I have found two Congressional publications so far for the Congressional Progressive Caucus’s Better Off Budget. The first is a 2 page summary.

When the federal budget invests resources wisely, we can meet the needs of working families and shrink the deficit. The Better Off Budget not only creates jobs, it reduces deficits by $4.08 trillion over the next 10 years. It’s the right budget for the country, for working families and for our future.

The second one goes a little deeper in 26 pages.

In a previous post Congressional Progressive Caucus Budget Strikes Back Against Austerity, I took the commentator to task for implying that increased spending must be “paid for”.  Reading the two page summary, I didn’t find the statement to be quite as bad as the analyst implied.

Still, this two page summary might leave some people with the impression that cutting the deficit is an important issue to tackle.  The above quote only mentions reducing the deficit in 10 years.  Perhaps toward the end of the 10 years it might be appropriate to have some deficit reduction, but it must be clear that deficit reduction is completely unnecessary and unwanted until the recovery is much more robust and the income inequality is reduced significantly.

When I looked at the 26 page document, I did find some charts that plotted the deficit as a fraction of the gross domestic product.

This shows a very short term increase in the deficit and then a rapid decline in the deficit.  By the beginning of 2015, the Better Off Budget deficit is smaller than the current law and smaller than the President’s proposed budget.  I don’t have the capability of determining exactly when the deficit ought to start to decline as the economy recovers.  A lot depends on the speed of the recovery and the needs of the economy for deficits.

As a rough measure, I bet it would be safe to say that a long term federal budget deficit that is a smaller share of the GDP than is the growth of the GDP in the same period of time would be a deficit that is well within the capability of the economy to handle without a hiccup.

If we could get a budget like this passed, it would probably be a good first step.  My fear is that if it turns out that the economy does not recover as fast as hoped and the need for deficits does not go down as fast as hoped, voters will be left with the impression that this budget failed and we need to go back to austerity.  This is what happened after the President’s too weak stimulus at the beginning of his term in office.  Rather than recognizing that the stimulus and deficit were too small, and that they needed to be increased and tried for a longer period of time, the voters were convinced that the program was a failure and that we had to go in  the opposite direction.  (Or at least that is how the 2010 vote that turned the House Republican was interpreted by the nattering nabobs of negativism.)

The fact that President Obama was either too timid, or didn’t believe it himself, to explain what had happened, has made correcting the problem unnecessarily hard from a political point of view.  The political problem is amply demonstrated by the need for a Congressional Caucus to publish a budget that is much better than the President’s proposed budget.

Naked Capitalism has the post Journalist Schools BBC on Russian Intervention in Crimea by Yves Smith.

A fellow blogger with substantial experience in Europe sent this BBC footage, which I believe readers will find instructive. There were several things I liked about this segment. First, in contrast to US TV, where two sides who hold strongly opposed views talk past each other, there was a real discussion. Each side actually went beyond its talking points while remaining civil. Second was that the Telegraph writer Liam Halligan debunked some popular perceptions about Russia and Putin.

Here is the video of the BBC show.

We seem to have this uncontrollable urge to “do something”, even when there isn’t much to be done.

Even I have the troubling thought that we can’t just sit there and do nothing, but the choice isn’t between doing something and doing nothing. The choice is between doing something to make the situation worse and doing nothing. In that case, doing nothing does seem to be the better alternative.

With the empty threats that Obama has been making against Russia, it calls to mind Mark Twain’s statement, “It is better to keep your mouth closed and let people think you are a fool than to open it and remove all doubt.”

Or as I have always said, “Never make a threat that you aren’t willing to carry out.” It would be the height of foolishness to carry out some of the threats that have been made. What credibility do you have when the person you are threatening knows that you have made a threat you dare not carry out?

The corollary to this is not that if someone calls your bluff on an idle threat that you must go through with it to maintain your credibility. The corollary is that if your bluff gets called, learn the lesson to stop making such threats. You should have foreseen the likelihood of getting into such a spot before you opened your mouth.