Feb
22
Hypocrites?
Filed Under American Politics | 5 Comments
The latest critique from the left of Republicans is that they hypocritically welcome and seek credit for stimulus funding whilst having voted against it in Congress. Whilst not an entirely accurate criticism, it does have some merit, it’s not something that we who want a government with integrity should be tolerant of. At least on the corrupting influence of pork, John McCain was right.
But here’s a thought from Republican Rep. Aaron Schock, one of the ‘guilty’ Republicans in response to a Rachel Maddow question:
MS. MADDOW: …just this week you were at a community college touting a $350,000 green technology education program, talking about how great that was going to be for your district. You voted against the bill that created that grant. And so that’s happening a lot with Republicans sort of taking credit for things that Democratic bills do, and then Republicans simultaneously touting their votes against them and trashing them. That’s, I think, a, a, a problem that needs to be resolved within, within your caucus, because, I mean, you seem like a very nice person, but that’s very hypocritical stance to take.
Fair point. Schock offered his rebuttal:
REP. SCHOCK: No. I think that argument that liberals are making is absolutely ridiculous. With all due respect, Rachel, does that mean you’re going to give back your Bush tax cuts that you continue to rail against? The fact of the matter is our country operates and govern by a majority. And I, along with almost all of my Republican colleagues and a good number of Democrats, have voted against the stimulus, the omnibus, all of this runaway spending. But we’ve lost those battles in the House. And at the end of the day, my constituents…
Hypocrisy of course exists on both sides. I wonder how much money Rachel Maddow, Barack Obama or Congressional Democrats have made from those hated Bush tax cuts. I wonder how many of them have handed the money they saved back to the federal government. Liberal criticisms of Republicans have no meaning until they are prepared to criticise their own on hypocrisy. But I think we’ll be in for a long wait on that one.
Jan
25
The Eloi Still Aren’t Getting It
Filed Under American Politics | 2 Comments
Joe Klein of Time in an article entitled Too Dumb To Thrive launches an attack on the American people:
Absolutely amazing poll results from CNN today about the $787 stimulus package: nearly three out of four Americans think the money has been wasted. On second thought, they may be right: it’s been wasted on them.
…
So, two thoughts:
1. The Obama Administration has done a terrible job explaining the stimulus package to the American people…especially since there have been very few documented cases of waste so far.
2. This is yet further evidence that Americans are flagrantly ill-informed…and, for those watching Fox News, misinformed.
It is very difficult to have a democracy without citizens. It is impossible to be a citizen if you don’t make an effort to understand the most basic activities of your government. It is very difficult to thrive in an increasingly competitive world if you’re a nation of dodos.
I have some thoughts of my own. The stimulus added $787 billion to the deficit with the intention of adding jobs to the economy. At the time the stimulus was passed, unemployment was at less than 8%, today it stands higher than 10%. It is the people who will have to pay higher taxes in the long run to pay for the increased level of debt that the stimulus added. The people see a bureaucracy that can’t even account for where them money has been spent properly and funding for transport projects that have made negligible difference to unemployment.
And finally they see advocates on the left arguing for a second stimulus and they are left wondering; if you can’t get the first one right, why on earth are you planning a second one?
Altering Joe Klein’s conclusion slightly, I would say this:
It is very difficult to have a democracy without citizens responsible journalists. It is impossible to be a citizen good journalist if you don’t make an effort to understand the most basic activities concerns of your government fellow citizens.
Dec
3
Shovel Ready?
Filed Under American Politics | 56 Comments
I’m asking a genuinely serious question here. Does anyone have a good thing to say about the stimulus? I’m honestly interested in hearing a good defence for this program, because to me it looks like an unmitigated disaster. Seriously what am I missing? Especially in light of this:
“Highway-construction companies around the country, having completed the mostly small projects paid for by the federal economic-stimulus package, are starting to see their business run aground, an ominous sign for the nation’s weak employment picture.”
The month the stimulus passed, February of this year, 6,593,000 Americans were employed in construction; in the most recent report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, 5,966,000 Americans were employed in that field. In other words, while all of this stimulus-based construction was going on, the profession lost 627,000 jobs.
Nov
12
Line Of The Day
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The Daily Kos seem out of touch with the American people:
Congress will confront no shortage of must-pass legislation once health care reform is enacted, including immigration reform and climate change legislation. These numbers clearly indicate that a major new jobs bill must be added to the mix.
You think?!?
The trouble is, a major jobs bill hasn’t been at the top of a Democratic wishlist like healthcare reform has. But let’s not let 10% and rising unemployment get in the way of the progressive agenda. The priorities must be got right. Netroots first, public second.
It should be a clean bill, one that focuses on creating jobs and nothing but jobs, to rebuild our infrastructure.
Unlike the very very dirty stimulus which was a mere waste of $787 billion. And why has rebuilding infrastructure become a priority for the left? Why not let the private sector create the jobs by releasing it from onerous regulatory and taxation burdens? Ah! Silly question. We are talking about the left here who see a government dollar as being inherently more valuable than a private economy dollar. This is the problem with Keynsian stimulus. A dollar is a dollar regardless of who spends it. A government dollar spent on the economy, is a private dollar taken out of the economy. A strange budgetry principal if you ask me.
Nov
7
An interesting article from Robert Reich, Clinton’s Secretary of Labour. first he sets the scene:
Presidents tend to overcompensate for the errors of their predecessors in the same party and in so doing sow seeds of their own mistakes. Bill Clinton wanted above all to avoid Jimmy Carter’s fate — losing re-election because the economy was heading south on Election Day. So Clinton made a deal with Alan Greenspan to slash the budget deficit and thereby jettison much of his ambitious campaign agenda (that was Greenspan’s precondition for lowering interest rates and causing an economic boom in time for the re-election) and then Clinton took direction from Dick Morris, who told him to move to the right. The result: Clinton avoided Carter’s failure and won re-election handily. But the Clinton years produced few if any major social reforms. Clinton spent so much of his initial political capital, as well as his time and energy, on deficit reduction that he didn’t have enough left to enact health care in 1994.
Barack Obama came to the White House intent on not repeating Clinton’s failure to enact universal health care. Did he overlearn the Clinton lesson? Obama seems to have made all the right moves to enact something he can credibly label health-care reform: Rather than spend his political capital elsewhere, he reserved most of it for health care.
Reich thinks that, although desirable, healthcare reform should not be done at the expense of the economy:
I worry, though, that Obama’s strategy may turn out to be a mistake comparable to Clinton’s overemphasis on deficit reduction. Obama’s focus on health care rather than jobs, when the economy is still so fragile and unemployment moving toward double digits, could make it appear that the administration has its priorities confused. While affordable health care is critically important to Americans, making a living is more urgent. Yet the administration’s efforts to date on this more basic concern have been neither particularly visible nor coherent
…
While health care reform, if done right, can help American families stay afloat in the economy, the current bills won’t offer most Americans any appreciable decline in the cost of their health insurance nor clear improvement in the efficiency or quality of the health care they receive, and those who will benefit won’t see the benefits until 2014 at the earliest.
Whilst Reich argues from the left,saying that the stimulus wasn’t large enough, something with which I disagree, one argument he makes does make sense:
Yet at this point, on the eve of a health care bill, it would be difficult for Obama to return to Congress seeking billions more to aid distressed homeowners and small businesses.
Adding the $1.8 trillion that the healthcare bill now costs onto the $787 billion of the stimulus gives Obama very little room to manoeuvre on turning round the economy. Whilst Democrats govern like a shopaholic with an open cheque book, moderate Democrats are already baulking at the size of the deficit and the ever increasing spending. Obama is wasting the political capital he had to fix the economy, after all, there was little pushback from moderates on the stimulus.
Will healthcare be Obama’s Waterloo?
Go read the article, it’s very interesting.
Nov
7
It’s self-explanatory:
Over 10% unemployment and still rising. Voters in Virginia and New Jersey said it was all about jobs, and those that cited jobs as the main reason for their vote:
Perhaps most striking were economic views: A vast 89 percent in New Jersey and 85 percent in Virginia said they were worried about the direction of the nation’s economy in the next year; 56 percent and 53 percent, respectively, said they were “very” worried about it.
Voters who expressed the highest levels of economic discontent heavily favored the Republican candidates in both states – underscoring the challenge Obama and his party may face in 2010 if economic attitudes don’t improve. The analogy is to 1994, when nearly six in 10 voters said the economy was in bad shape, and they favored the out-of-power Republicans by 26 points, helping the GOP to a 52-seat gain and control of Congress for the first time in 42 years.
In Virginia on Tuesday, voters who were “very” worried about the economy concern supported the Republican winner, Bob McDonnell by a wide margin, 77-23 percent. In New Jersey, while the gap wasn’t quite so broad, voters who were most worried about the economy backed the Republican Chris Christie by 61-34 percent as he unseated incumbent Democrat Jon Corzine.
But not to worry, the Democrats are focused on the problem…of healthcare reform. Doh!
Nov
5
(Un)Smart Power. Part II
Filed Under American Politics | 3 Comments
The stimulus was supposed to help create jobs. But as Veronique de Rugy points out, if that was the intention of the stimulus, wouldn’t it make more sense to spend more money in states with higher unemployment and less in states with lower. seems like common sense to me. So there is no surprise then that unemployment is much higher than that forecasted by the Obama administration when they do things like this:
Yet, with a few exceptions, the data show that this is not the case. Many higher-unemployment states are getting far fewer stimulus dollars than lower-unemployment states.
Take Michigan, for instance. Michigan’s 15.2 percent unemployment rate is the highest in the country. So far, it has received $403 per person in stimulus funds. That’s above the average stimulus per person across all states ($326). However, it’s lower than the $409 per person that the state of Vermont, a state with relatively low unemployment (6.8 percent), has received so far. Michigan’s per-person take is also much lower than the $707 per person the District of Columbia received. D.C.’s unemployment rate is 9.9 percent.
Now look at the state with the lowest unemployment rate in the country: North Dakota. It’s getting $253 per person with a 4.3 percent unemployment rate. Many other states are receiving roughly the same amount of stimulus funds per person despite much higher rates of unemployment.
No wonder that in Virginia, when 47% of the voters listed the economy as their main concern, their vote went to the Republican by a 15% margin.
Sep
18
The Wall Street Journal assesses the effect that rebate stimulus has on consumption with a nifty little chart to accompany it. The upshot: Giving people money does not mean they will spend more.
The blue line represents income following stimulus, the red line consumption and the green line, personal income without stimulus.
It’s an excellent graphical representation that trying to stimulate the economy through personal subsidy does not work. For both Bush’s stimulus and Obama’s the peaks represented in the blue line had little or no effect on consumption which almost exactly mirrors the non-stimulative income track.
Milton Friedman recognised this in 1957. From wikipedia:
The permanent income hypothesis (PIH) is a theory of consumption that was developed by the American economist Milton Friedman. In its simplest form, the hypothesis states that the choices made by consumers regarding their consumption patterns are determined not by current income but by their longer-term income expectations. The key conclusion of this theory is that transitory, short-term changes in income have little effect on consumer spending behavior.
It’s a shame we listen to Keynes and not Friedman on this.
Jul
31
….It all goes horribly wrong. The Cash for Clunkers program that is. This is the program that allows individuals to upgrade their old car to a new one with the aid of a government subsidy. Here is what one Republican Congresswoman, Candice Miller, had to say about Obama’s, and the Democrats, plan:
There can be no doubt that the Cash for Clunkers program is a complete success given the fact that the entire $1 billion allocated to the program was expended in less than a week.”
She called the program “simply the most stimulative $1 billion the federal government has spent during the entire economic downturn.”
How is that for effusive praise. However…
The Obama administration is telling lawmakers that its much-touted “cash-for-clunkers” program is already running out of money, according to three Senate aides familiar with the discussions.
The program — aimed at giving at boost to the U.S. auto industry — was supposed to expire at the end of October. But in the one week since it took effect, it appears to have run dry of the $1 billion allocated to it, aides said Thursday.
Read more: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0709/25638.html#ixzz0MpBBIJUb
So the genius’ in charge budgeted $1 billion for a stimulative program that worked, and $787 billion on a whole bunch of programs that didn’t.
Rightly, the administration are now planning to further fund the project. But as is usual for the left and left leaning, there will be a catch:
We believe that any extension of the ‘Cash for Clunkers’ program must go further in advancing the goals of better fuel efficiency and greater emissions reductions. We will not support any bill that does not meet these goals,” they (Dianne Feinstein & Susan Collins*) said in a statement.
The Democrats have a successful stimulative program. Why can’t they just leave it at that? Why do they always have to invoke some special interest? That’s not what the country is wanting right now, they just want jobs.
* Yes I’m aware Susan Collins is technically a Republican, but as she spends most of her time voting with the Democrats nowadays, I’m happy to lump her in with them.
Jul
20
From Gateway Pundit
Too funny by half