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.

If you are still a worker, read Overworked America: The Great Speedup.

This will keep up as long as we buy into three fallacies: One, that to feel crushed by debilitating workloads is a personal failing. Two, that it’s just your company or industry struggling—when in fact what’s happening to hotel maids and sales clerks is also happening to project managers, engineers, and doctors. Three, that there’s nothing anyone can do about it.

Since I retired, I have always said that I got out just in time.  The American workplace was a rapidly declining environment.

Now I know why I had trouble getting along in my last two jobs.  (Besides my usual inability to get along with authority figures that is.)

My problem was I was too close to retirement and had enough economic security that I refused to give in.  I told my next to last boss, point blank, “Sure I could hire someone out of my own pocket to do the extra work you are asking me, but I refuse to do it.”

In a performance review with my last boss, I told him, “Yes, I am not as productive as I would like to be.  If at any time you feel I am not doing enough work to justify my salary, just tell me.  I will quietly retire.”

The pending bursting of the real estate bubble is what finally got me to sell my house in Oregon, retire, and move back to Massachusetts.  As I said, just in time.  Although, having a stock market crash just after retirement is not the best of timing.  But at least I was out of the real-estate market for good, I had bought the last house I ever intend to own.

The McClatchy News article Libya mission becomes a burden for Obama starts with the following paragraph:

More than 100 days after the United States and NATO allies launched what was supposed to be a quick air campaign in Libya, Pentagon officials concede that the effort has little strategic value for the U.S., and the alliance’s desired outcome there remains unclear.

So, after 100 days even the Pentagon is leaking information that many of us knew from day 1.  President Obama loses face when he stands before us and tells us things that we clearly know to be untrue.

With economic issues pressing us, unemployment at an unacceptably high level, our supposed efforts to get out of Iraq and Afghanistan, Obama can hardly afford to be telling us fairy tales about why we should enter a new quagmire.

The story goes on to say:

Perhaps undercutting Obama’s rationale for war, Defense Secretary Robert Gates, in a series of exit interviews ahead of his retirement, has begun to describe the U.S. involvement as payback to NATO nations — which depend on Libya’s oil reserves — for joining American troops in fighting in Afghanistan, which was mainly a war about U.S. strategic interests.

“These allies, particularly the British and the French, and the Italians for that matter, have really been a big help to us in Afghanistan. They consider Libya a vital interest for them. Our alliance with them is a vital interest for us. So as they have helped us in Afghanistan, it seems to me that we are in a position of helping them with respect to Libya,” said Gates, who opposed U.S. involvement in Libya from the beginning, last week on the PBS NewsHour.

Apparently even though Gates knew from the start that it was all about oil, he is still being a little coy about our own interests.    See my June 11 post, In A Pure Coincidence, Gaddafi Impeded U.S. Oil Interests Before The War.

I wonder if this is the verdict on Obama’s attempt to explain why we  need tax increases as part of deficit reduction.

Well it gets a little better. Google news now has reference to The Los Angeles Times story Obama pressures Republicans on federal debt ceiling.

The news conference represented a rare instance of Obama using the presidential megaphone to defend his position. In the past, the president has been prone to delivering lengthy answers in a professorial tone, relying on abstract ideas. By contrast, Obama on Wednesday laid out his arguments in simple, everyday terms, echoing an ex-president that he has been studying: Ronald Reagan.

I guess I am not the only one to notice how rarely Obama uses his opportunities to influence the tenor of the debate

My comment on this story was:

Obama flubbed it again. He failed to make the point that the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy are job killers. Having missed that opportunity, Boehner made his usual silly point that rescinding those tax cuts is the jobs killer.

With those tax cuts, the wealthy are free to (and have) sucked that money right out of the economy. They (among other things) either invest it overseas and export jobs, or they lend the money back to the government by buying Treasury securities. Rather than invest it in the economy, they have just given it back to the government, but expect to be paid interest now. I don’t blame the wealthy for doing this. It would be silly to invest in more capacity without having enough market demand to sell what the new capacity would produce.

Had this money been put into the hands of the middle-class, they would have spent more of it than the wealthy do. This spending would draw forth investment in capacity (job creation) to meet the economic demand from the middle-class. This is absolutely essential if we are to get a self-sustaining economic recover with lower unemployment.

With just a stimulus to create demand, the recovery will require more and more deficits and never sustain itself without government help.

In the article The Debt Limit Option President Obama Can Use,  Bruce Bartlett latches on to the part of the Fourth Amendment to the Consitution which he quotes as “The validity of the public debt of the United States…shall not be questioned.”

You can look it up.

Bartlett says, “it’s worth remembering that the debt limit is statutory law, which is trumped by the Constitution.”