Steve's Politics Blog

Mark Thoma has posted the article ‘The Progress is Real’ quoting Paul Krugman.

Thoma adds the insight:

That brings up the second point. Republicans in Congress have blocked efforts to implement fiscal policy measures over and above the initial stimulus effort (and they would have blocked the Fed as well if they had the power to do so). An aggressive infrastructure construction effort would, for example, buttress monetary policy and speed the recovery, and it would also provide benefits (including higher future growth) that exceed costs, but Republicans are not going to let that happen. This is like hiding half of the medicine a patient needs for recovery based upon medical quackery, and then asking why the doctor is doing such a lousy job.

This is the metaphor I always think about, but perhaps Thoma states it better than I would.

I think about the example of the use of anti-biotics. If you are going to use anti-biotics, you must use the full dose. If you don’t use the full does, you leave behind the organisms that were able to survive the partial dose. These are the organisms that mutate into anti-biotic resistant ones. At some point, when you do apply full doses of the previous anti-biotic, they no longer work because of the partial doses that went before.

In the case of the economy, the more often you apply a stimulus that is too weak, the more likely you are to develop an economy that becomes resistant to stimulation. In this case, the stimulus that would have been big enough when you first applied the weak stimulus is now no longer big enough. You now have to apply a stimulus that is even bigger than the one that would have worked in the first instance.

The headline Jack Welch Is Wrong! ‘It’s Outrageous’ to Say the Jobs Number is Manipulated: EPI’s Mishel comes from the interview on Yahoo!’s Daily Ticker pod cast.

“It’s a shock to hear that anybody can think that these numbers were manipulated,” say Lawrence Mishel, president of the Economic Policy Institute, in the accompanying interview with The Daily Ticker. “Having followed these numbers for 25 years and knowing the people who put them out it’s absolutely bizarre…It’s outrageous. The data is based on surveys of tens of thousands of employers and households every month.”

In the interview, Lawrence Mishel called the people who claim the number to be manipulated “despicable”.

Even before you hear what Lawrence Mishel says about the numbers’ non-political import, you can tell by Jack Welch’s response how bad they seem for Republicans’ political ambitions and therefore how good they must be for the economy.

After all, if the numbers could be forced to be manipulated by President Obama, he certainly would not have them manipulated to make himself look bad.

This follows along with the logic of President Obama’s remarks in the debate that Mitt Romney would not keep the details of his economic plans secret because they were too good to tell to the public.

I think that a con-man like Mitt Romney would of course keep his plans secret because the pigeons wouldn’t fall for the plan if they knew the details or knew that the plan did not actually exist. I wonder if the President was being too subtle by not stating the case against Romney the way I just did.

Perhaps the President understands psychology better than I do. People being conned tend to stick up for the con man even more strongly when their judgment is put in doubt by being told by someone else that they are being conned.

The Real News Network has an interview with Larry Wilkerson.

Lawrence Wilkerson is a retired United States Army soldier and former chief of staff to United States Secretary of State Colin Powell. Wilkerson is an adjunct professor at the College of William & Mary where he teaches courses on US national security. He also instructs a senior seminar in the Honors Department at the George Washington University entitled “National Security Decision Making.”

So you have to look at much more—a much wider array of very complex issues in order to understand why someone’s taking the negotiating position they’re taking. We call it empathy. We call it being—in the military, being able to put yourself in the other person’s shoes and look at the problem you’re negotiating from their perspective. Paul, we simply have lost the ability to do that in this country.

I am glad to hear a confirmation of what I had always thought about why Saddam Hussein could not allow an unambiguous demonstration of his lack of weapons. He had to at least preserve some doubt in the mind of the Iranians that he might actually still have some weapons. That would keep them from attacking him. Unfortunately this very same ambiguity is what caused the Americans to attack him.

I had this figured out at the time this was going on. There does not seem to be anything that Saddam Hussein could have done that would have assured him that he wouldn’t be attacked by one side or the other. Maybe he consciously decided that an attack by the US was the least bad thing that could happen.

In the Presidential debate, Mitt Romney claimed that gasoline prices today are twice what they were when President Obama took office.

From gasbuddy.com I was able to learn the truth.

This graph shows that the gasoline prices dropped precipitously from $4.12 a gallon in August 2008 to $1.61 in December 2008.  If you remember, the economy was in free fall at that time.  People were cutting back on their gasoline purchases so that they could afford to eat.  Is this how you want Mitt Romney to lower the gasoline prices?  Or would you be willing to trade gasoline at $3.87 as opposed to $4.12 before the economic crash in order to have even a slow economic recovery?

I just received my electronic version of Medicare & You. On the second page of the document, it says

Now available for e-Reader

Visit www.medicare.gov/publications to download a digital version of this handbook to your e-Reader. You can get the same important information that’s included in the printed version in an easy‑to‑read format that you can take anywhere you go. This new option is available for the iPad, Nook, Sony e‑Reader, Kindle, and all other e-Reader devices.

At the time of this posting in my blog, you get a run-around if you use this link.  The only thing you can get is the PDF version from which you clicked on the link.

I found out that the ebook version will not be available until mid-October.

I got this information by having an online chat with a Medicare agent.  She suspected that the version I sought was just not available yet.  She told me to call an agent on the phone to escalate the issue of the ebook version not being available.

The person on the phone did a little research after I described the problem again.  She was the one that gave me the mid-October date.

For all you software/website geniuses out there, how much effort do you think it would have taken to make the website tell you that the ebook version was not available when you clicked on the link to get the ebook version?  This feature would be as opposed to the current “feature” that you just get taken back to the same page that will give you the PDF version with no explanation of what is going on.

Now weigh the cost of fixing the web site compared to handling just my tying up an agent in an online chat and another agent on the telephone to get the answer that could have been put on the website.  Even if there aren’t thousands of people like me who will contact Medicare to find out how to solve the problem, the cost of handling just my call alone is probably more than the cost of making the website give out this information.

Caroline Kennedy gives a perfect description of some of the reasons why I support Elizabeth Warren. She could do so much in the Senate to help correct what has gone wrong in this country over the last 30 or so years.

Of course Elizabeth Warren cannot fix our problems of government by herself. It requires a President who is working to move the country in the same direction, more legislators who are pushing in the same direction, and it requires an active and vocal citizenry to keep reminding the opposition what the mandate is.

Here is a radio ad from the Elizabeth Warren campaign.

I guess that is the risk Scott Brown thought he could take. He thought he could lie and get away with it. His TV ad is very cute. It shows The Boston Globe article, and the ad highlights certain words that are actually in the article. However, the technique is just like cutting out words from a newspaper to create a ransom note. The words were never put together that way in the article to mean what Brown’s ad pretend that they mean.

The ethics Scott Brown is showing is about on a level of someone who would put together a ransom note from words clipped out of the newspaper.

When Scott Brown said during the debate that Elizabeth Warren’s explanation of her role in the asbestos case was laughable, I would have said to Brown.

“What is laughable is that a man who claims to be a lawyer could read the court documents and misunderstand them so badly that he would come away with an interpretation that is exactly the opposite of what is in the documents.”

When no one thought we could take on the big banks and win, Elizabeth Warren did it. She exposed the tricks in credit cards and mortgages, and led the fight to create a new consumer agency to hold the big banks accountable. President Obama calls her “one of the fiercest advocates for the middle class.” When everybody else backs down, Elizabeth stands up for people.

Then there is the other candidate who was a lawyer for banks who issued mortgages. Did he help create some of those tricks in the mortgage papers?

When asked to name his model Supreme Court Justice, Scott Brown named anti-choice conservative Antonin Scalia.

One measure of a debate outcome could be the fodder it provides for political ads. By this measure, perhaps Elizabeth Warren did a lot better than I gave her credit for.

CNN has the article Fact check: Are half of ‘green’ energy firms helped by stimulus out of business?

The Department of Energy proudly touts that the 2009 stimulus authorized $90 billion “in government investments and tax incentives to lay the foundation for the clean energy economy of our future.”

But not all that money has been spent, and not all of it — in fact, not even half of it — is being directed to upstart green businesses.
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It is fair to say that the 2009 stimulus authorized $90 billion for green energy, as Romney asserted. Whether or not one terms these as “breaks” is subjective, and one shouldn’t assume that all the funds went to specific businesses like Solyndra.

Most of the large projects that benefited from the Department of Energy loan program remain in operation — contrary to Romney’s assertion that “almost half” of them had closed.

This is another example  of Romney’s claims that just do not add up.  In my previous post, Romney’s Magic Plans, I pointed out why it is easy to have a plan that sounds great if you don’t insist that it be feasible.  Another analogy is that Romney is more like the snake oil salesmen that used to travel the country with their medicine shows – a little entertainment and then a hard sell of fake cure-alls.

I must admit, Romney is pretty good at it.  He did build himself a quarter billion dollar fortune selling his medicine to the “investment” world.