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.

In his recent decision to cancel the new EPA smog rule, President Obama is showing how his thinking is more like that of a corporate officer than that of a President of the United States.

There was a tremendous lobbying effort by business and Republican legislators complaining about the billions of dollars of costs that some corporate entities would endure.  Was there a powerful enough lobby on the other side telling him how many jobs would be created in the pollution control industry?

Without waiting for the lobbying efforts from multiple sides, as a United States President, Obama has to be aware that one company’s costs are another company’s sales.  The jobs created by designing, manufacturing, and installing pollution control equipment might have more than offset the jobs lost in the industries paying the costs.

The companies incurring the costs might even have taken the money to pay for this out of their cash reserves.  In other words the money they had sitting idle and not creating jobs could have been used to pay other companies to create jobs.

Who was making this cost/benefit analysis and presenting it to the President for his consideration?  Unless he knows enough to ask for it, there is no constituency that has the interest in doing the analysis for him.

Unless Obama starts thinking like a President and looking at the economy holistically, he will miss opportunities to get the economy moving again.

Here is  an exercise for the reader.

Since I have made no attempt to enumerate all the economic benefits of the new EPA rule, see how many other benefits for the economy as a whole that you can think of that would offset the costs of the new rules on the economy as a whole.

In Robert Reich’s article Obama’s Jobs Plan: Will He Offer Policy Miniatures Or Give ’Em Hell?, Reich puts together a number of ideas that I have been espousing on this blog for a long time.

Plan A would be big enough to restart the economy (now barely growing) and reduce unemployment (which continues to grow). That means spending another trillion dollars over the next two years – rebuilding the nation’s infrastructure, creating a new WPA and Civilian Conservation Corps, and lending money to cash-starved states and cities.
…
That means the President would have to fight for it. He’d have to barnstorm the country, demanding Republican votes. He’d build his 2012 campaign around it, attacking the Republican “do nothing” Congress. He’d give ‘em hell.

To read Plan B and other ideas that I have been espousing, follow the above link to read the rest of what Reich has to say.

In barnstorming the country, Obama would be doing the necessary work of getting his policies enacted.  That is governing, not campaigning.  If he fails to do the work of governing, then all the campaigning in the world will not get him re-elected.

The audacity of hope and the fierce urgency of now are pretty useless motivations if you lack the vision to do something when given the chance.  How many chances does President Obama need before we are able to decide if he has the vision to lead and to govern?

Imagine if Obama had been doing the barnstorming the country for his ideas over the last three years as I have been urging him to do.  He wouldn’t be faced with having a huge task of turning public opinion around in a very short amount of time on this one particular issue.  The fact that he does not see the necessity of doing this shows that though he may be a Constitutional scholar, he is not a scholar of the politics of governing.   That fact that he may not be smart enough to even have a firm conviction on what to fight for may also be hampering him.

Found the McClatchy story Regulations, Taxes Aren’t Killing Small Business, Owners Say on Nation Of Change.

Politicians and business groups often blame excessive regulation and fear of higher taxes for tepid hiring in the economy. However, little evidence of that emerged when McClatchy canvassed a random sample of small business owners across the nation.

Compare this to the story from my previous post Obama halts controversial EPA regulation.

The decision rests in part on reducing regulatory burdens and uncertainty for businesses at a time of rampant uncertainty about an unsteady economy.

September 5, 2011

Economist Mark Thoma’s view is expressed in his blog post, It’s *Not* Regulatory and Tax Uncertainty

Obama halts controversial EPA regulation is an AP news story. The subheading for the story and the first paragraph appear below:

Obama directs EPA to withdraw controversial proposed regulation on smog standards

President Barack Obama on Friday scrapped his administration’s controversial plans to tighten smog rules, bowing to the demands of congressional Republicans and some business leaders.

Later in the article, we have this amazing statement.

In his statement, the president said that withdrawing the regulation did not reflect a weakening of his commitment to protecting public health and the environment.

“I will continue to stand with the hardworking men and women at the EPA as they strive every day to hold polluters accountable and protect our families from harmful pollution,” he said.

He should have said that he will stand with the citizens of this country hacking their lungs out over the cancer causing pollutants that he is too cowardly to try to stop.

When the President indicates that he has already bought into the Republican propaganda before he even sits down to negotiate, you know our lungs haven’t got a prayer.

I wonder when Obama will tell us that gravity is what keeps the apple connected to the tree branch and prevents it from falling.

In an earlier post, I explained the use of the word tautology.  I figured I needed the antonym here.  One suggestion was oxymoron.

1. (rhetoric) A figure of speech in which two words with opposing meanings are used together intentionally for effect.
2. (loosely) A contradiction in terms.
3. A paradoxical juxtaposition of two seemingly contradictory words.

A more complex reason for bringing up the term, oxymoron, can be seen by comparing another paragraph from the article referenced here:

The decision rests in part on reducing regulatory burdens and uncertainty for businesses at a time of rampant uncertainty about an unsteady economy.

and the quote from my subsequent post Regulations, Taxes Aren’t Killing Small Business, Owners Say.

Politicians and business groups often blame excessive regulation and fear of higher taxes for tepid hiring in the economy. However, little evidence of that emerged when McClatchy canvassed a random sample of small business owners across the nation.

The part about reducing the regulatory burden is just dumbfounding.  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?