links at Politico and here’s a taste.

“It’s part of a stimulus. but we’re sensitive to the deficit,” Durbin said on “Fox News Sunday” when asked by host Chris Wallace about the president’s expected plans to call for more spending for infrastructure, education, research in his State of the Union address Tuesday night to a joint session of Congress.

Noting his support for the president’s deficit commission recommendations, Durbin said Congress should be cautious about large spending cuts until the economy is showing sustained patterns of growth.

“They said be careful,” he said citing the report.  “Don’t start the serious spending cuts, the deficit reduction, until were clearly out of the recession in 2013.  We’ve got to make sure this economy is growing with more jobs, more business success.”

I’m not sure which part of economics 101 and 102 these folks missed–given the took them at all–but the growth we’re anticipating during this ‘recovery’ is not enough to eliminate the current unemployment rate.  Mature economies do not grow very quickly.  Any growth rate of real gdp from about 1-4% would be healthy and normal for a developed, mature economy.  That’s not going bring down unemployment any time soon, let alone within a two year presidential election cycle.  Giving tax breaks to corporations that can head to markets over seas where there are actually customers is not going to create jobs here.   The only thing that is stopping this Democratic Death Wish is the fact that Republicans are BAT shit crazy and even then, they still managed to recapture the house.

Speaking of the Republicans, they’re all in for taxcuts to Billionaires, but any spending ascribed to help ordinary Americans still will get the wall of no.  At least that’s what Senator Mitch McConnell is saying.

Speaking on Fox News Sunday, Mr. McConnell countered that “The American public, as one pundit put it, issued a massive restraining order,” against government spending and excessive debt in November’s Congressional elections.

Indeed, Mr. McConnell seemed at times gleefully sardonic about President Obama’s efforts to depict himself as a centrist trying to find common ground with Republicans. The president, he said, has certainly moved to the enter , but mostly “rhetorically.”

“The president needs to pivot,” Mr. McConnell said. “He seems to be pivoting on virtually everything else, and I don’t put him down for that. I mean he obviously saw what happened in the November election and is trying to go in a different direction. He’s quit bashing business and is now celebrating business.”

“Well it’s about time,” Mr. McConnell added, “because the only way we’re going to get unemployment down and get out of this economic trough is through private sector growth and development. I think excessive government spending, running up debt, making us look like a Western European country is the wrong direction.”

I’m not sure which Western European Country he’s referring to here except maybe Ireland or Greece.  Most of the rest of them are growing at about the same level that we’re expected to grow with a few above and a few below.  Developed economies don’t really grow rapidly unless they get some kind of boost from a technological advance or something else.  Here’s some estimates from the CIA factbook. McConnell just says anything that serves his narrative, I swear.

Even if we do get some ‘normal growth’, I doubt we’ll see anything to kick us up a notch given this kind of education and research and development environment. Wonder where are priorities are?

• U.S. consumers spend significantly more on potato chips than the U.S. government devotes to energy R&D.
• In 2009, for the first time, over half of U.S. patents were awarded to non-U.S. companies.
• China has replaced the U.S. as the world’s number one high-technology exporter.
• Between 1996 and 1999, 157 new drugs were approved in the U.S.  Ten years later, that number had dropped to 74.
• The World Economic Forum ranks the U.S. #48 in quality of math and science education.

Here’s some good news that shows all hopes for science and reality may not be lost completely for the US.  You’ll see that it doesn’t come from registered Republicans however.

52% of GOP reject evolution; 36% reject creationism

More Americans today believe that human beings developed without any involvement of a higher power, according to a new poll.

Gallup reported that since 1982, the number of Americans believing that humans evolved over millions of years increased by seven percentage points.

The current figure – 16 percent – has trended upwards since 2000.

Since 1982, Americans who believe that humans evolved with God guiding the process haven’t changed (38 percent), while Americans who believe God created humans in present form has decreased four points to 40 percent.

Read the rest of this entry »