The Republi-CON 'Regular Order' Budget CON

UPDATE:  "Republicans don’t want to enter into conference negotiations over the budget (even though they had previously insisted on 'regular order' for a long time). Instead, Ryan wants a pre-conference agreement before regular conference negotiations. He gives a bunch of procedural reasons for this, such as the fact that if conference negotiations fail, the House minority has the authority to force Republicans to take uncomfortable votes (on so called 'motions to instruct'). . .

The simple fact of the matter here is that Republicans are not willing to enter into negotiations over the budget unless they can use the threat of crashing the economy to get more of they want. . .

At the same time, it’s politically problematic to openly admit they are only willing to enter into negotiations in which they can avail themselves of the threat of something as destructive as default to maximize their leverage. So Ryan is forced into the above contortions to explain the Republicans’ strategy — or, more accurately, their lack of any coherent strategy."

Read the Washington Post, Paul Ryan admits GOP can’t govern without a hostage crisis.

Republi-cons have "spent years calling for a return to 'regular order' in which the House writes a budget, the Senate writes a budget, and the two chambers move to a conference committee to hash out their differences. This year, for the first time since 2009, Senate Democrats wrote and passed a full budget, shepherding it to passage through an open amendment process. Now various Senate Republicans are blocking the move towards conference — blocking, in other words, the move towards the regular order they demanded."

Read  the Washington Post, GOP moderates feud with conservatives over stall tactics on budget. 

Hoodwicked by the Hoodie??

UPDATE V:  It's been more than a year since the killing, and the trial starts in two weeks.  As part of his defense, Zimmerman wants to smear Martin's name.  He better watch out, character assassination cuts both ways.

Read the Washington Post, George Zimmerman’s relevant past, which notes that "over the course of eight years, Zimmerman made at least 46 calls to the Sanford (Fla.) Police Department reporting suspicious activity involving black males." His cousin is also quoted as saying "'I know George. And I know that he does not like black people.'"

UPDATE IV: It appears that "[w]hat is likely is that both men scared each other for different reasons, and one tragically overreacted." Read the Washington Post, Fear and bloodshed in Florida.


UPDATE III: What happened that night?

Watch as "Tracy Martin, Trayvon's father, details what the detectives told him about George Zimmerman's account of his son's fatal shooting" at the Washington Post, Trayvon Martin's father: What the police told me:

Also see an interactive article that summarizes the evidence known at The New York Times, The Events Leading to the Shooting of Trayvon Martin.

UPDATE II: Although I think there is much to discuss about the shooting of Trayvon Martin, the way that it was discussed yesterday on WEBY's Your Turn program by the owner of the radio station was inexcusable, with attacks on Obama as a 'race pimp' for his comments on the matter.

From Politico, Obama: 'If I had a son, he'd look like Trayvon', watch what Obama said in response to a question about the shooting:



As the article notes "Obama [had] come under fire from some black leaders for failing to comment on a case that has become a major national story — and brought thousands of Americans into the streets for demonstrations calling for the arrest of Martin's shooter. . .

The president was careful not to comment too extensively on an active investigation on both the federal and state levels, noting that as head of the executive branch, the Department of Justice reports to him."

This wasn't Mike's first inexcusable attack on Obama.

Mike's comments yesterday were a poor attempt to use fear, anger and hatred to pander to worst element of the Republican Party.

I challenge Mike to play Obama's comments and explain why those comments justify the label 'race pimp.' If he is unable to do so, Mike owes the WEBY family an apology for his show yesterday.


UPDATE: It should be noted that the account of the incident in the Orlando Sentinel is "entirely at odds with the account of Martin’s girlfriend, who says Martin was talking to her on his cell phone just before his death. The girlfriend says she heard Martin ask a man, 'What are you following me for,' and that the man answered, 'What are you doing here?' Then she heard Martin pushed to the ground." Read Slate, Can We Trust the Cops’ New Account of Trayvon Martin’s Killing?

Hoodwink means: "1. To take in by deceptive means; deceive. See Synonyms at deceive. 2. Archaic To blindfold. 3. Obsolete To conceal."

Has the media hoodwinked the public regarding the Trayvon Martin case?

Read the Orlando Sentinel, Police: Zimmerman says Trayvon decked him with one blow then began hammering his head, which is only now reporting that Zimmerman "had turned around and was walking back to his SUV when Trayvon approached him from behind, the two exchanged words then Trayvon punched him in the nose, sending him to the ground, and began beating him." The article also states that was "the account Zimmerman gave police, and much of it has been corroborated by witnesses, authorities say."

For Heavy Thinkers

From an email:

1 - I'd kill for a Nobel Peace Prize.
2 - Borrow money from pessimists -- they don't expect it back.
3 - Half the people you know are below average.
4 - 99% of lawyers give the rest a bad name.
5 - 82.7% of all statistics are made up on the spot.
6 - A conscience is what hurts when all your other parts feel so good.
7 - A clear conscience is usually the sign of a bad memory.
8 - If you want the rainbow, you got to put up with the rain.
9 - All those who believe in psycho kinesis, raise my hand.
10 - The early bird may get the worm, but the second mouse gets the cheese.
11 - I almost had a psychic girlfriend,  But she left me before we met.
12 - OK, so what's the speed of dark?
13 - How do you tell when you're out of invisible ink?
14 - If everything seems to be going well, you have obviously overlooked something.
15 - Depression is merely anger without enthusiasm.
16 - When everything is coming your way, you're in the wrong lane.
17 - Ambition is a poor excuse for not having enough sense to be lazy.
18 - Hard work pays off in the future; laziness pays off now.
19 - I intend to live forever.  So far, so good.
20 - If Barbie is so popular, why do you have to buy her friends?
21 - Eagles may soar, but weasels don't get sucked into jet engines.
22 - What happens if you get scared half to death twice?
23 - My mechanic told me, "I couldn't repair your brakes, so I made your horn louder."
24 - Why do psychics have to ask you for your name.
25 - If at first you don't succeed, destroy all evidence that you tried.
26 - A conclusion is the place where you got tired of thinking.
27 - Experience is something you don't get until just after you need it.
28 - The hardness of the butter is proportional to the softness of  the bread.
29 - To steal ideas from one person is plagiarism; to steal from many is research.
30 - The problem with the gene pool is that there is no lifeguard.
31 - The sooner you fall behind, the more time you'll have to catch up.
32 - The colder the x-ray table, the more of your body is required to be on it.
33 - Everyone has a photographic memory; some just don't have film.
34 - If at first you don't succeed, skydiving is not for you. 
And the all-time favorite -
35 - If your car could travel at the speed of light, would your headlights work?

Baracknophobia aka Obama Derangment Syndrome

UPDATE III:  With foolish talk of impeachment, will 2014 be Republi-con déjà 1998 vu all over again?

Read Bloomberg, 'Obama Scandals' Could Actually Hurt Republicans.  

UPDATE II:  That old Republi-con 'blind rage' continues, they "are so focused on their bitter battles against Obama, they can’t see how little impact the 'scandals' have had on public opinion."

Read National Journal, Republicans’ Hatred of Obama Blinds Them to Public Disinterest in Scandals, which notes: "Red-faced Republicans, circling and preparing to pounce on a second-term Democratic president they loathe, do not respect, and certainly do not fear. Sound familiar? Perhaps reminiscent of Bill Clinton’s second term, after the Monica Lewinsky story broke? During that time, Republicans became so consumed by their hatred of Clinton and their conviction that this event would bring him down that they convinced themselves the rest of the country was just as outraged by his behavior as they were. By the way, what was Clinton’s lowest Gallup job-approval rating in his second term, throughout the travails of investigations and impeachment? It was 53 percent. The conservative echo machine had worked itself into such a frenzy, the GOP didn’t realize that the outrage was largely confined to the ranks of those who never voted for Clinton anyway."
 
Without fear, anger and hatred, where would the Republi-cons be.

 UPDATE:   "Welcome to the Obama Haters Book Club—a parallel universe of fear mongering for fun and profit. 

 Over the past four years, no less than 89 obsessively anti-Obama books have been published, as now catalogued by The Daily Beast. I’m not talking about cool statements of policy difference, but overheated and often unhinged screeds painting a picture of the president as a dangerous radical hell-bent on undermining the Republic by any means necessary. It is hate and hyper-partisan paranoia masquerading as high-minded patriotism.

Here’s the worst part—this steady drumbeat of incitement is having an impact on this presidential election because it has poisoned the well of civic discourse for many voters and those in their radius of damage. It has helped divide the nation beyond reason, distorting the president’s real record beyond all recognition.

By their very nature, books offer the promise of education and enlightenment. These conspiracy entrepreneurs prey on the prejudices of their audience."

Read The Daily Beast, The Obama Haters Book Club, The Canon Swells.
Like our local Pastor Egomaniacal (AKA Pastor 2+2 Does Not = 4, Pastor Dred Scott, Resident Pastor-to-the-Dictators, Pastor Truthiness, and Pastor Poppins), his friends at WND just can't admit that Obama was re-elected.  Read USA Today, No, Obama can't be stopped at the Electoral College. 

The Republi-CON Government and Household Debt CONparison

"A government does not have a life cycle, does not ever expect to stop generating income to support itself, and, therefore, does not ever have to retire its debt. It must keep its debts at a manageable size relative to the economy, which the U.S. has done over that 60 year period. If the economy is growing over the long term, that means the government can run a deficit and grow the debt every year -- sustainably. . .

If the recent expansion of the public debt is a matter of overriding economic concern, why is Boehner so resolutely opposed to tax increases to pay it down? America’s economy has thrived under a variety of tax policies, including much higher top marginal tax rates than are in effect today. Shouldn’t Boehner be willing to accept tax increases, or perhaps even be eager for them, in order to fight the debt menace he cites?

Boehner doesn’t really care about the public debt, as he made clear when he repeatedly supported debt-expanding measures under a Republican president. What Boehner and House Republicans really want are excuses to cut federal spending, particularly on programs such as Medicaid and food stamps that support low-income Americans. But those cuts are unpopular, so Republicans frame fiscal debate to make such cuts appear necessary to avoid disaster."

Read Bloomberg, Boehner Accidentally Explains Why His Deficit Position Is Phony. 

The article includes a chart showing the growth of "the net debts of Wal-Mart Stores, Inc. They have soared -- up 5,760 percent since 1987. By comparison, the roughly 600 percent rise in the U.S. public debt over the same period looks restrained. Is Wal-Mart mad? How long can it go on just borrowing and borrowing and borrowing?

The answer is 'as long as Wal-Mart keeps growing.' The white line shows Wal-Mart’s ratio of debt to earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization. And what that shows is that Wal-Mart’s debts have been rising to keep pace with its growing earnings. Similarly, for six decades U.S. government debt has been rising roughly in line with the growth of the economy. Over the last few years, it’s grown a lot faster because of cyclical economic weakness. The proper matter for debate is whether recent deficits are too large -- not whether six decades is too long to run them."

Why Are Republi-CONs Opposed to Immigration? In Order To Protect the 'White Native Population'

The Heritage Foundation is a CONservative think tank. 

It "made something of a splash with its study suggesting that immigration reform will cost the public trillions. Past work by one of its co-authors helps put that piece in context.

Jason Richwine is relatively new to the think tank world. He received his PhD in public policy from Harvard in 2009, and joined Heritage after a brief stay at the American Enterprise Institute. Richwine’s doctoral dissertation is titled 'IQ and Immigration Policy'; the contents are well summarized in the dissertation abstract:

The statistical construct known as IQ can reliably estimate general mental ability, or intelligence. The average IQ of immigrants in the United States is substantially lower than that of the white native population, and the difference is likely to persist over several generations. The consequences are a lack of socioeconomic assimilation among low-IQ immigrant groups, more underclass behavior, less social trust, and an increase in the proportion of unskilled workers in the American labor market. Selecting high-IQ immigrants would ameliorate these problems in the U.S., while at the same time benefiting smart potential immigrants who lack educational access in their home countries.

Richwine’s dissertation asserts that there are deep-set differentials in intelligence between races. While it’s clear he thinks it is partly due to genetics — 'the totality of the evidence suggests a genetic component to group differences in IQ' — he argues the most important thing is that the differences in group IQs are persistent, for whatever reason. He writes, 'No one knows whether Hispanics will ever reach IQ parity with whites, but the prediction that new Hispanic immigrants will have low-IQ children and grandchildren is difficult to argue against.'"

Read the Washington Post, Heritage study co-author opposed letting in immigrants with low IQs.

The Republi-CON Myth of Expansionary Austerity

UPDATE IV:  "The nation’s unemployment rate would probably be nearly a point lower, roughly 6.5 percent, and economic growth almost two points higher this year if Washington had not cut spending and raised taxes as it has since 2011, according to private-sector and government economists.

After two years in which President Obama and Republicans in Congress have fought to a draw over their clashing approaches to job creation and budget deficits, the consensus about the result is clear: Immediate deficit reduction is a drag on full economic recovery."

Read The New York Times, Economists See Deficit Emphasis as Impeding Recovery. 

UPDATE III:  "At this point the economic case for austerity — for slashing government spending even in the face of a weak economy — has collapsed. Claims that spending cuts would actually boost employment by promoting confidence have fallen apart. Claims that there is some kind of red line of debt that countries dare not cross have turned out to rest on fuzzy and to some extent just plain erroneous math. Predictions of fiscal crisis keep not coming true; predictions of disaster from harsh austerity policies have proved all too accurate. . .

And if you look at United States history since World War II, you find that of the 10 presidents who preceded Barack Obama, seven left office with a debt ratio lower than when they came in. Who were the three exceptions? Ronald Reagan and the two George Bushes. So debt increases that didn’t arise either from war or from extraordinary financial crisis are entirely associated with hard-line conservative governments.

And there’s a reason for that association: U.S. conservatives have long followed a strategy of “starving the beast,” slashing taxes so as to deprive the government of the revenue it needs to pay for popular programs.

The funny thing is that right now these same hard-line conservatives declare that we must not run deficits in times of economic crisis. Why? Because, they say, politicians won’t do the right thing and pay down the debt in good times. And who are these irresponsible politicians they’re talking about? Why, themselves."

Read The New York Times, The Chutzpah Caucus. 

UPDATE II:  "Economic debates rarely end with a T.K.O. But the great policy debate of recent years between Keynesians, who advocate sustaining and, indeed, increasing government spending in a depression, and austerians, who demand immediate spending cuts, comes close — at least in the world of ideas. At this point, the austerian position has imploded; not only have its predictions about the real world failed completely, but the academic research invoked to support that position has turned out to be riddled with errors, omissions and dubious statistics.

Yet two big questions remain. First, how did austerity doctrine become so influential in the first place? Second, will policy change at all now that crucial austerian claims have become fodder for late-night comics? . .

Part of the answer surely lies in the widespread desire to see economics as a morality play, to make it a tale of excess and its consequences. We lived beyond our means, the story goes, and now we’re paying the inevitable price. Economists can explain ad nauseam that this is wrong, that the reason we have mass unemployment isn’t that we spent too much in the past but that we’re spending too little now, and that this problem can and should be solved. No matter; many people have a visceral sense that we sinned and must seek redemption through suffering — and neither economic argument nor the observation that the people now suffering aren’t at all the same people who sinned during the bubble years makes much of a dent."

Read The New York Times, The 1 Percent’s Solution.   

UPDATE:  "For three years, the turn to austerity has been presented not as a choice but as a necessity. Economic research, austerity advocates insisted, showed that terrible things happen once debt exceeds 90 percent of G.D.P. But “economic research” showed no such thing; a couple of economists made that assertion, while many others disagreed. Policy makers abandoned the unemployed and turned to austerity because they wanted to, not because they had to."

Read The New York Times, The Excel Depression.  

Another Republi-con myth fails in the real world of factual reality:

"With all the theatrics going on in Washington, you might well have missed the most important political and economic news of the week: an official confirmation from the United Kingdom that austerity policies don’t work.

In making his annual Autumn Statement to the House of Commons on Wednesday, George Osborne, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, was forced to admit that his government has failed to meet a series of targets it set for itself back in June of 2010, when it slashed the budgets of various government departments by up to thirty per cent. Back then, Osborne said that his austerity policies would cut his country’s budget deficit to zero within four years, enable Britain to begin relieving itself of its public debt, and generate healthy economic growth. None of these things have happened. Britain’s deficit remains stubbornly high, its people have been suffering through a double-dip recession, and many observers now expect the country to lose its 'AAA' credit rating."

Read The New Yorker, It’s Official: Austerity Economics Doesn’t Work.

As you may remember, the myth of expansionary austerity has been the subject of numerous posts over the past several years.

America's New Religion: Market Capitolism (Pun Intended)

"Some say the moral failing at the heart of market triumphalism was greed, which led to irresponsible risk-taking. The solution, according to this view, is to rein in greed, insist on greater integrity and responsibility among bankers and Wall Street executives, and enact sensible regulations to prevent a similar crisis from happening again.

This is, at best, a partial diagnosis. While it is certainly true that greed played a role in the financial crisis, something bigger was and is at stake. The most fateful change that unfolded during the past three decades was not an increase in greed. It was the reach of markets, and of market values, into spheres of life traditionally governed by nonmarket norms. To contend with this condition, we need to do more than inveigh against greed; we need to have a public debate about where markets belong—and where they don’t. . .

Consider, for example, the proliferation of for-profit schools, hospitals, and prisons, and the outsourcing of war to private military contractors. (In Iraq and Afghanistan, private contractors have actually outnumbered U.S. military troops.) Consider the eclipse of public police forces by private security firms—especially in the U.S. and the U.K., where the number of private guards is almost twice the number of public police officers.

Or consider the pharmaceutical companies’ aggressive marketing of prescription drugs directly to consumers, a practice now prevalent in the U.S. but prohibited in most other countries. (If you’ve ever seen the television commercials on the evening news, you could be forgiven for thinking that the greatest health crisis in the world is not malaria or river blindness or sleeping sickness but an epidemic of erectile dysfunction.)

Consider too the reach of commercial advertising into public schools, from buses to corridors to cafeterias; the sale of “naming rights” to parks and civic spaces; the blurred boundaries, within journalism, between news and advertising, likely to blur further as newspapers and magazines struggle to survive; the marketing of “designer” eggs and sperm for assisted reproduction; the buying and selling, by companies and countries, of the right to pollute; a system of campaign finance in the U.S. that comes close to permitting the buying and selling of elections.

These uses of markets to allocate health, education, public safety, national security, criminal justice, environmental protection, recreation, procreation, and other social goods were for the most part unheard-of 30 years ago. Today, we take them largely for granted."

Read The Atlantic, What Isn’t for Sale?

The Afghanistan-CON

"And so it turns out, the war in Afghanistan has been an even bigger mug’s game than we imagined. The latest blow comes from a story by Matthew Rosenberg in the April 28 New York Times, reporting that, for the past decade, the CIA has been dropping off bags of cash—now totaling tens of millions of dollars—at the office of Afghan President Hamid Karzai, who in turn has passed it around to his cronies and favored warlords.

This is a very big deal, much more than most scandals about secret payoffs and bribes. It suggests that, in a crucial way, the war was a sham from the get-go, that the conditions for success would never—could never—be fulfilled, and that our own actions helped ensure our failure. . .

[A U.S. Army study] laid bare two important facts about the war. First, the U.S. and Afghan governments did not share the same interests. The American strategy required Karzai to reform, in order to enhance his legitimacy and thus dry up support for the Taliban; Karzai’s strategy was to stay in power, which required payoffs to a network of cronies.

Second, because of this tension, the American strategy’s two goals—to secure the Afghan people from the Taliban and to help reform the Afghan government—were themselves incompatible, or at least in constant tension with each other. For instance, the first goal sometimes required us to pay local security forces, i.e., warlords. This boosted corruption and alienated the population, which worked against the second goal.

This was known all along, certainly by McChrystal and Petraeus, who saw the dynamic of corruption—how it was interwoven with the nature and structure of Karzai’s regime—as their biggest challenge.

But now the Times story tells us that the CIA was stiffening this challenge by providing Karzai with the money to keep the network rolling.

The money was self-defeating in another way. By seeing how much money the Americans were willing to pay just to keep him in power and to support the U.S. mission, Karzai must have inferred that the war was at least as important to them as it was to him—maybe more so. As a result, when McChrystal, Petraeus, and other top U.S. officials made noises about reform, he had good reason to doubt their sincerity. Their own CIA, after all, was bankrolling the corruption; they couldn’t be too serious in their demands to end it.

Which raises a question that some congressional committee might want to probe: How deep, how high, did the complicity with Afghan corruption go? Was this a CIA rogue operation, or did everyone know about it, and, if the latter, did anyone in a position of power see—or say anything about—the contradiction between pushing for reform and abetting corruption? How seriously did the people in charge take this war?"

Read Slate, Feeding the Hand That Bites. 

So Many Republi-CON Lies, So Little Integrity, ObamaCare Edition

If a Republi-con says something that "sounds unbelievable, it’s because it is."

Read the Washington Post, No, Congress isn’t trying to exempt itself from Obamacare. and Congress isn’t giving itself special treatment on Obamacare. It’s giving itself special punishment.

So many lies, so little time to refudiate.

Refuse to Be Afraid

Q:  "What should people be thinking about in the aftermath of an attack like this?"

A: "They should refuse to be terrorized. Terrorism is a crime against the mind. What happened in Boston, horrific as it is, is theater to make you scared. That’s the point. The message of terrorist attacks is you’re not safe, and the government can’t protect you — that the existing power structure can’t protect you.

I tell people if it’s in the news, don’t worry about it. By definition, news is something that almost never happens. The brain fools you into thinking the news is what’s important. Our brains overreact to this stuff. Terrorism just pegs the fear button. . .

This is a singular event, and not something that should drive policy. Unfortunately, you can’t prevent this sort of thing 100 percent. Luckily, terrorism is a lot harder than people think, and it happens rarely. The question people asked after 9/11 is what if we had three of these a year in the United States? Turns out there were none. People get their ideas on terrorism from movies and television. . .

The damage from terrorism is primarily emotional. To the extent this terrorist attack succeeds has very little do with the attack itself. It’s all about our reaction. We must refuse to be terrorized. Imagine if the bombs were found and moved at the last second, and no one died, but everyone was just as scared. The terrorists would have succeeded anyway. If you are scared, they win. If you refuse to be scared, they lose, no matter how much carnage they commit."

Read the Washington Post, 'If you are scared, they win. If you refuse to be scared, they lose.'

Finally, Calling the Republi-CON Bluff and Breaking the Republi-CON Fever

UPDATE IV:  "It’s time to entertain the possibility that President Obama is a right-wing extremist. After all, look at where he’s taking the country over his second term. . .

His budget should put to rest those crazy claims that he is some sort of Norwegian socialist."

Read The New York Times, Bold on Both Ends.

UPDATE III:  The Republi-cons are lying again, but what's new.  Read The Atlantic, Reality Check: Obama Cuts Social Security and Medicare by Much More Than the GOP. 

UPDATE II:  "If the White House’s political goal in calling for Social Security cuts in its budget was to reveal the GOP as the intransigent, uncompromising party in Washington, it’s having the desired effect."

Read the Washington Post, GOP leaders: By all means, cut Social Security, but don’t tax the rich. 

UPDATE:  "Over these last few months, the White House has been engaged in a systematic effort to call the GOP’s various bluffs. . .

This budget sets up that debate. Republicans are, at this point, out of excuses. They can’t say the president isn’t reaching out to them. They can’t say he’s not willing to make painful concessions — or, to rephrase, they can say that, but given all the on-the-record quotes of Republican leaders demanding the White House accept means-testing Medicare and chained-CPI, no one will take them seriously. The White House is calling their bluff. The question is whether, as the pressure mounts, they double down against compromise, or they begin to fold."

Read the Washington Post, Obama’s budget calls the GOP’s bluffs. 

For years I've suggested calling the Republi-con bluff.  And that may be the focus of Obama's second term.

"The president's hard line on the Bush tax cuts represents the first major test case for his theory that the GOP 'fever' can be broken in his second term." Read The Atlantic, Obama Won't Play That Way, Fiscal Cliff Edition, which notes of Obama:  "Goodbye, conciliator. Hello, Mr. Tough Love."

And you might remember, almost a year ago I discussed 'the GOP's dual trigger nightmare' (now commonly called the 'fiscal cliff') and asked: Did Obama Con the Republi-CONs?   So it appears that Obama has been planning this little show down for some time.

The Republi-CON 'Obama Phone' Myth

A "28-year-old federal program known as Lifeline . . . was begun not by President Obama but under Ronald Reagan. It expanded to include cellphone service during the presidency of another Republican, George W. Bush."

Read the Washington Post, 'Obama phones' subsidy program draws new scrutiny on the Hill. 

The Great Keynesian Experiment

Will it result in industrial growth on the back of a weaker currency, an improving economy and deficit picture, and "a goldilocks economy of prices rising about 2 percent a year and debt to GDP levels coming down", or the mother of all sovereign debt crises?

Read the Washington Post, Why Japan is the most interesting story in global economics right now. 

Watch What You Wish For, You Might Lose Your Job, The Sequester Edition

UPDATE IV:  The March jobs reports shouldn't surprise anyone, it's Republi-con déjà vu, 1930s edition, all over again.  Read The New York Times, The Urge to Purge, which begins:

When the Great Depression struck, many influential people argued that the government shouldn’t even try to limit the damage. According to Herbert Hoover, Andrew Mellon, his Treasury secretary, urged him to 'Liquidate labor, liquidate stocks, liquidate the farmers. ... It will purge the rottenness out of the system.' Don’t try to hasten recovery, warned the famous economist Joseph Schumpeter, because “artificial stimulus leaves part of the work of depressions undone.”

Like many economists, I used to quote these past luminaries with a certain smugness. After all, modern macroeconomics had shown how wrong they were, and we wouldn’t repeat the mistakes of the 1930s, would we?

How naïve we were. It turns out that the urge to purge — the urge to see depression as a necessary and somehow even desirable punishment for past sins, while inveighing against any attempt to mitigate suffering — is as strong as ever. Indeed, Mellonism is everywhere these days. Turn on CNBC or read an op-ed page, and the odds are that you won’t see someone arguing that the federal government and the Federal Reserve are doing too little to fight mass unemployment. Instead, you’re much more likely to encounter an alleged expert ranting about the evils of budget deficits and money creation, and denouncing Keynesian economics as the root of all evil.

Now, the fact is that these ranters have been wrong about everything, at every stage of the crisis, while the Keynesians have been mostly right. Remember how federal deficits were supposed to cause soaring interest rates? Never mind: After four years of such warnings, rates remain near historic lows — just as Keynesians predicted. Remember how running the printing presses was going to cause runaway inflation? Since the recession began, the Fed has more than tripled the size of its balance sheet, but inflation has averaged less than 2 percent.

But the Mellonites just keep coming . . . [demanding] liquidationism, with a strong goldbug streak. . .

But that prescription is, of course, anathema to Mellonites, who wrongly see it as more of the same policies that got us into this trap. And that, in turn, tells you why liquidationism is such a destructive doctrine: by turning our problems into a morality play of sin and retribution, it helps condemn us to a deeper and longer slump.

The bad news is that sin sells. Although the Mellonites have, as I said, been wrong about everything, the notion of macroeconomics as morality play has a visceral appeal that’s hard to fight. Disguise it with a bit of political cross-dressing, and even liberals can fall for it.

But they shouldn’t. Mellon was dead wrong in the 1930s, and his avatars are dead wrong today. Unemployment, not excessive money printing, is what ails us now — and policy should be doing more, not less. "

If ya forgot, Hoover was a Republican.  

UPDATE III:  The March jobs report was "is a terrible, horrible, no-good, very bad jobs report." Read the Washington Post, Today’s jobs report is a disaster. But why?

As first predicted two months ago, 'sequester will sock a vulnerable economy.'

Too late for the election, but all part of the Republi-con effort to tank the economy. 

UPDATE II:  "Partisan gridlock is the law of the land for the foreseeable future. . .

In short, if you think this is as bad as things can get, just wait awhile."

Read the Washington Post, After the sequestration stalemate, things will only get worse.

UPDATE: "It may be hard to believe, given the intense partisan strafing already ignited by the automatic government spending cuts that begin on Friday, but this year’s budget wars have yet to get fully under way.

In the next month, Democrats and Republicans, so at odds with one another that they are not even negotiating to avert the across-the-board cuts set to kick in at the end of the week, will have to find a way to agree on spending levels for the remainder of this year. If they fail, they could risk a government shutdown starting March 27, when the current authorization for spending runs out."

Read The New York Times, Fight Over Spending Cuts a Prelude to Budget Battles Ahead.

As I said at first back in October 2010, there is an old proverb, author unknown: "Be careful what you wish for, you just might get it."

"The federal government, the nation’s largest consumer and investor, is cutting back at a pace exceeded in the last half-century only by the military demobilizations after the Vietnam War and the cold war.

And the turn toward austerity is set to accelerate on Friday if the mandatory federal spending cuts known as sequestration start to take effect as scheduled. Those cuts would join an earlier round of deficit reduction measures passed in 2011 and the wind-down of wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that already have reduced the federal government’s contribution to the nation’s gross domestic product by almost 7 percent in the last two years."

Read The New York Times, Austerity Kills Government Jobs as Cuts to Budgets Loom.

Also read the Washington Post, Sequester will sock a vulnerable economy.

Health Care (Industry) Scare Talk

UPDATE V:  "Turns out it was just the tip of the iceberg."  Read the Washington Post, Readers respond to the $1,206 toenail clipping for more about our fee-for-service health care industrial complex.

UPDATE IV:  The following article, first posted about four years ago, reminded me of the editorial cartoon below about the relationship between the Republi-con party and the health care industry.   Read the Washington Post, The case of the $1,206 toenail clipping.

You might also remember the $1,500 stitches.

UPDATE III:




UPDATE II: How will health care be reformed? For one possibility of what will be accomplished, and how, read The New York Times, You Be Obama.

The article is a good primer on how the "skinny guy with big ears" 'gits r done.'

Also, another interesting point of view from The New York Times, Keeping Them Honest, which argues that health reform will fail without serious cost control, which will require a fundamental change in the way the insurance industry behaves.

And for more on SGWBE, read The New York Times, The Chicago View, which describes Obama's idealistic facade on a realist structure perplexity.


UPDATE: Read The New York Times, Following the Money in the Health Care Debate, and enjoy this editorial cartoon:

Talk again of reforming health care. If you want to continue to spend more and get less than you should, then don't read this informative article describing how one woman’s medical experience in Canada can teach the United States about health care reform at The New York Times, This Time, We Won’t Scare.

If this example is true and typical, then something really is wrong with the American health care industry that puts obscene profit ahead of care.

It is also interesting to note that the Canadian financial industry didn't collapse like it did in the U.S. and Britain. "Canada [is] — a mostly English-speaking country, every bit as much in the American cultural orbit as Britain, but one where Reagan/Thatcher-type financial deregulation never took hold. Sure enough, Canadian banks have been a pillar of stability in the crisis."

Maybe I'll move to Canada, at least it will be temperate as the American energy industry fights sensible environmental regulation.

Can you guess the common theme -- industry doesn't really care about you, only profit. So why have sooooooo many people fallen for the Republi-con-health care industry BS hook, line and sinker? Go figure.

Embracing Your Obligations

"I don’t think we’ve paused sufficiently to celebrate the wonderful recent defeat for the cause of personal freedom. After all, these sorts of defeats don’t happen every day. . .

But last week saw a setback for the forces of maximum freedom. A representative of millions of gays and lesbians went to the Supreme Court and asked the court to help put limits on their own freedom of choice. They asked for marriage.

Marriage is one of those institutions — along with religion and military service — that restricts freedom. Marriage is about making a commitment that binds you for decades to come. It narrows your options on how you will spend your time, money and attention.

Whether they understood it or not, the gays and lesbians represented at the court committed themselves to a certain agenda. They committed themselves to an institution that involves surrendering autonomy. They committed themselves to the idea that these self-restrictions should be reinforced by the state. They committed themselves to the idea that lifestyle choices are not just private affairs but work better when they are embedded in law. . .

[I]f it wins, same-sex marriage will be a victory for the good life, which is about living in a society that induces you to narrow your choices and embrace your obligations."

Read The New York Times, Freedom Loses One.  

The Banksters Still Gamble With the Comfort of Government Guarantees

UPDATE II:  "Financial firms can borrow money . . . more cheaply and with less market scrutiny when they have access to government guarantees of deposit insurance, loans from the Federal Reserve and, ultimately, taxpayer support such as we saw with the Troubled Assets Relief Program in 2008. This safety net was intended to stabilize the financial system by protecting the payments system that transfers money around the country and the world as well as the essential lending that commercial banks provide. But these protections also assure those who lend to banks that they will be repaid regardless of the condition of the bank. Under such circumstances, creditors give the firms a discount on the cost of the funds they borrow.

Things are made more difficult by the fact that the largest financial companies now combine traditional commercial banking with higher-risk activities such as trading so that both their banking and betting activities get access to these government protections and the multibillion-dollar subsidy that comes with them. Using subsidized money to finance the conglomerates’ bets encourages ever-higher levels of debt, risk and interconnectedness not attainable or sustainable in a truly free market. . .

This form of corporate welfare allows the protected giants — those 'too big to fail' — to profit when their subsidized bets pay off, while the safety net acts as a buffer when they lose, shifting much of the cost to the public. For example, the conglomerates can cover — and even double down on — their trading positions for extended periods using insured deposits or discounted loans from the Federal Reserve that come with the commercial bank charter. The subsidy often allows them to stay in the game long enough to win the bet, but it supersizes the loss if the bet should finally fall apart.

This system distorts the market and turns appropriate risk-taking into recklessness. The result is a more concentrated and powerful financial sector — and a more fragile economy."

Read the Washington Post, Stop subsidizing Wall Street.  

UPDATE:  "A couple of years ago, the journalist Nicholas Shaxson published a fascinating, chilling book titled 'Treasure Islands,' which explained how international tax havens — which are also, as the author pointed out, 'secrecy jurisdictions' where many rules don’t apply — undermine economies around the world. Not only do they bleed revenues from cash-strapped governments and enable corruption; they distort the flow of capital, helping to feed ever-bigger financial crises.

One question Mr. Shaxson didn’t get into much, however, is what happens when a secrecy jurisdiction itself goes bust. That’s the story of Cyprus right now. And whatever the outcome for Cyprus itself (hint: it’s not likely to be happy), the Cyprus mess shows just how unreformed the world banking system remains, almost five years after the global financial crisis began. . .

Everyone has seen the damage that runaway bankers can inflict, yet much of the world’s financial business is still routed through jurisdictions that let bankers sidestep even the mild regulations we’ve put in place. Everyone is crying about budget deficits, yet corporations and the wealthy are still freely using tax havens to avoid paying taxes like the little people."

Read The New York Times, Treasure Island Trauma. 

"Can anyone manage a big bank these days? Should anyone try?

Or should we simply conclude that playing in the modern world of derivatives is best left to those whose survival is not critical to the nation’s economy, and who do not benefit from government-backed deposit insurance?

That question is brought to mind by a reading of the fascinating — well, to me, anyway — story of how JPMorgan Chase got into the mess of the London whale trades that dominated the financial news last year, as told in a report by the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations that was released last week. . .

[The report documents the "sheer incompetence and stupidity" that exists with the government backed financial sector.]

Consider the following presentation written by Bruno Iksil, the whale himself, on Jan. 26, 2012, as the losses were growing. He called for executing 'the trades that make sense.'

He proposed to 'sell the forward spread and buy protection on the tightening move,' 'use indices and add to existing position,' 'go long risk on some belly tranches especially where defaults may realize' and 'buy protection on HY and Xover in rallies and turn the position over to monetize volatility.'

That presentation was made to a JPMorgan group called the International Senior Management Group of the Chief Investment Office, which seems to have approved it.

If the proposal does not make sense to you, don’t despair. It is largely gibberish."

Read The New York Times, Masked by Gibberish, the Risks Run Amok. 

Bush's Puppet-Master, Bush's War

UPDATE V:  "At the outset of the Iraq war, the Bush administration predicted that it would cost $50 billion to $60 billion to oust Saddam."  

Not even close.

Read the Washington Post, Iraq, Afghan wars will cost to $4 trillion to $6 trillion, Harvard study says.  

This estimate says nothing of the lives lost and shattered.

 

UPDATE IV:  There was another casualty of the Bush's war, a sort of poetic justice.

Read the Wall Street Journal, Can the Republican Party Recover From Iraq?  

UPDATE III:  "We got our war. More to the point, we got Bush’s war, which was, in the end, the only war on offer. There were no weapons of mass destruction. There was little real planning for the occupation, which led to a huge and senseless loss of Iraqi life in a quasi-civil war that we did too little, at first, to stop, and arguably helped start through the misguided process of 'debaathification.'"

Read Bloomberg, Mistakes, Excuses and Painful Lessons From the Iraq War.  

UPDATE II:  "On Feb. 26, 2003, President George W. Bush gave a speech at the American Enterprise Institute, spelling out what he saw as the link between freedom and security in the Middle East. 'A liberated Iraq,' he said, 'can show the power of freedom to transform that vital region” by serving “as a dramatic and inspiring example … for other nations in the region.'

He invaded Iraq three weeks later. The spread of freedom wasn’t the war’s driving motive, but it was considered an enticing side effect, and not just by Bush. His deputy secretary of defense, Paul Wolfowitz, had mused the previous fall that the spark ignited by regime-change 'would be something quite significant for Iraq … It’s going to cast a very large shadow, starting with Syria and Iran, but across the whole Arab world.'

Ten years later, it’s clear that the Iraq war cast 'a very large shadow' indeed, but it was a much darker shadow than the fantasists who ran American foreign policy back then foresaw. Bush believed that freedom was humanity’s natural state: Blow away the manhole-cover that a tyrant pressed down on his people, and freedom would gush forth like a geyser. Yet when Saddam Hussein was toppled, the main thing liberated was the blood hatred that decades of dictatorship had suppressed beneath the surface.

Bush had been warned. . ."

Read Slate, The Coming Collapse of the Middle East?

UPDATE:  "Judgments rendered by history tend to be tentative, incomplete and reversible. More than occasionally, they arrive seasoned with irony. This is especially true when it comes to war, where battlefield outcomes thought to be conclusive often prove anything but.

Rather than yielding peace, victory frequently serves as a prelude to more war. Once opened, wounds fester. Things begun stubbornly refuse to end. As the renowned strategic analyst F. Scott Fitzgerald once observed, 'The victor belongs to the spoils.'"

Read the Washington Post, Ten years after the invasion, did we win the Iraq war?

He was "a misguided powermonger who, in a paranoid spasm, led this nation into an unthinkable calamity."

Read The New York Times, Repent, Dick Cheney. 

You might remember that Cheney 'leaked' a false classified intel report about so-called Iraqi WMDs, then used the leak in press appearances to promote the war.

BTW, today (March 20th) is the 10 year anniversary of that unnecessary war.

Reagan the Marxist Democrat

"The Congressional Progressive Caucus’s new [budget] plan, wrongly written off as softheaded by most of the press, calls for 23 percent of GDP in 2023, with deficits coming in then as small as they were in Ryan’s last two 'conservative' budgets. . .

[I]t can never be said often enough that Ronald Reagan ran government at 22 percent of GDP. This means the long-run spending goal of a caucus seen in Washington as impossibly liberal is just a penny on the national dollar higher than that of a conservative hero. Who knew how close the Gipper was to Karl Marx?"

Read the Washington Post, Lessons from the budget bake-off.