I just received an email that says 238,000 have signed the petition at ReformTheFilibuster.com.

This is one of the first issues that Elizabeth Warren will be working on as our new Senator.

Reform the Filibuster

Far too often, we’ve seen good ideas stall in the Senate because a single Senator can stop everything without a single word uttered on the Senate floor.

In a few short weeks, we can reform the filibuster. But it won’t be easy. And it’s going to require that the American people speak with one, clear, loud voice.

Take action now: Tell the Senate to fix the filibuster.

If you want Washington to respond to your needs, you have to make your voice heard more often than just at election time.  Use the link above to sign the petition.

The New York Times has the article Lines Blur as Texas Gives Industries a Bonanza.

Mr. Ryan’s specialty is helping clients like ExxonMobil and Neiman Marcus secure state and local tax breaks and other business incentives. It is a good line of work in Texas.

Under Mr. Perry, Texas gives out more of the incentives than any other state, around $19 billion a year, an examination by The New York Times has found. Texas justifies its largess by pointing out that it is home to half of all the private sector jobs created over the last decade nationwide. As the invitation to the fund-raiser boasted: “Texas leads the nation in job creation.”

The rest of the article talks about the pros and cons of these tax breaks. I don’t doubt that each reader of the article will see the moral of the story to be whatever fits best with their political outlook.

It is kind of ironic to pit the facts presented here with the Republican mantra that the government should not pick business winners and losers. I suppose the answer is that the Texas government does not care if the companies they pick are winners or losers as long as they provide the promised jobs. You’ll have to read the whole article to decide for yourself what you think about the situation.

From personal experience of having lived in Texas for 4½ years, I have my own opinion of low wages and high living standards for engineers.  My wages were enough to have a decent living standard in Texas, but they were falling behind national wage levels.  I felt that if I stayed in Texas much longer, I would be financially trapped by my inability to afford to live anyplace else.  Sharon and I are both glad we got out when we could.

I actually faced a similar situation in Oregon, also a low cost-of-living, low-wage state.  Had it not been for the real-estate boom in Oregon which doubled the value of our house while we were there, we might have been trapped in Oregon after retirement.  Unlike Texas, Oregon is actually a very nice place to live, but it was not near family, so it is not where we wanted to retire.

The bursting of the real-estate bubble before we moved back to Massachusetts is what made it possible to return to the high-cost of living state even in retirement where my income is not affected by where I live.

NBC has the article Facing the fiscal cliff: American taxpayers have had it easy for decades.

Still, with the deadline for a deal to head off the so-called “fiscal cliff” now less than a month away, the debate has shifted from whether taxes should go up to just who should pay more. Both sides seem to acknowledge what some economists have been saying for some time.

The problem with the budget is that Americans don’t pay enough taxes.

The case isn’t hard to make. The U.S. federal tax burden, relative to gross domestic product, is lower than it’s been in half a century. Americans pay lower taxes in relation to the size of their economy than all but a handful of developed countries, including Chile and Mexico.

The relatively low tax burden on Americans is, in part, an illusion that results from heavy reliance on hundreds of billions of dollars of so-called “tax expenditures.” To make government spending appear lower than it really is, the U.S. tax code is larded with givebacks, deductions and exemptions.

I particularly like this article because it provides so much food for thought.  As a well balanced article, it was hard to find a concentrated excerpt that also showed its balance.  As I looked for as good an excerpt as I could find, I chose the above.  At first, I was going to leave out the last excerpted paragraph above, but as I stepped away from the posting the article to go have breakfast, the ability to digest some of that food for thought led me to see the importance of the paragraph.

There is a tradeoff between tax expenditures and collecting the taxes and then spending the money on targeted programs to accomplish some specific purpose.  The tax expenditures may be meant to encourage some social good, but they tend to be less focused and targeted on the specific social good they are trying to promote.  For instance, lowering the tax on capital gains may encourage investing more in businesses, but not all businesses are the types in which  we want to encourage investment.

On the other hand, we could stop favoring capital gains in the tax code, but use the extra money collected to spend on particular industries or particular business practices that we want to encourage.  That would focus the tax money where it might do the most good, but such a plan would require more bureaucracy to manage it.  The burden of bureaucracy would fall on both the government to administer such a program and the beneficiaries who might have to apply for the benefit.

Like any good idea for change, it needs to be applied judiciously.  There are some aspects of the old way that are worth preserving.  One management course that I took as a Digital Equipment Company employee argued for a certain methodology when contemplating making changes.  Write down what it is about the current system that you want to change and also write down those parts you want to preserve.  Neither the old system nor the new system is likely to be all good or all bad.

McClatchy  has the article Al Qaida-linked group Syria rebels once denied now key to anti-Assad victories.

Nearly a year later, however, Jabhat al Nusra, which U.S. officials believe has links to al Qaida, has become essential to the frontline operations of the rebels fighting to topple Assad.

I have no idea about the truth of or falsity of anything in the article.  The only conclusion I can feel certain of is that dealing with the Syria problem is complicated.

In the comments on the article are links to two other articles, America’s New Proxy, The Syrian National Coalition: The Many Faces of its Leader, Sheikh Ahmad Moaz Al-Khatib and
Al-Qaeda affiliate playing larger role in Syria rebellion.  I have no more ability to vouch for these two articles than I have for the McClatchy article.  However, taken all together they just reinforce how fraught with danger it is to meddle (or decide not to meddle) in the internal affairs of other countries.

I guess the only lesson to take away from this is to avoid getting too wedded to one side of the argument or the other and keep your mind open to new information.

The Real News Network has rebroadcast Tax the Rich: An animated fairy tale narrated by Ed Asner.

Tax the rich: An animated fairy tale, is narrated by Ed Asner, with animation by Mike Konopacki. Written and directed by Fred Glass for the California Federation of Teachers. An 8 minute video about how we arrived at this moment of poorly funded public services and widening economic inequality. Things go downhill in a happy and prosperous land after the rich decide they don’t want to pay taxes anymore. They tell the people that there is no alternative, but the people aren’t so sure. This land bears a startling resemblance to our land. For more info, www.cft.org.

I wonder if this will become a popular bed time story.

The Democratic Underground has Pic Of The Moment: As Fiscal Cliff Deadline Approaches, Obama’s Position Strengthens.

It’s nice to imagine, but it’ll never happen this way.

Truth Out has republished the article In the US, an Insecure Economy Needs a Stronger Safety Net by Paul Krugman.

Every time you read an article by someone extolling the dynamism of the modern economy, the virtues of risk-taking and declaring that everyone has to expect to have multiple jobs in his or her life and that you can never stop learning, etc., bear in mind that this is a portrait of an economy with no stability, no guarantees that hard work will provide a consistent living and the constant possibility of being thrown aside simply because you happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

And nothing people can do in their personal lives or behavior can change this.

Your church and your traditional marriage won’t guarantee the value of your 401(k) or make insurance affordable on the individual market.

So here’s the question: isn’t this exactly the kind of economy that should have a strong welfare state?

Isn’t it much better to have guaranteed health care and a basic pension from Social Security rather than simply hanker for a corporate safety net that no longer exists?

Might one not even argue that a bit of basic economic security would make our dynamic economy work better, by reducing the fear factor?

I have often thought along these lines.  It is often said about the stock market that it is driven by fear and greed.  It’s probably true about much of what happens in life.  Some amount of fear probably helps to drive progress, but too much fear can tend to lead to paralysis. (Deer in the headlights problem).

One issue that I have wondered about for a long time in observing the high tech industry is that a young engineer may be driven to create innovative technology by the love of the challenge and thoughts of possible future rewards.  Once the best and the brightest of our engineers achieve a good amount of success, part of their brain is occupied by efforts to manage the wealth that are the fruits of this success.  They have less time to devote to continued technological achievements.  I wonder what would happen if many of these people, who wanted to, could spend more time in continuing their devotion to research if the safety net were stronger and they had to spend less time worrying about preserving their gains.

Keep in mind that the amount of safety net is a quantitative decision.  I am not saying that either extreme of all encompassing safety net or absolutely no safety net would be the optimum solution.  We need to have a national discussion on where on the scale from zero to infinity we would like to have the safety net.

The Real News Network has the interview Why the Fiscal Cliff is a Scam with economist James K. Galbraith.

For those who are interested in econometric models and their predictions, perhaps this excerpt may talk to you.

But those long-term CBO forecasts of very rapidly rising national debt, very rapidly rising deficits, rest on a couple of very doubtful assumptions. One is that health-care costs will continue to rise more rapidly than every other cost in the economy forever—can’t happen and won’t happen, but that’s—you can build a computer forecast that makes it happen, in which it happens. And the other is that the interest rate that the federal government pays on its public debt will be raised by the Federal Reserve, let’s say, four years from now, to a point where it’s higher than the growth rate of total output, the growth rate of income, and then that interest burden compounds, the interest payments compound as a share of GDP and go up very rapidly after that. If you stretch out that forecast long enough, you can get a debt-to-GDP ratio as high as you like in a computer projection. But once again, it will not happen in real life. It’s not consistent with the way an actual economy is going to function.

I hope to find more details of the article referred to in the interview. Right now, the web site serving this article is not responding. Apparently, this down time is so common that there is a website to answer the question Is the Alternet down right now? Well, the web site is not particular to alternet, but the fact that the link that checks the alternet appears in a Google search is what is indicative.

The bottom line of Paul Krugman’s piece  Class Wars of 2012 is:

So keep your eyes open as the fiscal game of chicken continues. It’s an uncomfortable but real truth that we are not all in this together; America’s top-down class warriors lost big in the election, but now they’re trying to use the pretense of concern about the deficit to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat. Let’s not let them pull it off.

This blog is trying to do its part to keep our eyes open.  I hope no one was naive enough to think that the recent election meant we had won and we could all ignore politics for the next few years.  In fact, with the election we just staved off disaster for another few weeks.  Now the same forces that some of us may have thought we defeated are back at it just as if nothing happened.

So now we wait for the answer to the question that President Obama refused to answer in the campaign.  What is going to be different now from what it was in the previous four years of his administration?

The Wall Street Cheat Sheet has the article Is Bernanke Right About the Fiscal Cliff?.

The article starts with a comment by Dallas Fed President Richard Fisher:

Fisher has requested more governmental action because there are limits to what monetary policy can accomplish, Reuters reported. “We at the central bank have been carrying the load and this is a very dangerous predicament,” Fisher said during a lecture in Frankfurt.

This is a point that I have been trying to get across to people ever since the economic downturn started.

The article ends with the comments by Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke:

As Bloomberg reported, the report also “bolster[ed] Fed Chairman Ben S. Bernanke’s view that an agreement on reducing long-term federal budget deficits without abrupt tax increases and spending cuts would remove a barrier to growth.”

I agree with the comment about the spending cuts not being abrupt. I do find it hard to believe that the barrier to growth doesn’t have something to do with doubts about future consumer spending. That might be a minor quibble as the reduction of future consumer spending would be as a result of abrupt spending cuts and abrupt increases to taxes on the consumer.

Somehow, I don’t believe that the consumer is making decisions based on the long term federal budget deficits. If people were really worried about impending inflation, they would be spending now rather than saving dollars that are going to become worthless.