On The Daily Show, Jon Stewart did an extended interview with Ron Paul.

Occasionally, Jon Stewart gets a word in edgewise to challenge Ron Paul. Ron Paul’s ideas would work so well if only people didn’t act the way they actually do. This is usually the knock on Socialism. In fact the problem applies to any extreme system that requires people to behave in an idealized way.

Sure I can insist on a libertarian system where my property rights are sacrosanct. What do I do if a person with a gun tries to take away my rights? Must I engage in a gunfight, or can I depend on the police department provided by the government that my fellow citizens and I set up in advance to handle this type of problem?

What if a major corporation with billions of dollars of resources tries to take away my property? What chance do I have to fight them off by myself?

If it takes this little thinking about fairly simple situations to see the flaws in Ron Paul’s ideal system, how well would it work when the issues get far more complicated?

As They get older, most people get over these notions of ideal people working in an ideal system. It took Alan Greenspan until well into his 80s or was it 90s before he finally saw the flaws in his similar ideas to Ron Paul’s. Give Paul another 20 years, and maybe he will come to his senses, too.

It is fun to discuss the ideal. I did it in my blog post, Imagine – Total Automation. After the ideal case reveals the upper limits on the possibilities, you need to get back to the real world to discuss what you might actually be able to implement.

Ron Paul does not seem to understand the place of the idealized system with respect to the real world.

And then again, some of his ideas are flat out wrong. Anything he says about the economy, especially the fed, is flat out wrong.

In the article The Real Job Killer: Missed Opportunity Paul Krugman writes:

Something that forces firms to replace capital, even if that something seemingly makes them poorer, can stimulate spending and raise employment. Indeed, in the absence of effective policy, that’s how recovery eventually happens: as the economist John Maynard Keynes put it in his “General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money,” a slump goes on until “the shortage of capital through use, decay and obsolescence” gets firms spending again to replace their plants and equipment.

At the end of my September 2, 2011 blog post Obama halts controversial EPA regulation I made the same point that Krugman is making in his article.

I heard a news report of an estimated cost of the regulations as $19 to $90 billion dollars.  The President was reported to have said that this was too big a burden at this time.  Does he think that the money was going to be used directly to plug up smoke stacks and be burned in the process?  That $19 to $90 billion would have been spent buying pollution control technology.  That would have meant job creation for the people producing and installing the technology.  The money might have had to come from industry’s cash reserves that are sitting idle.  This President apparently understands nothing about economics and how to stimulate an economy.  Why did I ever think he had the intelligence to understand this?

It is nice to have confirmation from a Nobel Prize winning economist about my understanding of how macro-economics works.  (I know, I have intimated before that the title ” Nobel Prize winning economist” is not always proof that you know what you are talking about with regard to economics.)

Talking Points Memo has the story Elizabeth Warren Endorsed By Russ Feingold.

“In all my years in the Senate, I always took positions that I believed in, even when my own party tried to stand in the way,” Feingold writes. “I know Elizabeth will be exactly the same kind of senator.”

Sometimes I would get upset with Feingold for opposing some of Obama’s initiatives.  I don’t know if his opposition did more good than harm.  Perhaps he understood Obama’s failings better than I did.

Thinking back to my days as a supervisor/manager, I remember that when you have a failing employee, you need to start discussing the problems with that employee as soon as possible.  If it should get to the point where you have to fire the employee, it should come as no surprise to the employee.  If you didn’t give the employee plenty of opportunities to correct the troublesome performance, then you have failed as a supervisor/manager.

Likewise, all of us who held our tongues when Obama failed us time and again were failing as the voters who elected him.  It shouldn’t have taken three years for us to deliver the message loud and clear that Obama was in danger of being fired.  Yes, it shouldn’t have taken Obama three years to appear to come to his senses.  We may both bear some blame for the delay that may cost him his job.

The Real News article 80 People Arrested at “Occupy Wall St.”  has the following video report:

Do you suppose that the police violence is prompted by real worries about this protest by the power brokers on Wall Street?

In my previous post Errors Dealing With Economic Recovery Originate With Obama, I used the quote from Brad DeLong’s post:

I learn that Barack Obama was attracted to the idea that on top of our business-cycle demand-driven downturn was a longer-run trend rise in technological unemployment that virtually guaranteed that the recovery would be “jobless”:

[Summers and Romer] were concerned by something the president had said in a morning briefing: that he thought the high unemployment was due to productivity gains in the economy. Summers and Romer were startled. “What was driving unemployment was clearly deficient aggregate demand,” Romer said. “We wondered where this could have been coming from. We both tried to convince him otherwise. He wouldn’t budge.” Summers had been focused intently on how to spur demand, and on what might drive a meaningful recovery…. [W]ithout a rise in demand, in Summers’s view, nothing else would work…. But productivity?… If Obama felt that 10 percent unemployment was the product of sound, productivity-driven decisions by American business, then short-term government measures to spur hiring were not only futile but unwise. The two economists strained their memory… had they said something he’d misconstrued?… After a month, frustration turned to resignation. “The president seems to have developed his own view,” Romer said.

I’d like to talk about what is so wrong about Obama’s thinking.

Obama is short sighted when he thinks, “high unemployment was due to productivity gains in the economy.”  He needs to realize that because of the way our taxes are structured and the rules that have been set up for our economy since 1980, the fruits of increasing productivity flow almost exclusively to the top of the economic pyramid.  The rest of the economy  is left to suffer only the bad consequences of how this economic structure is set up.

In my previous post Imagine – Total Automation, I tried to show that by taking the rise of productivity to an extreme it might be clearer that one could imagine a different outcome is possible for the 98% of the economy that is actually harmed by increasing productivity under the current system.

Where Romer missed making an effective argument, was in saying that “What was driving unemployment was clearly deficient aggregate demand,”  as if that were totally unrelated to the President’s vision of the cause of high unemployment being the fault of increased productivity.

Letting the top 2% of the population take all of the benefits of increased productivity, robs the other 98% of the money needed to buy all that can be produced by this highly productive economy.  This combination is what leads to high unemployment.  Contrary to what Obama was thinking, the high productivity does not inevitably lead to high unemployment.

This flow of all benefits upward is a product of our tax structure and economic rules and regulations created by the government.  Both of these are within Obama’s domain to try to change.  When faced with the thought that “the high unemployment was due to productivity gains in the economy”, he needed to ask himself, so how can we change this outcome of productivity gains without losing the benefits of those gains.

There are plenty of experts around who can explain to Obama how to do this.

When I voted for Obama, I thought of him as a man of vision and great enough intellectual curiosity that he would learn the things he needed to in order to be a success.  In the case of economics, he has been a man of little vision.  He has been completely intellectually unaware that he was not an economics expert. There is no reason why he would have even thought that he was an expert.

Somehow, his erroneous thinking has shifted him from “Yes we can”, to “Oh well, I guess we really can’t” with respect to fixing the economic problems of the country.

He is going to have to work extremely hard in the next 14 months to convince me that he has seen the error of his ways.  So far he blames the discouragement of his natural constituency on themselves.  All the exhortation in the world won’t get these people excited about him again unless he gives them something to be excited about.

The one lesson we learned from Ronald Reagan’s tenure is that when faced with such dire problems, we may not be able to fix them until someone comes along with the courage and the heartlessness to let the economy crash so that it can finally be reshaped in a better way.  With his programs, Reagan was finally able to break the back of OPEC and solve our inflation problems.  Of course, what he and his descendants in the office of President did after  he solved the inflation problem is the proximate cause of our current problems.

In 2012, should I vote for Obama if he shows signs that he is just going to manage to prolong the agony?  Or I should I vote for someone to crash the economy so we can finally go on to the next phase of resolving the issues?   As in Reagan’s case, the actions of the person who solves the problem of economic depression will be taken to extremes and in the long run will swing the pendulum too far in the opposite direction.

On Brad DeLong’s blog, the article Review of Ron Suskind’s “Confidence Men” confirms my worst fears about how the Obama administration has dealt with the economy.  That fear is that Obama’s economic policy was anemic not because he didn’t fight hard enough for the right policies.  It was anemic because Obama convinced himself, contrary to all good advice, that the wrong policies were needed and that the right policies were not needed.

On this blog I don’t intend to repeat the information in the articles to which I point.  I want to give you enough information to encourage you to read the whole articles yourself.  This is especially true of this article.  So, keep in mind that in the following you will only get a pale shadow of the information of the whole article.

For the most part DeLong does not think that Ron Suskind did a good job with his book.

And, as Ezra Klein points out, the stories Suskind does tell repeatedly undermine his global narrative claim that the administration’s big problem was that Lawrence Summers was (a) too sure of himself, and (b) so good a debater that he won internal arguments he ought to have lost. If Larry Summers had been winning all the internal policy arguments, Ezra points out, then administration policy would have gone in “the direction Suskind clearly wishes the White House had gone.”

However, DeLong does list quite a few things that he learned from the book.  The following is one of the items I find indicative of Obama’s failings:

I learn that Barack Obama was attracted to the idea that on top of our business-cycle demand-driven downturn was a longer-run trend rise in technological unemployment that virtually guaranteed that the recovery would be “jobless”:

[Summers and Romer] were concerned by something the president had said in a morning briefing: that he thought the high unemployment was due to productivity gains in the economy. Summers and Romer were startled. “What was driving unemployment was clearly deficient aggregate demand,” Romer said. “We wondered where this could have been coming from. We both tried to convince him otherwise. He wouldn’t budge.” Summers had been focused intently on how to spur demand, and on what might drive a meaningful recovery…. [W]ithout a rise in demand, in Summers’s view, nothing else would work…. But productivity?… If Obama felt that 10 percent unemployment was the product of sound, productivity-driven decisions by American business, then short-term government measures to spur hiring were not only futile but unwise. The two economists strained their memory… had they said something he’d misconstrued?… After a month, frustration turned to resignation. “The president seems to have developed his own view,” Romer said.

I found a link to chapter 1 of Confidence Men: Wall Street, Washington and the Education of a President by Ronald Suskind.

The New Yorker has an article on the book titled The Book on Barack.

Robert Reich: Why This is Exactly The Time to Rebuild America’s Infrastructure explains the following:

Now connect the dots. Anyone with half a brain will see this is the ideal time to borrow money from the rest of the world to put Americans to work rebuilding the nation’s infrastructure.

Problem is, too many in Washington have less than half a brain.

Coincidentally, before I read this article, I had posted a comment that with trillions of dollars of needed infrastructure investment and prices so low to do the work, it should be a no-brainer to do the work now.  The only difference between Reich and me is that I don’t even think it should take any brains to figure this out.

With the Republicans and Faux Noise spewing the opposite idea 24/7, it just takes as much repetition on our side as they have on their side.  People are not thinking (not using any brains).  They are on automatic pilot and following what they hear most often.

If we could repeat the truth often enough, maybe we could get people to think.  Once they started thinking, they too might see the obvious.

Maybe we also need to repeat the part where Robert Reich says:

Seems like only yesterday conservative nabobs of negativity predicted America’s ballooning budget deficit would generate soaring inflation and crippling costs of additional federal borrowing.

Remember Standard & Poor’s downgrade of the United States? Recall the intense worry about investors’ confidence in government bonds — America’s IOUs?

Hmmm.

Last week ten-year yields on U.S. Treasuries closed at 1.83 percent.

In other words, they were wrong.

In the article DOJ Says They’ve Debunked The ‘$16 Muffin’ Myth, the cost is explained.

“The package consisted of food, beverages, staff services and function space, including a 450-seat ballroom and more than a dozen workshop and breakout rooms each of the five days of the conference.”

This answer is so obvious, one wonders how the DOJ’s Inspector General could have been so silly as to make the accusation in the first place.  Imagine an Inspector General going after this kind of stuff when we have issues of past corruption and approval of torture in the DOJ.  I guess any little thing that will distract from the real issues is what the Inspector General’s job requires.

As I watched CBS new anchor Scott Pelley repeat the charge on several nights, I wondered about his competence.  Is it possible to  suppose a person in his position has never been to a large social function to see the resources that a hotel puts out to host a large gathering before they even set out the food?

Surely not.  So you know that when Scott Pelley sits there and says these things with a straight face, that he is pulling your leg.  This kind of “understanding” of what they report is what has turned me off from watching Scott Pelley’s previous program 60 Minutes. I can’t remember when it was that I finally got sick and tired of 60 Minutes.  It must be 20 to 30 years ago.

For a brief while after I decided to give Pelley another chance by watching CBS Evening News, I thought that Pelley might have left behind the shenanigans of 60 Minutes.  What a forlorn hope that a news anchor could exhibit half the intelligence of most of his audience.

I have created a petition on the Whitehouse web site, We petition the Obama administration to: Regain the governing mandate of the 2008 election by acknowledging your mistakes that cost you the mandate and fix it.  There is also a short URL that you may use to access the petition – http://wh.gov/42B.

Signatures needed by October 25, 2011 to reach goal of 5,000.  This number is the minimum needed for the staff to bring this to the attention of the President.  This is your chance to do more than just complain about the President’s lackluster battle for progressive principles.  Click on the above links to add your vote.  Also spread the word about this petition.

Below is the description to back up the title of the petition:

The President has noted that many of his supporters from the 2008 election have become discouraged. In order for the President to be effective, he must regain the discouraged supporters and thus his mandate to accomplish the goals for which we elected him.

In order for these supporters to regain the faith we initially had, he must acknowledge his mistakes in failing to use the mandate and the people who gave it to him. He must acknowledge that he failed his primary role of educating his supporters and prospective supporters about the reasons behind each and every initiative he took.

The President must acknowledge that it was his failure to enlist the mass of his supporters. He needs to acknowledge that he understands that his tactical compromises are what lost him his strategic advntg

That last word advntg is of course an abbreviation of advantage.  It had to be shortened to get the description to fit in 800 characters.

If you have trouble signing the petition, read my post How To Sign a whitehouse.gov Petition.

As of October 01, 2011 10:44 EDT the petition has received 3 votes. Only 4,997 to go.

As of September 28, 2011 19:39 EDT the petition has received 2 votes. Only 4,998 to go.

As of September 27, 2011 20:32 EDT the petition has received 1 vote. Only 4,999 to go.

As of September 26, 2011 19:46 EDT the petition has received 1 vote. Only 4,999 to go.

I found the article War of words over global warming as Nobel laureate resigns in protest on the UK Telegraph web site.

A Nobel laureate has quit one of the world’s leading organisations for scientists in protest at its assertion that the evidence of damaging global warming is “incontrovertible”.

After reading this, I had mixed feeling to say the least.  I was not going to make a blog post about this.  However, after making the post What Can We Say About 9/11? And How Can We Say It?, I started to think that I couldn’t avoid posting this one about global warming.