US POLITICS SPRING 2011: Let's just call off this country.

or Syria

no, the progressives-with-balls kind, not the limbs-flying kind.

Meanwhile Ezra Klein follows Andrew Sullivan's lead and posits that Obama has been a terrific conservative president.

Too bad so many conservatives will vote against him because he is a Mau-Mau and a communist. Of course, the John Birchers called Eisenhower a communist sympathizer, too.

Klein actually says: President Obama, if you look closely at his positions, is a moderate Republican from the early 1990s

"we are the change we voted against 20 years ago"

OBAMA 2012

haha he actually did all those policies republican wonks put together to have something on file, but republican pols were never ever going to do

x-post

but its not that brooks and friedman and (RIP) broder hate policy or numbers! they hate conflict. friedman in particular would love a country run by a council of technocratic geeks

― ban drake (the rapper) (max), Tuesday, April 26, 2011

My aerospace engineer brother sometimes endorses this Friedman point of view.

during the healthcare debate i remember feeling like "why am i supporting bob doles health care plan"

"why am I paying to keep Bob Dole alive?"

bcz single-payer is airy-fairy Candyland shit

I wonder if the centrist Democrat plan is to appeal to the private sphere (since the public one is already beholden to them) as the Republicans increasingly turn into the wingnut/flat-earth party?

"There's gold in them thar hills!"

The political genius for the Dems is that it is a massive part of the economy, has and creates/expands both private and public sphere special interests and is nation-wide.

Don't overrate the Dems' political genius.

i dont think the private sphere really gives a shit as long as they dont have to pay taxes

as long as they dont have to pay taxes ...while continuing to operate in a country with a sound infrastructure, the world's most expensive armed forces, and the dollar remains the reserve currency of international finance.

yeah, i still think they dont really care

true, until they discover they do care and didn't know it.

that is why the GE CEO is bouncing that private sphere around like Chaplin w/ the globe in The Great Dictator.

xp

Alterman: Obama really is like Carter.

Stylistically speaking, Barack Obama could hardly be further from Jimmy Carter if he really had been born in Kenya. Carter was a born-again Baptist who was raised on his father’s peanut plantation and supported George Wallace on the road to the Georgia state house. Barack Obama—well, you know the story. But the two men have a great deal in common in their approach to the presidency, and not one of these similarities is good news for the Democrats or even for America. Both men rule without regard to the concerns of the base of their party. Both held themselves to be above politics when it came to making tough decisions. Both were possessed with superhuman self-confidence when it came to their own political judgment mixed with contempt for what they understood to be the petty concerns of pundits and party leaders. And worst of all, one fears, neither one appeared willing to change course no matter how many storm clouds loomed on the horizon.

*****

So what does Obama propose? Well nothing so simple as his own party’s highly popular political platform for this president. He’s too smart for that. Rather, as Ezra Klein points out,, Obama’s deficit reduction plan, while not quite as brutal as the Republican Ryan plan, is even more conservative than the Simpson-Bowles plan, which was itself deeply conservative. He calls for raising less money in new taxes and far smaller cuts in the defense budget, chasing the Republicans into territory that is well to the right of anything even Ronald Reagan dared propose before his 1980 shellacking of Jimmy Carter.

"we are the change we voted against 20 years ago"

lol

but its not that brooks and friedman and (RIP) broder hate policy or numbers! they hate conflict. friedman in particular would love a country run by a council of technocratic geeks

actually, i stand corrected. max is 1,000% correct about brooks/friedman/broder. this troika isn't particularly GOOD about discussing policy in any meaningful way IMHO, but that is different than saying they are not concerned with policy or anti-technocrat.

anyway, we're all morbz now. at least we know that next year's "lesser evil" candidate will be as much Bob Dole circa 1996 as Jimmy Carter (a comparison i've made myself since like the moment Barry threw his hat in the presidential ring several years ago).

http://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news/157759-schumer-pressures-boehner-on-oil-subsidies-

So now the White House and Schumer have finally decided that ending oil company subsidies is a good idea? It is, but they should have tried earlier and I doubt they will now properly keep up the pressure on Boehner to do so (Republicans consider ending subsidies to be a tax increase) as it also makes political sense.

Bam is still an even lesser Bill Clinton to me, w/out a phony Prosperity Bubble to protect him

goddamn phony prosperity

question: were there trillion-dollar federal deficits during Reagan's presidency or not?

Several hundred billion -- first ever.

Which was fine: we ended the Cold War w/out firing a shot, made America strong, and gave millionaires tax breaks.

2.85 trillion by the end of his presidency

Adjusted, that's about 5.1 trillion

my mom wz watching lol Glenn Beck and he was graphing the national debt as a straight and level line that elevated slightly w/ Clinton, dipped pretty low w/ Dubya, and then divebombed w/ Obama...

wait what

why would Glenn Beck be arguing that the national debt went DOWN under Obama

watching it again, there's a slight dip to indicate that Reagan brought national deficit into 200 billion territory

xp my bad Shakes, the graph was surplus/deficit...mainly hung around zero until Reagan who had a 200B deficit, Clinton pulled it back into the surplus etc etc

his point seemed to be: remember when Dubya's deficit was bad; that's nothing compared to what Obama has done

(along w/ points about banks having literal boatloads of TARP money in reserve and the hyperinflation that releasing it would cause)

sorry about that

meanwhile, vermont is set to ratify the nation's first single-payer health care system

http://www.wcax.com/story/14518224/vt-senate-approves-single-payer-plan

awesome

so glad the 50 people who live in Vermont finally have healthcare

man when is California gonna fall into the ocean already?

(<3 shakey!)

Overall, he cut the rate of growth in Fed spending from 4% to 2.5% and, to his credit, he reduced the early deficits as percentages of GDP from 6% of GDP in 1983 to 3.2% of GDP in 1987. If you don't remember the early years of his presidency, allow to point out that they were very bad; almost like the last several years bad. Unemployment was near 10% but that can be attributed in great part to the Fed keeping interest rates very high, the highest ever in modern markets, peaking at around 20% in 1980, so the beginning of the Reagan recession was really during the end of the Carter presidency.

The salient thing about Reagan overall is that he only cut spending by 1%; he basically transferred about 5% of annual public expenditures to the military while drastically cutting the maximum marginal tax rates and changing the emphasis on taxation from high earners and capital gains and onto payroll and new investment. It's a very mixed bag from the point of view of praxis. He treated business income more fairly across the board, ridding the code of many preferences for certain kinds of investments but raising it overall. His record on deregulation is overstated too; much of that was begun under Carter.

The marriage of military hawkishness along with classical economic theories, like the alliance of (classic) economic liberals and social conservatives in the party today, is sometimes a bit odd. Reagan wasn't proud of making the US a debtor nation but he was justly proud of his record wrt the USSR/Eastern Bloc and its economic and political collapse.

630 K ppl in Vermont, Shakey

Unemployment was near 10% but that can be attributed in great part to the Fed keeping interest rates very high, the highest ever in modern markets, peaking at around 20% in 1980, so the beginning of the Reagan recession was really during the end of the Carter presidency.

Paul Volcker warned Reagan in '81 that the short term economic outlook would be very bad; he would be keeping a choke hold on interest rates until the economy was starved.

And he did kill inflation

good summaries of the early 80s economics-wise. kinda sad to think that we've gotten so low that reagan and tip o'neill's early 80s shenanigans look like up to us in 2011.

Panetta to Defense, Petraeus to CIA.

But the White House press secretary has been busy for the last 2 days dealing with questions on something else:

For the second consecutive day, White House Press Secretary Jay Carney was peppered with questions about President Obama's birth certificate. It wasn't just some fringe reporter who worked his way into the briefing room -- the questions came from CNN's White House correspondent. Washington Monthly

oh ffs Obama/White House

http://26.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lkbco2MFYh1qa9bmvo1_500.jpg