As a business man, Romney most certainly would not invest in a new factory to make a product for which there is already an over supply, not enough customers, and many idle factories that could produce that product.  Apparently he thinks we are stupid enough to think that is the way businesses are run.

It’s about time someone started attacking Romney’s insane ideas. I know his plan has been out for less than 24 hours, but the rebuttal shouldn’t be delayed 1 minute. Of course, it is my fault for waiting until Wednesday to post this item that happened last night.

The Rawstory article Robert Reich tears down Mitt Romney’s ‘job machine’ introduces the video below with this description.

University of California professor Robert Reich appeared Tuesday night on MSNBC’s The Last Word to discuss Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney’s job plan. The 59-point plan calls for tax cuts, cuts in the federal workforce and rollbacks in environmental, health and banking rules. Romney called his plan, “A job machine.”

Robert Reich’s call, in the video, for $500 trillion in spending this year must be a slip of the tongue. I am sure he meant $500 billion. There are reports that President Obama will call for $300 billion. He’ll be luck if the Republicans allow $100 billion, and they will insist on offsetting spending cuts. When this totally inadequate effort does not work, they will claim this proves Obama was wrong and that stimulus doesn’t work. Pretty clever ploy, huh?

This is not a dumb ploy on the Republicans’ part, because it always seems to work for them. What is dumb is Obama falling for it once more without making any effort to counter it.

Here is the letter featured in the article Angry House Dems Request Pre-Speech Meeting With Obama.

I have finally read the post Goodbye to All That: Reflections of a GOP Operative Who Left the Cult.

It should have been evident to clear-eyed observers that the Republican Party is becoming less and less like a traditional political party in a representative democracy and becoming more like an apocalyptic cult, or one of the intensely ideological authoritarian parties of 20th century Europe. This trend has several implications, none of them pleasant.

I had seen this article on the truthout.org website for the past 3 days.  I had a little trouble getting into it the first time I started reading it.  When I read about it in the article A Must Read…It’s a cliche…but it’s true…, I decided to give it another try.

It’s long, but it really does lay it all out there.

The article Elizabeth Warren: America’s future depends on jobs on Raw Story has extracted some quotes from the video below.

Harvard Law School professor Elizabeth Warren suggested Monday that she was planning to run for the U.S. Senate during a speech at a breakfast held by the Greater Boston Labor Council.

“America’s future depends on jobs… but we can’t just made jobs out of thin air,” she said. “We need to build the kind of future that creates jobs, and that keeps creating them generation after generation. We need a future of growth and opportunity.”

With a little more practice on the campaign trail, I am sure Elizabeth Warren will polish her delivery style. However, I think she starts with a good set of fundamentals.

I am done predicting how people will do in office. All we can do is elect the people who appear to have all the possibilities and then hope for the best.

I do like her phrase “invest in the future” much better than Obama’s lame “win the future.”

In the video above Joe Romm says that Obama is worse than George Bush on the cancelling of the new EPA smog regulations. Obama seems to be acting like a punch drunk boxer as he stumbles into one haymaker after the other from his opponents. Can he recover before the 15th round or before he loses in a TKO?

Joe Romm is making some of the same points I made in my previous posts Barack Obama, Think Like A President and Obama halts controversial EPA regulation.

You can watch  Obama Previews Jobs Plan in Detroit on C-SPAN’s web site.

To give you a little guidance, Obama appears at about 16 minutes into the video.  He starts his speech at about 17:35.  He talks about his plans for the Thursday speech at about 28:00 minutes into the video.

All I can say is that I wish we had this guy as our current President.  If a guy who behaved like this guy talked were our President, we’d have our economic problems licked in no time.

When this guy gets off the podium, who is it that is in Washington being President?

This guy has to tell the President that this kind of talk can’t be made just once a year.  It has to be an ongoing theme every minute of every day.  There are people trying to counter these ideas every minute of every day.  Part of the President’s job is to make sure that nothing goes unanswered in this fight for the middle-class.

A Jobs Bill: (Not so) Great Expectations by Macroeconomic Advisers LLC concludes:

Temporarily extending the current payroll tax holiday, emergency unemployment benefit, and business tax breaks will temporarily boost GDP and hence employment, albeit modestly. For temporary training programs and hiring incentives to have much impact now, firms must be confident that when the temporary programs and incentives expire, economic conditions will validate the decision to hire earlier rather than later. In today’s economy, there’s certainly no guarantee this will occur. For infrastructure spending to make a big dent in the unemployment rate, it would have to be done rapidly and on a scale that is impossible in today’s political climate. In sum, and disappointing as it may be to unemployed Americans, there simply are limits to what a jobs bill can achieve today.

I am just pessimistic about what Obama will propose.  Macroeconomic Advisers LLC seems to be pessimistic that anything great is even possible.

About the pessimism of infrastructure projects, what comes to mind immediately is that fixing infrastructure that already exists can probably be started much faster than projects to build new infrastructure.

What could Obama have done differently to create jobs and improve the economy? attempts an even handed analysis of the criticisms of Obama’s performance on job creation.  I think it does a fairly good job, but even it falls a little short.

In the article, there is an attempt at giving the President the standard pass on the ineffectiveness of his actions.

But there’s something else worth keeping in mind: Economic shocks like the one we went through with the housing bust and the financial crisis take a long time to recover from.  In a paper written last year for the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City, the economists Carmen and Vincent Reinhart, experts on the history of such crises, concluded that the effects typically linger for around a decade. “Income growth tends to slow and unemployment remains elevated for a very long time after a severe shock,” they wrote, predicting “a lengthy period of retrenchment.”

Where is the analysis of why history has shown that, “Economic shocks like the one we went through with the housing bust and the financial crisis take a long time to recover from.” ?

Perhaps an analysis of that history might show that government had never taken really strong action to try to improve the situation.  I suppose it would be tautological to say that government never took effective action in these situations.  In any case, this history should not be taken as proof that effective action is not possible.

You will be able to judge Obama’s proposals on Thursday.  I buy the story from most economists that the original stimulus plan was too small.  Given an inadequate amount of stimulus the first time around, an even larger stimulus is probably needed this time.  I would bet that Obama’s stimulus plan will call for a smaller stimulus than the last time.  Whatever Congress passes will be significantly smaller than what Obama requests.  Therefore the plan will fail to stimulate the economy.  One thing you can be sure of, that failure will be incorrectly used as proof that stimulus does not work.

Do I get any points if my prediction is borne out?

Another example of the failure of even-handedness is shown in the following excerpt:

President Obama has admitted that few infrastructure projects turned out to be “shovel-ready.”

Frum, by contrast, thinks more of the stimulus should have been devoted to infrastructure projects, and less to things like Pell Grants and individual tax rebates. Assuming there were enough projects that could have been started quickly–something that’s far from clear, as Obama’s concession on “shovel-ready” projects indicates–that approach might have had more impact on unemployment, because those projects create jobs directly. The White House’s recent, belated embrace of an “infrastructure bank” for that purpose suggests that the president and his advisers might agree.

In fact, the initial infrastructure stimulus did have the desired effect, but then the money ran out.  Had the program been larger and properly phased in, after running out of the initial shovel-ready projects, more projects could have become shovel-ready in time to prevent the relapse. This is another example of what could have been the lesson learned from history instead of the standard one being promulgated by this article.

As I pointed out in the previous post Roll Back the Reagan Tax Cuts,

I think it was Nassim Nicholas Taleb who pointed out that it is one thing to note some historical behavior, but quite another to postulate that you know the reason why it happened.

What I’d like to see is a list of the possible explanations for the observed behavior.  Then an indication of what analysis was done to rule out or rule in each alternative.

Robert Reich has posted Why Inequality Is the Real Cause of Our Ongoing Terrible Economy on his blog.  He starts the post with these paragraphs.

THE 5 percent of Americans with the highest incomes now account for 37 percent of all consumer purchases, according to the latest research from Moody’s Analytics. That should come as no surprise. Our society has become more and more unequal.

When so much income goes to the top, the middle class doesn’t have enough purchasing power to keep the economy going without sinking ever more deeply into debt — which, as we’ve seen, ends badly. An economy so dependent on the spending of a few is also prone to great booms and busts. The rich splurge and speculate when their savings are doing well. But when the values of their assets tumble, they pull back. That can lead to wild gyrations. Sound familiar?

The economy won’t really bounce back until America’s surge toward inequality is reversed.  …

These are ideas from his book “Aftershock: The Next Economy and America’s Future” For copyright reasons, I was unable to quote from his book in my previous blog post.

Dark Matter Is an Illusion, New Antigravity Theory Says is a great article for the physicists and physicophiles in my audience.  According to the opening of the article:

The mysterious substance known as dark matter may actually be an illusion created by gravitational interactions between short-lived particles of matter and antimatter, a new study says.

You’ll have to read the article to understand what the new theory proposes. I like the sound of this theory and am rooting for it to be proved.

For background on this topic, see my previous post, Dark Matter and Dark Energy.

MardyS has provided a link to a more accurate explanation Dark matter may be an illusion caused by the quantum vacuum.

Before I received the above link, I was suspicious of the explanation in the National Geographic article:

According to quantum field theory, this sudden snapping to order of electric dipoles, called polarization, generates a secondary electric field that combines with and strengthens the first field.

I did a little review of my electricity and magnetism and had already concluded that the more accurate description in the second article would be the correct one.  I was so pleased to have the confirmation that, though I have retired, I have not forgotten everything I knew about electrical engineering.

As Hajdukovic explains, the effect of the stronger gravitational field can be understood by looking at what happens when an electric field rather than a gravitational field causes polarization. He gives an example of a dielectric slab being inserted into a parallel plate capacitor, which results in a decrease in the electric field between the plates. The decrease is due to the fact that the electric charges of opposite sign attract each other. But if the electric charges of opposite sign were repulsive instead of attractive, then the electric field would increase. Back to the quantum vacuum scenario, since the gravitational charges of opposite sign are repulsive, the strength of the gravitational field increases.

You always have to be a little suspicious of articles in the popular press that purport to explain scientific matters.

Ever since the day that I woke up, weighed myself, had a cup of tea, and weighed myself again, I have believed in anti-gravity tea.  According to my scale I weighed a little bit less just after I drank the tea. Perhaps I was more right than I ever imagined. 🙂

Warning – that last paragraph was a true story, but I was not serious about the conclusion I drew.

The above warning is for those who cannot see my wry humor when it slaps them in the face.

The idea that there may be gravitational monopoles reminds me of the controversy that was raging when I was in college. Back then there were arguments in the literature about whether or not a magnetic monopole existed. I don’t know if that argument was ever settled. Perhaps I ought to Google it.

There is a Magnetic Monopole article in WikiPedia.