Another Republican Myth Debunked
February 9, 2009 8:38 pm

Bob Cesca:

Devilstower presents a pretty thorough debunking of the very insane Republican lie that the New Deal made the Depression worse. Here's a teaser by way of a graph illustrating U.S. Commerce Department GDP figures:

Wow. The New Deal really was an Epic Fail...

...if you look at the graph upside-down, that is.

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Why Analysts Keep Telling Investors to Buy
February 9, 2009 8:47 pm

By JACK HEALY and MICHAEL M. GRYNBAUM, NYT

.....At the top of the market, they urged investors to buy or hold onto stocks about 95 percent of the time. When stocks stumbled, they stayed optimistic......

......as the Dow and Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index suffered their worst January ever, analysts put a sell rating on a mere 5.9 percent of stocks, according to Bloomberg data......

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Krugman: Sustained Public Good Spending Required to Save American from Deflation
February 11, 2009 9:42 pm

Firedoglake

Krugman spoke at the Thinking Big, Thinking Forward Conference on the economy.

He started by debunking the idea that this isn't as bad as the 82 recession because the US hasn't lost as many jobs, first quipping "just wait a couple months" then noting something more important: the 82 recession was caused by the Fed. We knew what caused it and we knew how to end it. It was ugly, but it was something we could fix.

This downturn was caused by factors we still don't entirely understand, the Fed can't end it with normal monetary policy because rates can't go below effective zero and while other policies might work, we don't know for sure what they are or how to do them.

His fear is that deflation might set in permanently, as people's expectations of lower prices and wages become set and as a result they keep spending and investing less and less. While we may not know exactly what will work, especially because of the financial component, the best tool in the toolbox to stop deflation remains Keynesian stimulus spending.

The best type of Keynesian stimulus spending is sustained (there must be an expectation that it will continue for some years) and on public goods like infrastructure, education, research and so on. This sort of public spending peaked under Eisenhower.

Since Reagan it's been at about only 2%, and that has left a huge deficit in public spending, which has shown up in education statistics, collapsing bridges, declining research, lousy broadband and a transportation network which is falling apart. Krugman argued, therefore for multi-year spending on public goods as the primary stimulus method.

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Krugman: Economy 2.0
February 13, 2009 11:31 am

AFL CIO blog

Krugman added that the one thing conservative opponents of the stimulus legislation fear the most is that when the economy recovers, people will look back at the government programs and say they were a good thing. And that would reverse the mantra of the past 30 years that "less government is better government."

"We have spent 30 years shortchanging public investment in the name of ‘government is bad’ - 30 years shortchanging the things government can do to make us richer and our lives better."

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Looting Social Security
February 13, 2009 2:02 pm

thenation.com - A self-righteous billionaire spending his fortune to save the nation from the elderly is leading an effort that would misappropriate the trillions in Social Security taxes that workers have paid to finance their retirement benefits. This swindle is portrayed as "fiscal reform" to pay the cost of bailing out the banks. In fact, it's the political equivalent of bait-and-switch fraud.

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Repeat this Over and Over
February 14, 2009 1:31 pm

GOP Votes Against Biggest Middle-Class Tax Cut In History

Repeat, repeat, repeat. Why are the Republicans against tax cuts for the middle class?

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Media Matters: Putting the "partisan" in "bipartisanship"
February 14, 2009 6:56 pm

by Jamison Foser

If there was any doubt that the news media have a badly skewed understanding of "bipartisanship" -- one in which no number of concessions from Democrats is enough and no number from Republicans is too little -- the reaction to Judd Gregg's decision to back out of becoming Barack Obama's commerce secretary should put the matter to rest.

Even before the Gregg announcement, the flaws in the media's fetishization of bipartisanship had been on display for weeks.

Most striking has been the bizarre notion that bipartisanship is an essential end in and of itself, rather than a means to an end. When the House of Representatives passed a stimulus bill two weeks ago, ABC's The Note led not with an analysis of the content of the legislation, but with President Obama's purported failure to win a single Republican vote. (Note that the failure of bipartisanship was not portrayed as a bipartisan failing; it was Obama's alone. But we'll get back to that shortly.)

That was typical of reporting in the days before the vote, which was at its most absurd when NBC's Chuck Todd asked White House press secretary Robert Gibbs if Obama would veto a bill that lacked Republican support. In the midst of an economic crisis unlike any we've seen in decades, the news media think the most important thing is not that the government take strong, successful action to help the economy -- and the millions of Americans who are struggling -- recover. No, they think the most important thing is for Democrats and Republicans to play nicely together.......

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The change we need
February 14, 2009 7:25 pm

After eight long, tiresome years, President Al Gore won't be missed. Even if he did save the planet

TA Frank

No one thought Al Gore would be a loveable president, but, after eight years in the White House, he has gotten truly tiresome. The droning voice, the purchase of an eco-friendly robot dog, the campaign for carbon-free diamonds - all these things were hard to take, and he has been way too smug about reversing global warming. I think we've gone too far in the opposite direction, especially in light of the glacier that recently crushed Wasilla.

I think I started to dislike Gore when he stirred up a media storm after the Feds broke up the terrorist ring conspiring to fly airplanes into buildings back in 2001. He could have let it pass quietly, as Bill Clinton did with the millennium plot arrests in 2000. Instead, Gore held a press conference to milk it for political gain and scare us into a 15 cent per gallon gas tax. But who can afford to pay over a dollar and a half per gallon? No wonder we're resorting to electric cars these days.

And why did he pressure the universally admired Fed chairman Alan Greenspan to step down early in 2002? Replacing him with that old warhorse Paul Volcker was a nasty surprise, especially when Volcker choked off a promising housing boom in 2002 and imposed old, outdated regulations on lenders. Some properties lost as much as 8% of their value that year. Now housing prices are rising really slowly, and GDP barely grew by 3% this year.

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When Robber Barons Cry Generational Theft
February 14, 2009 10:57 pm

Michael Connery's blog

.....While I'm touched by the GOP's new-found concern for our youth, I'm curious as to why such concerns never materialized over the last 8 years as a Republican President turned record budget surpluses into the worst deficit in American history. President Bush achieved that legacy - aided by Rep Boehner and Senator McCain - by failing to invest in American infrastructure, turning a blind eye to the self-destructive practices of Wall Street and the banks, and championing massive tax cuts for the rich such that economic disparity in America is now greater than it has been at any time since The Gilded Age. Forgive me if I find it disingenuous that two figureheads of the party that turned a blind eye to Bush's tax cuts and spending policies, and enabled this new "Gilded Age," are now crying "generational theft.".....

.......The facts of the matter are simple. We're facing the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, and the question on the minds of most economists isn't "how big will the deficits be," rather, it's "will the stimulus be big enough to plug the gaping holes in our economy." The economic recovery package isn't $800 billion in pork or wasteful spending, rather it is a stop-gap to save jobs, and a mid- to long-term investment in the future our citizens, our infrastructure, and our economy........

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SNL Republican Meeting Mocked In Opening Skit, Dan Akroyd Guest Stars
February 15, 2009 8:45 am

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We've cut our way into this crisis
February 15, 2009 1:34 pm

What is true in Kansas is true nationwide:

Steve Rose

We have met the enemy, and man, is it us. Kansas is faced with a crushing $300 million deficit this year, followed by a gargantuan billion dollar deficit in 2010.Schools, universities, highways, virtually every program run by the state will get slashed. And the state will dump more and more of the costs on local governments, who themselves are already in a bind. Sure, the recession knocked our revenues for a loop. But, more important, we knocked ourselves for a loop by cutting and cutting and cutting taxes over the past 15 years. We have had a wild tax-cutting orgy. We slashed property taxes, which used to be the main source of income for schools.
Automobile property taxes were cut in half.
We phased out the franchise tax.
We eliminated the tax on machinery and equipment.
We reduced corporate income taxes.
We are phasing out the estate tax.

Had enough? There’s more. Lots more. But I think I’ve made my point. What has all this cutting cost us? I have done some homework. Or rather, I had it done for me. A friend who serves in the Legislature asked the state’s research team to figure out how much all the costs of all the tax cuts have totaled since 1995.

The cumulative impact on Kansas, the study finds, is a loss of $7.6 billion in revenue during that period. We are now losing about $600 million a year from tax cuts. That would have put us in the black this coming year and go a long way toward reducing the billion dollar budget forecast in the following year.

This is a right-winger’s dream come true. By cutting taxes without regard to impact, the knuckleheads are rejoicing as Kansas is dismantled. They are glad school funding will be cut. They must be thrilled that our universities, once again, will be forced to raise tuition to cover losses in state aid. They must be doing handstands over the slashing of our highway budget. And our social programs, like Medicaid for the poor? The tax-cutting zealots are overjoyed to see worthy programs like that shrink......

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