Monthly Archives: February 2009

Who’s the Idiot?

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David Brooks’s column today is titled “Money for Idiots.” Naturally I assumed it must be about a bailout for pundits. But no; the “idiots” are people who are behind on their mortgage payments. And here’s yet another unexpected twist — after berating the idiots for being idiots, Brooks grudgingly admits that we have to help them, anyway, for the sake of the economy.

The nation’s economy is not just the sum of its individuals. It is an interwoven context that we all share. To stabilize that communal landscape, sometimes you have to shower money upon those who have been foolish or self-indulgent. The greedy idiots may be greedy idiots, but they are our countrymen. And at some level, we’re all in this together. If their lives don’t stabilize, then our lives don’t stabilize.

Well, yes, that really is the bottom line. Talk of whether any individual “deserves” help is beside the point. Letting so many people fail amounts to a national economic murder-suicide pact.

I haven’t had time to digest the details in the save-the-homeowners plan. Edward L. Glaeser, an economics professor at Harvard, provides a brief critique that mostly approves of it.

The Right, of course, is opposed to the Obama plan. They don’t have a plan of their own other than to do nothing, but they don’t like Obama’s plan one bit. Their reasons for disagreement range from the stupid to the stupid and clueless to the stupid and clueless plus hallucinatory.

See also: Ryan Chittum, “CNBC Editor: The People Are Revolting!“

Sick of It

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Adventures in the land of the Best Health-Care System in the Worldâ„¢:

They borrow leftover prescription drugs from friends, attempt to self-diagnose ailments online, stretch their diabetes and asthma medicines for as long as possible and set their own broken bones. When emergencies strike, they rarely can afford the bills that follow.

The article is about how you get health care if you’re a 20-something living and working in New York City. However, I suspect this is true of vast numbers of 20-somethings throughout America. And I want to emphasize that we’re talking about children of the middle class. I’m not saying children from lower-class families don’t deserve health care as much. The point is that if this were a coal mine, the canary would be decomposed to a pile of bones and feathers by now.

Of course, some healthy young people who are eligible to get health benefits from employers choose not to do so because they are foolish. But many more, I think, either don’t get health benefits from their jobs or honestly cannot afford what they’d have to pay to join their company group insurance plan.

Today, the same people on the Right who fought S-CHIP expansion tooth and nail suddenly care about young people, although not about their health. Little Lulu and some of the other hysterical shriekers are pushing “porkulus” protests against the stimulus package. Lulu’s got photos of children and youths holding signs saying “I don’t want to pay for the ‘swindle-us’ package” and “Say no to generational theft.” But when Moveon produced videos like the one, for some reason the Right was not moved.

But as Steve M says, if the Right wants to waste its time with tactics that didn’t work for the Left, who am I to complain?

How Conservatism Is Destroying America

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California is on the brink of financial collapse. Jennifer Steinhauer writes for The New York Times,

The state, nearly out of cash, has laid off scores of workers and put hundreds more on unpaid furloughs. It has stopped paying counties and issuing income tax refunds and halted thousands of infrastructure projects.

This crisis has many causes, but addressing it has been rendered nearly impossible by Republicans in the state legislature who block any form of tax increase. Hilzoy says,

They need three (3) Republican votes in each house. They can’t get them. And this despite the fact that the Republicans who have been negotiating have gotten a lot, including, according to the LATimes, “tax breaks for corporations”.

Really. I am not making this up. With the state budget $41 billion in deficit, Republicans held out for corporate tax cuts, and then aren’t even supporting the resulting bill.

Stopping building projects is costing Californians millions of dollars. Borrowing money to keep the government going is going to cost Californians millions of dollars.

As the stimulus bill becomes law today, we learn that a number of Republican governors are lining up to support it. It may be too little, too late for California. But a number of other states, both red and blue, may be pulled back from the brink of disaster by federal dollars — in no particular order, New York, Virginia, Iowa, Tennessee, Missouri, Ohio, etc. etc. Add your state here.

States are in trouble for a lot of reasons, but an immediate one is the loss of revenue by retailers. City and state budgets are breaking all over America.

Florida Governor Charlie Crist, a Republican, explains,

“It really is a matter of perspective,” Mr. Crist said in an interview. “As a governor, the pragmatism that you have to exercise because of the constitutional obligation to balance your budget is a very compelling pull” generally.

With Florida facing a projected $5 billion shortfall in a $66 billion budget, and social costs rising, the stimulus package “helps plug that hole,” Mr. Crist said, “but it also helps us meet the needs of the people in a very difficult economic time.”

And it appears Americans on the whole are glad Congress came through.

So, who’s not happy? Well, we know, don’t we?

As there weren’t enough Republicans in Washington to provide fodder for the story the New York Times wanted to write – they simply took it on the road to those Republicans Governors who also happen to be the ones most hat in hand when it comes to Federal dollars. Yep, quite a “conservative” bunch this crew. Or so the Times would have one believe. …

… How about if the Feds didn’t suck the money out of states to begin with only to wastefully plow it back in?

If you are wondering how the feds are sucking money out of states, read the comments to the rightie blog post linked above. They’ve noticed that poor New Jersey only gets back 70 percent of what it sends to Congress. Yes, and this is something I’ve written about in the past. The wealthier, more industrialized states (nearly all of which are blue) tend to pay more in taxes than they receive in federal dollars. Poorer, less industrialized states (nearly all of which are red) pay less in federal taxes than they receive in federal dollars.

In other words, for many years blue states have been carrying the load for red states that won’t pay for their own messes.

Now, if the conservatives who run the poor red states want to be real conservatives and stop grabbing money out of the hands of New Jersey taxpayers, I wouldn’t object. Let the freeloaders in Mississippi pay their own bleeping taxes, heh?

Of course, in the real world what would happen is that there would be a belt of states sunken into Third World style poverty by their idiot GOP state government, and this belt would stretch across the southeastern U.S. and reach up to the more rural western states. And in the long run it would hurt the U.S. as a whole more than it would help.

Right-wing economic “theory” is destroying America. It’s doing a bigger job on us that al Qaeda could ever have dreamed.

Two Kinds of Progressives

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I continue to be impressed with Nate Silver, and not just because of his number-crunching skills. His post on the “two progressivisms” speaks to why some progressives find other progressives annoying. Go take a look.

Of the two types I’m clearly more rational than radical. I’m not nearly as credulous as I was, um, eight years ago (wonder why?) and I’m also much less of an incrementalist, but I identify more with the rational side.

Rational progressives sometimes regard radical progressives as impractical, self-righteous, shrill, demagogic, naïve and/or anti-intellectual. Radical progressives, in turn, regard rational progressives as impure, corrupt (or corruptible), selfish, complacent, elitist, and too quick to compromise.

I don’t think I identify the radicals as anti-intellectual. It’s more the case that they seem to have an emotional need to stay in attack mode. One wonders if events arranged themselves to give them every policy change they wanted, would they still find something to attack? I suspect so.

In my case, my ultimate goal is not so much to enact progressive policies (although that would be nice) as it is to create a nation in which the people received factual information and could have rational, substantive debates about issues. And then if well-informed voters, after a thorough airing of a problem, express a preference for conservative solutions, so be it. I am just damn tired of living in a nation in which it’s a near-impossible task to lift facts over all the bullshit and demagoguery.

I Bet They Have Secret Handshakes, Too

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Lest you think this is an exaggeration,

Four Tennessee state representatives, all Republicans, have signed up to be plaintiffs in a lawsuit against President Barack Obama, aimed at forcing him to prove he is a United States citizen by coughing up his birth certificate.

After the November elections, the rightie blogosphere smugly declared that, yeah, maybe they lost, but at least they weren’t going to get crazy like loony liberals and their Bush Derangement Syndrome. So all this weekend the righties were in a state of hysterical meltdown because President Obama chose to return a bust of Winston Churchill on loan from Britain.

Update: This is, of course, not the least bit deranged.

Conservative Economics: Let’s Make Sense!

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Sean Paul Kelly of The Agonist found this video clip from August 2006. As Sean Paul says, I don’t know anything about Peter Schiff, but he was right, and econoclown Arthur Laffer is, um, not. The word “fool” doesn’t even come close.

BTW, I understand Laffer has come out against any sort of stimulus package, but I can’t find a direct link to anything he’s written since last fall. Maybe he’s not well; he’s too big a fool to actually shut up.

Dennis Waldman, aka Kagro X, at Congress Matters has a look back at what Republicans said about Bill Clinton’s economic policies in 1993. Give it a look; it’s a hoot.

Republicans: Let’s make sense!

Let’s Make Sense!

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“Let’s Make Sense!” is the name of a game I’ve just invented. I’m still working on the rules, but the basic idea is to sniff out bits of public discourse that don’t make sense. By this I don’t mean bits I disagree with, or even bits that are not factual (although there are plenty of those, and they are not ruled out). I mean things that are just plain disconnected from standard human cognitive processes.

Tim F. at Balloon Juice found a great example. There’s a provision in the stimulus bill that would cap the pay of financial institution executives.

The provision, inserted by Senate Democrats over the objections of the Obama administration, is aimed at companies that have received financial bailout funds. It would prohibit cash bonuses and almost all other incentive compensation for the five most senior officers and the 20 highest-paid executives at large companies that receive money under the Treasury’s Troubled Asset Relief Program, or TARP.

That makes sense, yes? But here’s an objection coming from an adviser to President Obama:

“These rules will not work,” James F. Reda, an independent compensation consultant, said on Friday. “Any smart executive will (a) pay back TARP money ASAP or (b) get another job.”

As Tim F. says, what’s not to like about either (a) or (b)? If the institution can survive without TARP money, then let it do so. Taxpayers don’t need to be propping up companies that don’t need propping up. On the other hand, if the company is sliding into bankruptcy, why is it such an all-fired tragedy if the CEO quits?

Mr. Reda: Let’s make sense! And Obama Administration, let’s make even more sense and stop listening to Mr. Reda.

That’s More Like It

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Headline at WaPo: “Obama Scores Early Victory of Historic Proportions.” Story by Michael D. Shear and Alec MacGillis. Lede:

Twenty-four days into his presidency, Barack Obama recorded last night a legislative achievement of the sort that few of his predecessors achieved at any point in their tenure.

In size and scope, there is almost nothing in history to rival the economic stimulus legislation that Obama shepherded through Congress in just over three weeks. And the result — produced largely without Republican participation — was remarkably similar to the terms Obama’s team outlined even before he was inaugurated: a package of tax cuts and spending totaling about $775 billion.

Well, yes, that is what happened. Amazing that anyone at WaPo noticed. I still expect some editorials tsk-tsking Obama for not getting more Republican support, but whatever. Oh, wait, here it is in paragraph 3:

As Obama urged passage of the plan, he and his still-incomplete team demonstrated a single-mindedness that was familiar from the campaign trail. That intensity may have contributed to missteps in other areas, as the president’s White House stumbled repeatedly in the vetting of his Cabinet and staff nominees. And high-minded promises of bipartisanship evaporated as Republicans accused the president and his Democratic allies in Congress of the same heavy-handed tactics that Obama, in his campaign, had often demanded be changed.

Yes, after Obama and his team politely solicited GOP input, and the GOP bit his hand. And when he realized they were trying to block him, he went around them, and they’re mad about it. On what universe does this make the partisanship Obama’s fault? Oh, wait …

At Balloon Juice, DougJ posts an example of early bipartisanship under George W. Bush, from the same article. I’m going to post a longer quote:

President George W. Bush was similarly without a major achievement by the week of Feb. 8, 2001, three weeks after his inauguration.

Bush had begun selling his $1.6 trillion plan to cut taxes, and he had announced a plan for a big investment in new weaponry for the military. He was preparing for his first international trip, to Mexico, and gave a speech to military units warning against “overdeployment.”

Unlike Obama, by this point Bush had not yet held a prime-time news conference. Like Obama, Bush made an early gesture to encourage bipartisanship: inviting members of the Kennedy family to the White House to see the movie “Thirteen Days.”

Bush’s efforts at bipartisanship largely failed, but not until after he had launched a war in Iraq and pursued controversial efforts to expand the power of the executive branch.

Sort of a mine field of howlers, don’t you think?

Other stuff: It’s so hard to pick one Howler out of all the Howlers, even though Bob Somerby has been doing it since 1998. But I think I’ll nominate this Hot Air post. Just read it. You will howl.