President Obama’s full remarks are elaborated on the White House blog post President Obama: “Let’s Get to Work”.

President Obama makes a statement about the action we need to take to keep America’s economy growing, while at the same time reducing our deficits.

Here is the video of that presentation.

Where is the statement that taxes on the rich must be raised to stop their hoarding of the liquidity that the country needs to get moving again? Where is the refutation of Boner’s claim that raising taxes on the wealthy will slow the economy down? It is easy to do and it must be done that we remove all of Boner’s false claims as to why we should not raise taxes on the wealthy. It goes beyond fairness. It is a necessity to get the economy working again.

This lack is what prompted my tirade of yesterday in the post Obama Still Has No Clue On Being President – There Goes The Economy.

I am not making this up. WikiPedia has a nice explanation of the well known economic paradox called a Liquidity Trap. Well, I do have one bone to pick with the introduction to the page as quoted below. The issue is not that the injection of liquidity by the Fed fails to lower interest rates. It is that it fails to stimulate economic growth. It does not make much sense to say that “Signature characteristics of a liquidity trap are short-term interest rates that are near zero” after saying that “injections of cash into the private banking system by a central bank fail to lower interest rates”.

A liquidity trap is a situation described in Keynesian economics in which injections of cash into the private banking system by a central bank fail to lower interest rates and hence fail to stimulate economic growth. A liquidity trap is caused when people hoard cash because they expect an adverse event such as deflation, insufficient aggregate demand, or war. Signature characteristics of a liquidity trap are short-term interest rates that are near zero and fluctuations in the monetary base that fail to translate into fluctuations in general price levels.

It is about time that the administration start a campaign to educate voters about real economics as opposed to the false economics fostered by Boner. Don’t tell me that it is too complicated to explain. Boner does it every chance he gets.

Thanks to HankH for suggesting this video.  It is a clip from The Daily Show titled An Avalanche on Bulls#%t Mountain.

Karl Rove disputes Fox News’ Ohio electoral math, Megyn Kelly goes for a stroll, and Bill O’Reilly pronounces the election a victory for people who want stuff.

This is especially for the devotees of Faux Noise hereby renamed as BMN – Bulls#%t Mountain News – by Jon Stewart.

Also give a thought to what Bill O’Reilly said. Maybe it was a bit of a loss for people who have so much stuff already that they don’t know what to do with their money and power except to rape and pillage the poor just for sport.

But as President Obama has shown today, he’ll pretend to fight the losers, but will soon capitulate to them anyway.

It is time for the public to start yelling bloody murder.

I have just watched President Obama give up on taxing the wealthy without a fight.

I was looking for a news story to use as a reference to show you what I mean.  I found it in The Los Angeles Times news story Obama says budget deal must include higher taxes on the wealthy.

Allowing the tax rates on higher income levels to go up in the new year would hurt small-business owners, Boehner argued, which “would slow down our economy.”

The president said he “was encouraged to hear Speaker Boehner agree that tax revenue has to be part of this equation,” and would look forward to discussing plans in detail next week.

Here is a perfect example of the President continuing his failure to communicate that has been his downfall over the last 4 years.  The Boner of The House is addressing the electorate with propaganda that has sunk in with his and other Republican’s repetition.  The President is addressing Speaker Boner without even offering a story to the public to counter the propaganda wallop that Boner delivered.  Boner knows where the power is.  Despite going to Harvard to learn where the power is, the President apparently did not learn much.  You could dismiss my griping as coming from a country hick who knows nothing about power if you hadn’t already observed this kind of travesty many times yourself.

The wealthy and the big corporations are drowning in so much excess money that they don’t know where to invest it.  They are not investing it in making jobs to produce more goods since the middle-class does not have enough money to buy the goods that the currently employed and currently open factories can produce.  What foolish capitalist would invest money to produce goods for which there are no customers and there are not going to be customers?  Instead the wealthy are putting their money into financial finagling trying to see which one can gain an advantage over the other.  As a side line, they are buying up troubled companies, selling off the assets that could have been used to create future jobs, and increasing their share of the country’s wealth.  They are stealing the workers’ pension funds and health care accounts to add a little more to their wealth.

Look at the above comparisons, if you think I am kidding.

• For poor and median households, Great Recession wipes out 20 years of net worth accumulation
• For the rich, only small decline

The net worth of the rich and the poor are in terms of today’s depressed values. If and when the values come back, the wealthy will have gotten even farther ahead of the middle-class and poor.  Even without the recovery of values, the share of the shrinking pie that is owned by the wealthy is skyrocketing.

Taxing the wealthy and using that extra government revenue to buy infrastructure, education, health care, retirement benefits, basic science, and a myriad of other things the society needs will increase jobs and make further deficit spending unnecessary.  In other words increasing the taxes on the wealthy and not cutting spending is what we need, while Boner tries to justify the exact opposite policy.  Where is the public outrage going to come from if the President won’t explain this?

Whatever liquidity that the Fed has been pumping into the economy to boost its performance has been sucked right back out of the economy by the hoarding of wealth by the rich.  The only way to break this cycle is to tax this wealth out of the hoarders’ hands and put it back into the economy as the Fed intended.

Do you think the President could get the public to put pressure on Boner and the other Republicans if he explained all of this to the public and asked for their help?  Instead, the President is treading lightly so as not to offend Boner who has on his Army boots and is stomping all over the President.

What can we do, when the President we just re-elected is too weak to stand up for us?  If we don’t rise up in a second Occupy movement, then we will get what we deserve for our inaction.

I am issuing this call from this blog.  How many of you can help me spread the word?  The longer you wait, the less chance we have of overcoming the forces of the wealthy.

Lest you think I am only complaining about what the wealthy are doing to me, I need to say that my personal net worth history looks more like the right hand graph than it does the other two. I have learned a little about how to play the game with the rules cast as they are. However, for the good of the country, I am hoping that things can be made more even. There is every likelihood that I will do OK unless the greed of the wealthy takes us all into a depression. Then even my skills may not be enough to protect me. That is my real worry.

Of course, how my descendants might fare is another worry. I may have enough cushion to protect Sharon and me (I hope), but I doubt it is enough to protect anybody else.

The Nation Of Change has published Robert Reich’s article Obama’s Next Economy: Why He Must Take This Opportunity to Reframe the Economic Debate.

His victory and the pending “fiscal cliff” give him an opportunity to recast the economic debate. Our central challenge, he should say, is not to reduce the budget deficit. It’s to create more good jobs, grow the economy, and widen the circle of prosperity.
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Any “grand bargain” on deficit reduction should contain a starting trigger — and that trigger should be when the economy can safely be assumed to be back on track. I’d make that trigger 6 percent unemployment and 3 percent economic growth for two consecutive quarters, and make sure that trigger was in the legislation.

The first part of the quote describes how the debate must be reframed.

The second part of the quote is a way to agree to deficit reduction, but makes it clear when is the time to do it and when is not the time to do it.  If this wording makes it comfortable for the opposition to realize that the President is not saying that the deficit should not ever be cut, then we should put in those words.  These words are only an explicit statement of what President Obama’s policy has always been.  The words are also an answer to the claim by the opposition that if we do not cut the deficit now, there are no plans to ever cut the deficit.

Mitt Romney, even before his unexpected  switch to being a pseudo-moderate Democrat in the campaign, agreed that cutting the deficit too soon would be bad for the economy.

I might add that another part of the Grand Bargain is the statement that changes to Social Security and Medicare will not be planned in detail until after we see how the increase in taxes on the wealthy and the recovery of the economy effects the long term outlook for these insurance programs.

When you pay for an insurance policy, you are entitled to the benefits you paid for.  Nobody calls the monthly payments of a private annuity  an entitlement.  Why should they call the monthly payments of a public insurance policy, the Social Security Annuity, an entitlement?

The Real News Network has the interview Nader on What To do Now.

No matter what you may think of Nader’s past actions, I think he raises some excellent points and ideas here.

Now is the time to think about how we turn our campaign enthusiasm into something more permanent.

The New York Times published the opinion piece The Oscar Wilde Strategy by Lee Siegel.

Someone once said that upon reaching 60, you have two thoughts. The first is, “This is going to work out.” The second is, “This is not going to work out.”

Many of those who voted, as I did, for Barack Obama must have experienced a similar simultaneous sense of relief and despair last night, as jubilation gave way to the grim realization that the political paralysis of the past four years will become, if anything, worse and more bitter.

It was startling to hear, on CNN, the assembled pundits almost unanimously agree that President Obama had to find the “middle ground,” move to “the center” and “build relationships” with Republicans. Where have they been for four years? Mr. Obama had been trying desperately to find the political center for his entire first term, only to be stymied by Republicans trying to recapture the White House by rejecting his every attempt at compromise and then blaming him for being unwilling to compromise.

What to do in such a situation, with the country split right down the middle, and a Republican opposition driven by a hardcore faction that believes the country has been stolen from them by treacherous and unpatriotic forces? There is only one thing to do: one half of the country must leave the other half behind.

You really need to read the rest of the piece by following the link above.

I thank JamesG for sending an email containing an extensive quote from the article.  I wish I could post the whole thing here, but what is appropriate for a personal email is too long to be published on this blog without written permission from the author.

I don’t know how the target audience reacts to these videos from Bravenew Films.

I don’t have trouble imagining my ethnic group being scapegoated like this, so perhaps that is why I empathize.

MoveOn.org is promoting this video.

On job creation I expected the part where Mitt Romney says that government does not create jobs.  Then I was expecting a comment how cutting defense spending will costs hundreds of thousands of jobs.  The one they used is almost as good.

It is one thing to be confused about who is lying and who is telling the truth when it is merely an argument about which set of statements are true.  However, when the words of the candidate himself are contradictory, then it is not hard at all to figure out what’s what.