Overall, the above interview is very good. However, Schumer says too blithely that sure there is waste in Medicare. He should never say such things without pointing out that one of the biggest wastes was put in there (probably at the insistence of Replubicans). That waste is the 15% subsidy over the normal cost of Medicare to give incentives to private insurers to take responsibility for the benefits for some Medicare recipients. This wasteful policy (which is a good deal for the recipients so I am enrolled) is called Medicare Advantage.

If the government is going to give some people an unfair advantage and I am qualified, I am going to take it. I play by the rules even when I don’t think the rules are fair. I’d prefer the rules to be changed so that they are fair. I can adjust.

In his blog Grasping Reality with Both Hands: Fair, Balanced, and Reality-Based: The Semi-Daily Journal of Economist Brad DeLong, Brad Delong offers a history lesson for Michell Bachman.

He ends with the statement:

Ms Bachmann can easily correct the record, and sound smart to boot, by insisting on a distinction between those founders who really did fight tirelessly to end slavery and those who fought tirelessly to tilt the young country’s balance of power toward states filled with human chattel who could not vote. And she ought to stop name-checking John Quincy Adams and start agitating for the eternal glory of John Jay. Or Gouverneur Morris. He had a peg leg.

In the debates that have been going on it seems for an eternity about economic policy, two sides of the argument talk about different things like they are talking past each other.  I thought it might be good to create a table that showed the conservative economic policy point with its polar opposite progressive economic policy.

I’ll take suggestions for entries in the table above.

Paul Krugman has a brief post Barack Herbert Hoover Obama that ties together two of his other articles.  In the article he quotes from President Obama’s radio address today.

Government has to start living within its means, just like families do. We have to cut the spending we can’t afford so we can put the economy on sounder footing, and give our businesses the confidence they need to grow and create jobs.

As I have been surmising, President Obama cannot forcefully stand up for the right economic policy for today because he believes in the wrong one himself.  My thesis is that Obama’s mind has been poisoned by the remnants of Milton Friedman that still reside in the University of Chicago where Obama was a professor.

Paul Krugman’s other two articles that he references are Myths of Austerity and Reposted: Sam, Janet, and Debt.

All is lost if President Obama’s idea of the right policy is a watered down version of the Republican’s policy.  Instead as Krugman, Reich, Stiglitz, Kuttner, Tyson, Galbraith, and many other economists have been saying, Obama needs to be pursuing a policy that is almost directly opposite of what the Republicans propose.

In the Presidential campaign, Krugman warned us about Obama.  Krugman favored Hillary Clinton. I thought he was wrong to think Hillary Clinton was a better choice than Barack Obama.  I still think he was wrong.  Bill Clinton understood the economics that Krugman endorses, but I saw no evidence that Hillary Clinton understood the issue at all.  Her weak defenses of liberalized world trade indicated to me that she didn’t have a clue.

It also showed to me that none of Bill Clinton’s understanding of the big picture had gotten through to Hillary.  And why should it have?  For instance, I studied Electrical Engineering for the equivalent of 5 college years.  I spent a 40 year career involving software related to electrical engineering.  Despite Sharon having been married to me throughout my career, I wouldn’t expect her to have the understanding of Electrical Engineering, Software Engineering, and Semiconductor Physics that I do.  I talked a lot about those subjects to her, but she still did not have the experience of it that I did.  On the other hand, although Sharon has talked to me a lot about horticulture, birds, painting, and the art of cooking, I don’t understand any of those topics as well as she does.

Of course the article is really titled 14 Propaganda Techniques Fox “News” Uses to Brainwash Americans.  The author is Dr. Cynthia Boaz, assistant professor of political science at Sonoma State University, where her areas of expertise include quality of democracy, nonviolent struggle, civil resistance and political communication and media.

My curiosity about this question compelled me to sit down and document the most oft-used methods by which willful ignorance has been turned into dogma by Fox News and other propagandists disguised as media. The techniques I identify here also help to explain the simultaneously powerful identification the Fox media audience has with the network, as well as their ardent, reflexive defenses of it.

The good news is that the more conscious you are of these techniques, the less likely they are to work on you. The bad news is that those reading this article are probably the least in need in of it.

You won’t be surprised by what she writes, but you might appreciate her analysis.