What Do We Do?

I’m a pretty well-informed person.  I read news stories, blogs, op-eds, and get friends’ thoughts on the issues in America (and the world) in 2013 and beyond.  So I’m pretty well able to form my own opinions and articulate them relatively clearly.

What I don’t know is what the hell to do about them that will actually make a difference.

You know the problems as well as I do.  Here’s a partial list:

• We have 25 people –including 20 young school children — killed by gun violence while in school and we still can’t do anything about it, because the NRA owns Congress.  So now the NRA, feeling its oats, is proposing placing armed guards in schools, and arming teachers.  The city council in Nelson, Georgia — and I swear I’m not making this up — voted 5-0 to make gun ownership mandatory.  Unless the members of the family opt out.  The level of idiocy in this is simply breathtaking.  How does any of this remotely make sense?
• The manufactured deficit crisis, leading to the sequester:  This is directly related to the fact that most of our leaders (and I blame both Democrats and Republicans on this, but the Republicans are much, much worse on this) take really good care of the rich in this country.  After all, that’s where the campaign cash comes from, and those are the people who can afford the lobbyists.  Meanwhile, the little guy keeps getting the shaft.  The Republicans claim victory on the sequester, too, which is absolutely crazy.  At the same time they’re saying that the cuts are bad, bad, bad.  No wonder they’re so out of touch.  The latest news on this: Cancer clinics are turning away Medicare patients because of the sequester.  Can someone explain to me how this is good policy, or how it’s even humane?  Because I don’t see how it could be.  I can’t see how it’s moral or right, either, but that’s another story.
• Women’s health and the right to choose: States continue to pare back a woman’s right to control her body.  I wrote a post on this last August.  I don’t want to re-litigate it here.
• Republicans in North Carolina wants to declare a state religion.  Obviously, this is unconstitutional, but that people would actually try this in 2013 just boggles my mind.
• The Obama Administration is considering a trade agreement with the European Union that would give corporations just what they need — more power (yes, I’m being sarcastic).  This is another one of those policy ideas that I just can’t understand.  Corporations have too much power in this world; they certainly don’t need more.
• The heartbreaking struggle (If you haven’t seen the film that I’m linking to here, you should; it’s a documentary that aired on HBO … I was in tears watching it) that so many people are going through in  this country with long-term unemployment (while corporations sit on an unprecedented amount of cash, don’t hire enough people, and only manage to the bottom line).  The only mobility in this country is downward, unless you’re incredibly rich.  The middle class is being decimated.  It’s pretty plain that a strong middle class, and the poor actually being able to improve their situation, is vital to a strong economy.  All the growth is being concentrated with the rich.  None of it is “trickling down.”  Did we learn nothing from the last 30 years?  Did we learn nothing from the last Gilded Age?
• The gerrymandered to death congressional districts that pretty well rigged elections for the next decade.
• The voting rights act that is under review in the Supreme Court that could turn back the gains made there over the past 45 or 50 years.
• Taxpayer-subsidized banks and oil companies.

I’ve left out all kinds of things in this list, I know — everything from gay rights, to protection for women against being raped and mandating that rape kits are actually processed, to equal pay for equal work, to the crumbling infrastructure, to the crippling student debt that so many are buried under … the list could go on and on.  America is in sorry shape.  (And I want to blast Republicans in general for their general wing-nuttery, but that’s another post.)

So my question is this:  What the hell do we do about it?  What would actually make a difference?  Because I really don’t know.

We saw the Occupy movement fall apart and fade away after some serious police brutality and the weather changing.  Newspapers are failing and being consolidated.  (I can’t find a citation right now, but I read that there’s something like four or five corporations that control nearly all of the media in this country.)

I’m really concerned about my son’s future.  How is he going to get ahead in this country when it’s on this path?

So can someone tell me something to do that will actually make a difference?

Update 4/12/13 — I had dinner with a friend last night.  She said that to change it, you have to run for office.  I pretty much dismissed that out of hand; I don’t really have much interest in running for office.  I don’t want to join to politician class and become part of the problem.  Smarter people than I am have tried and got sucked in.  I’m watching people like Elizabeth Warren pretty closely.  I hope she and others like her can make a difference.

The Liberal Position on Abortion

I’ve been reading the liberal memes on Facebook about abortion.  I’m sure you’ve seen them.  Memes like “Republican Platform Calls for Constitutional Amendment Banning Abortion with No Exception for Rape or Incest.”  They excoriate the conservative position for not having the exceptions, and they’re right to do so although they don’t go far enough.

The problem is that they’re giving away half the game to conservatives.  Exceptions for rape or incest should be a given.  Only a cruel person would force a woman who has been raped to carry a rapist’s baby to term, then give birth, and then allow the rapist to have parental rights (in some states).  That is cruel — cruel and unusual punishment —  for a woman who has already been violated once by the rapist.

This whole issue of abortion boils down to one word: choice.  It’s about freedom — freedom for a woman to make decisions about her body.  It’s really that simple.

But as framed by Democrats and the President, the current debate about abortion — centered as it is around rape victims and the health exception — put women in the position of supplicants, seeking permission to end their pregnancies. Most people, fortunately, think there are circumstances where that permission should be granted. But true freedom is not freedom to ask permission—it’s freedom to make a decision. That’s what pro-choice really means, and it would be healthy for abortion-rights supporters to say so clearly and often.

Republicans want to eliminate a woman’s right to choose what happens in her body.  They want to take away a woman’s freedom to make decisions, a major theme in “The Handmaid’s Tale“.  (I’m rereading this now, and there are quite a few parallels to America today.  Give it a read if you haven’t read it or if it’s been awhile; it’s worth your time.)  Liberals are allowing the anti-abortion groups to stake out the moral high ground when it isn’t there’s to stake out.  They need to stop giving away the store.

No one likes abortion.  No one.  Everyone is pro-life.  Some are pro-choice (I am pro-choice); some are anti-choice.  Those are the accurate labels.  So why do those who are pro-choice allow those who are anti-choice to frame the argument that way?  (This problem — allowing conservatives to frame the debate in their terms — isn’t unique to the abortion debate.)

Instead of curtailing a woman’s freedom, we need to take pragmatic steps to reduce abortion.  I think nearly everyone wants fewer abortions.  We should provide realistic, good sex education in schools.  We also need to provide access and training for contraception.

People honestly need to grow up in this country.  Teenagers and adults are going to have sex.  Pregnancies might occur.  Teaching people how to prevent pregnancy will have a desired effect — fewer abortions.

People who are pro-choice should frame the argument as it really is.  It’s about choice.  It’s about freedom.  And only down the line is it about abortion.

Voting Against Interest

I read an article today on Wonkblog and again I’m astounded by how much government aid the red states consume, yet still keep voting with the conservatives who want no to extremely small government.  This doesn’t quite compute for me.

The story that got me thinking today is one talking about the fantastic deal the Medicaid expansion portion of the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) is that so many red state governors want to, in effect, shaft their own citizens by turning down the sweet deal the federal government is offering.  This, because anything Obama does is bad.

Over the coming weeks and months, there’s going to be a new event in the Republican Party’s ongoing “No, I’m the most anti-Obamacare!” contest: refusing to participate in the law’s proposed Medicaid expansion. So far, the governors of Florida, South Carolina and Louisiana have already promised to do exactly that.

Ignore them. The deal the federal government is offering states on Medicaid is too good to refuse. And that’s particularly true for the red states. If Mitt Romney loses the election and Republicans lose their chance to repeal the Affordable Care Act, they’re going to end up participating in the law. They can’t afford not to.

Medicaid is jointly administered between states and the federal government, and the states are given considerable leeway to set eligibility rules. Texas covers only working adults up to 26 percent of the poverty line. The poverty line for an individual is $11,170. So, you could be a single person making $3,000 a year and you’re still not poor enough to qualify for Medicaid in Texas. That’s part of the reason Texas has the highest uninsured rate in the nation.

Massachusetts, by contrast, covers working adults up to 133 percent of the poverty line — partly due to a former governor whose name rhymes with Schmitt Schmomney. It’s a big reason it has the lowest uninsured rate in the nation.

I realize that Ezra Klein says to ignore the promises to refuse federal Medicaid money, but it’s hard to ignore those promises without wondering why those governors feel secure enough politically to say those kinds of things without fearing the loss of a lot of votes.

Why do the red states keep voting against their clear economic interest?  And why are they so happy to keep taking the blue states’ tax dollars that are paid into the government they say they hate?  The blue states are happy (ish) to pay those tax dollars, though, and are happy to help those less fortunate than themselves.  Why are the blue states reviled?

Some of it, no doubt, is the Fox News Effect.  People who are rightly angry at the status quo are told what to be angry about.  Over and over and over.  And they end up believing it.

By the end of my stint as a hired Fox News–watcher, my takeaway was, first, that the Democrats invented corruption.

Second, regardless of different formats or different anchors, whatever else was going on in the world of news, each show featured the same big story. When I watched, it was the growing controversy about Solyndra.

How do the news people at Fox know what the big story of the day is? you might ask. They just look at the earlier Fox News shows. If they flag it, it must be important. Anyway, by the time the night is finished, it will be the big story. In fact, by the next day, or sooner, it goes viral, showing up on other networks and in the newspapers. Opinion-makers elsewhere are reluctant not to use it for fear of being judged “out of touch.”

How does Fox get its big story of the day? Several ways. I remember one coup regarding the Department of Agriculture official who gave a speech that made her seem racist. A video excerpt had fallen into Fox’s hands over the transom, as they say, and by the end of the day of repetition on Fox and elsewhere the official had been fired. That was enterprising investigative journalism at its finest.

When the whole speech was played, however, it turned out that the fired official actually had been making a strong civil rights statement. Somebody had performed a contextectomy. It was a clear violation of the Geneva Convention on TV Journalism, which calls for telling the whole truth, not just half or a quarter.

How could that story have gotten legs? It wasn’t true. Yes, but the more you repeat something on TV, the truer it becomes.

Third, I learned how people are Foxified: it comes from watching too much Fox News over a period of time. They fall asleep watching reruns of O’Reilly and Hannity, starting at 11 or midnight. Instead of turning into a cockroach like the guy in the Kafka story, they wake up as a right-wing ideologue, or as we progressives call them, nuts.

Now I understand what Ailes and his diabolical mind-benders are up to. At the Fox News Channel, they treat the news as a script. A more apt slogan than “Fair & Balanced” would be “Fox News—Based on a True Story.”

The BBC says that people in red states resent having solutions force-fed to them.  This sounds plausible to me.

It might be tempting to put the whole thing down to what the historian Richard Hofstadter back in the 1960s called “the paranoid style” of American politics, in which God, guns and race get mixed into a toxic stew of resentment at anything coming out of Washington.

But that would be a mistake.

If people vote against their own interests, it is not because they do not understand what is in their interest or have not yet had it properly explained to them.

They do it because they resent having their interests decided for them by politicians who think they know best.

There is nothing voters hate more than having things explained to them as though they were idiots.

As the saying goes, in politics, when you are explaining, you are losing.

It’s clear that health care reform is the right thing for the country.  It’s also true that trying to help the poor is the proper thing to do.  I — and other liberals — think that this is a role for government.  I think we all agree that people should pull themselves up by their own bootstraps, but so many people don’t have bootstraps to pull themselves up by.

The red states keep getting redder — that’s where the bulk of the tea party is coming from. Fox News keeps on going on with its version of the facts and people keep buying it.

I don’t know how the Democrats get around that.  It’s obviously a messaging problem, one that the Democrats are going to have to solve.  I would suggest that Democrats make the Republicans feel like it’s their idea, but with healthcare reform, the Democrats used a Republican idea!  So how is this solved?

Thoughts on the State of the Union Address

I’ve spent most of this evening watching the State of the Union and the Republican response.  Here are some thoughts on those:

The State of the Union

• I liked the agenda that President Obama laid out.  That’s not much of a surprise, really, for those who know me or who have been reading the sporadic posts on this blog.  (I hope to post more as the election gets closer.  We’ll see if I can make that happen.)  The fact is that we do have a major problem with the economic equality in this country.  The middle class is threatened.  The deck is stacked in favor of the very wealthy.  Obama is right when he says that we have to level the playing field.  We should be giving tax breaks to companies that move manufacturing back to the United States, and we should penalize those (through the tax code) that offshore jobs and profits.  These are common sense steps that we should have taken long ago.
• We do have to get the money out of politics.  A constitutional amendment is needed, though.  Bernie Sanders’ proposed amendment is a great place to start.  (Actually, I think it should be passed as is.)
• I liked Obama’s confrontational tone.  The Fix called it “Confrontation Wrapped in Kumbaya”.  I like that; it’s an apt description.  Obama fully played on the fact that Congress’s approval rating is extremely low, lecturing them about their inaction.  He promised action where Congress has been inactive.  He can do a lot through executive order, but that is not as good as legislation.  He demanded that Congress send him bills this year and promised to sign them.
• I don’t have a lot of hope that Congress will actually act, though, the cameras kept panning to shots of stony-faced Republicans who seemed to want to be anywhere else.
• The Republicans didn’t seem to take kindly to that scolding tone, and cleared out of the chamber pretty quickly.  I enjoyed that.  One never likes being lectured to, especially when one knows that the person doing the lecturing is right.

The Republican Response

Mitch Daniels, the governor of Indiana delivered the Republican response.  I was struck by a few things.

• The use of the phrase “loyal opposition”.  I see a lot of opposition in the Republican agenda during Obama’s presidency.  But I have not seen a lot of loyal.  When the Senate minority leader’s stated goal is to make Obama a one-term president, how is that loyally caring for the people’s business?  How is the president supposed to work to find a middle ground, when there isn’t any to begin with?
• Mitch Daniels talking about budget math is really pretty rich.  Daniels was President Bush’s budget director.  A strong case can be made that the deficit and debt issues that the Republicans care so much about now can be laid at the feet of President Bush and his tax cuts.  And then fighting two wars.
• The claim that Steve Jobs was a jobs creator was embellished, to say the least.  Apparently Daniels missed the New York Times article from January 21.  Steve Jobs created jobs, all right, but Daniels neglected to mention that most of those were overseas.

I see a lot more of the same coming from Republicans.  They still don’t want to work with President Obama, despite the record low approval rating that Congress enjoys.  So President Obama will need to do what he can via executive order, and he’ll have to go out on the road and really sell his plan.  And he’s going to have to pick a couple of things he absolutely has to have and fight for them in Congress the way he hasn’t the past three years.

John Boehner – Horrible Speaker

Once again, John Boehner can’t keep his caucus in line.  This fact contributes to the absolute disgrace that is Congress these days.  The Republican leadership makes deals with the Democrats and then reneges because Boehner can’t get the Republican votes needed to pass a law.

Let’s be honest here – the tea partiers are holding this up for reasons completely unrelated to the payroll tax holiday.  They want quick action on the Keystone XL Pipeline and more discretionary spending cuts, according to Ezra Klein.  The American people are the ones who will pay the price in higher taxes – taxes that are in fact regressive, so the rich won’t pay anything more than they already do.  And Boehner says that the House has finished the work of the American people and is saying that the ball is back in the Senate’s court.

Boehner also says that a two-month extension of the payroll tax holiday is a non-starter because the House doesn’t want any more half measures that might “cause uncertainty.”  Dana Milbank’s column today points out the lie there:

On Monday, the bar owner’s son aligned himself with House conservatives in opposition to a broadly bipartisan plan to extend a payroll tax cut for 160 million Americans.

This new position, essentially reversing the one Boehner voiced a mere three days earlier, proves anew that the old-school speaker is less a leader of his caucus than a servant of his radical backbenchers. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say he’s their barkeep.

Three times at a news conference on Friday, Boehner was asked whether he could support a two-month extension of the payroll tax cut, as Senate Democrats and Republicans were planning. Three times, Boehner declined to state an objection to the two-month extension (he objected to a different part of the agreement, about an oil pipeline, which the senators subsequently changed to his liking).

“I just gave you an answer. How much clearer can I be?” Boehner said, refusing to take issue with the two-month extension.

And so senators passed the extension, 89 to 10. Tea Party heroes Pat Toomey and Marco Rubio voted for the compromise. The fiercest budget cutter of them all, Sen. Tom Coburn, voted for it. Republican lions such as John Cornyn, Jon Kyl and Mitch McConnell voted for it. Only seven Republicans voted “no.”

McConnell, the Senate Republican leader who negotiated the compromise, kept Boehner informed at every step — and was confident enough in Boehner’s acquiescence that his office sent out a notice saying there would be no more legislative business in the Senate until 2 p.m. on Jan. 23. But Boehner’s backbenchers — particularly the Tea Party freshmen — had other ideas, and, in a Saturday teleconference, made clear to Boehner that he would have to abandon the compromise.

The House Republican freshmen have become a bit tipsy with power, and freshman Rep. Steve Womack (R-Ark.) on Tuesday boasted at a news conference that his class is “performing more like sophomores now than freshmen.” Actually, their performance is more sophomoric than anything, but they’ve been able to deliver a string of insults to Boehner, most notably the July revolt that forced the speaker to pull his debt-limit plan from the floor. If Boehner needs any more evidence he’s out of style in his party, he can ponder the rise in the presidential race of Newt Gingrich, the man Boehner tried to depose from the speakership 15 years ago, losing his leadership position in the process.

On Tuesday, Boehner had the unpleasant task of going before the cameras to explain why his House Republicans, after championing tax cuts for millionaires, would be voting against a tax cut for ordinary Americans.

“You know, Americans are tired of, uh,Washington’s short-term fixes and gimmicks,” Boehner began. Behind him in the hallway outside his office, four American flags provided patriotic cover for the reversal. He complained that “the Senate Democratic leaders passed a two-month extension” — omitting mention that Senate Republicans, with Boehner’s knowledge and tacit support, had agreed.

So rather than pass a two-month extension, he’s willing to have the tax cuts lapse entirely when they expire at year end?

“I don’t believe the differences between the House and Senate are that great,” Boehner said, by way of reassurance. But this only confirmed that his side was making a big stink over nothing.

Why didn’t he raise warnings earlier about the two-month extension? “Uh, we expressed our reservations about what the Senate was doing,” he said.

What did he make of the fact that 90 percent of the Senate supported the compromise? Boehner, in reply, demanded to know why “we always have to go to the lowest common denominator” — which is exactly what he had done in letting his backbenchers lead him.

The speaker denied the obvious truth that he had encouraged the compromise before opposing it. He licked his lips, gave a “thanks, everybody” and disappeared.

The sophomoric freshmen must have needed their barkeep to serve them another round.

This is what happens when you make a deal with the devil to get power.  The Republican establishment made that deal with the Tea Party to win the 2010 Congressional election.  They made this bed.  Gridlock has ensued for the entire term.  Congress is an absolute disgrace with something like an 11% approval rating (who ARE the people who approve, by the way?).  And now, again, the American people that they profess to love so much will suffer.  The rich won’t, remember, because the payroll tax is regressive.  Nice going, Republicans.

Obama’s Jobs Bill

I have a few thoughts about the jobs bill that President Obama sent to Congress this morning.

• Why didn’t Obama make this speech and propose this bill two and a half years ago?  He would actually have gotten it passed.  But he got caught up in passing health care.  That was also worthy, but much less urgent than stimulating the economy and putting people back to work.
• It’s also nice to see Obama show a bit of a spine.  He’s let the Republicans set the agenda and control the debate for quite awhile.  It’s about time Obama realized that he’s the president and has a huge megaphone.  He can drown out the Republicans and make them smaller if only he’d actually do it.
• It’s a good bill.  It’s not perfect, but what would be perfect?  It would put a lot of people back to work.  Working people spend money and pay taxes.  Deficits are reduced when people pay taxes.  In any case, deficits are long term problems.  Unemployment is a short term issue.  We have to get the economy off the dime and get people working again.
• The bill is paid for by new taxes on the rich.  Republicans immediately complained that this would tax the very people who would create the jobs.  This overlooks a couple of things.  First, most jobs are created by small business.  Most of them aren’t really rich.  Second, this bill is paid for.  That’s saying something in this age, where interest rates are historically low and the cost of borrowing is incredibly cheap.  It also bows to the reality that Republicans don’t want more deficits.  I think that’s misguided right now, but okay.
• Does anyone else find it ironic that Speaker Boehner’s spokesman, Michael Steel, complained that Obama’s bill “wasn’t offered in that bipartisan spirit”?  I think that’s pretty rich, actually.  Absolutely nothing the Republicans have done since President Obama was elected, and especially since the last election, has remotely been bipartisan.  So spare me that one, Mr. Speaker.

So let’s get this bill passed.  I agree with President Obama.  Pass it as is.  Or he should take it to the people.  In fact, he should start doing that tomorrow morning.  He gives a great speech.  He needs to give some more now.

No Respect for Obama

I’m disgusted with the Republicans’ lack of respect for President Obama.  Like him or not, he is the president, duly elected by the people on November 4, 2008.  Even if your stated goal is to make President Obama a one-term president, you still need to show him and his office the respect they deserve.

Several Republican lawmakers are blowing off the speech.  Congressman Joe Walsh (Illinois) and Sen. David Vitter (Louisiana) had previously announced that they would not attend.  Senator Jim DeMint, Republican from South Carolina, is the latest say he’s not going to he’s not going to Obama’s speech to Congress tonight.  DeMint is “sick and tired of speeches” and won’t go because the president didn’t send over an advance, written plan.

Obama has no obligation to send him an advance copy of the plan.  DeMint, conversely, does have an obligation to be there tonight. 

Also, Speaker Boehner wouldn’t return Obama’s calls during the debt ceiling hostage taking.

Nobody returned the president’s call.

On Thursday afternoon, President Obama and House Speaker John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) had discussed a sweeping agreement that would have averted default on the national debt. On Thursday evening, Obama called back to talk more.

The president left a message, and waited.

The tone in Washington has gotten worse and worse during the Obama presidency.  I’m sure that Obama bears some of this blame.  But the Republicans are more disrespectful than I’ve ever seen.  I don’t want to call it racism, but can someone give me a better alternative? 

 These are matters of common courtesy for the office even if you abhor the man.  When the President of the United States calls, you drop what you’re doing and get on the phone.  When the President of the United States gives a speech to a joint session of Congress, you drop what you’re doing, you get yourself there, and you act like you’re listening.  Anything less is blatant disrespect to the man and the office.

Until the tone improves – and that starts with respect – nothing will change in Washington.  Gridlock will continue.  Nothing will get done.  And America will continue as a nation in decline.

An Opportunity We Can’t Afford to Miss

From Ezra Klein today.  I don’t usually just post entire posts, but this one is good enough that it doesn’t need any comment from me, except “Exactly right.”

This is going to be the most boring sentence I have ever included in a column, but it might also be the most important: The real yield on Treasury debt has, in recent months, turned negative. Sound impenetrably dull? Sure. But here’s what it means: free money!

Let’s start by defining some terms: The “yield” on Treasury debt is how much the government pays to borrow money. The “real yield” is how much it pays to borrow money after accounting for inflation. When the “real yield” turns negative, it means the government isn’t paying to borrow money anymore. Rather, the situation has flipped, and the government is getting paid to keep money safe.

It also means that America is facing perhaps the single greatest investment opportunity in decades. But more on that in a moment. First, I have to convince you that free money — or, in this case, better-than-free money, as real yields are negative, not just zero — is possible.

If you’re an individual investor, you can put your money in the bank and be assured of its safety. Bank deposits, after all, are insured up to $250,000. But if you’re an institutional investor — if you’re playing with millions, or billions — it’s not quite that easy. You have to put that money somewhere. And right now, there aren’t a lot of safe spaces. Europe is a mess. China is slowing down. Brazil and India remain uncertain. Corporate profits can’t outpace a sluggish economy forever.

These investments don’t just carry the potential for weak returns. They carry the potential for big losses. So does stuffing money under the proverbial mattress, where you’d lose money every year simply because of inflation.

That’s where Treasury debt comes in. You won’t make much money investing in U.S. Treasurys. But barring a catastrophic outcome to some future negotiation over the debt ceiling, you won’t lose much, either. And right now, that’s good enough for the market.

Usually, the U.S. government has to pay quite a bit to borrow money. In January 2003, for instance, the interest rate on a seven-year Treasury was about 3.6 percent, which gave investors a yield of more than two percent after accounting for inflation. Right now, the interest rate is 1.52 percent, or minus-0.34 percent after accounting for inflation.

Here’s what this means: If we can think of any investments we can make over the next seven years that have a return of zero percent — yes, you read that right — or more, it would be foolish not to borrow this money and make them.

The case is even stronger with investments we know we will need to make over the next decade. The economy will get better, and as it gets better, the cost of borrowing will rise. The longer we wait, in other words, the more expensive those investments will become.

The only reason we wouldn’t take advantage of these rates is that we have no worthwhile investments to make. But that’s clearly not true.

Our infrastructure is crumbling, and we know we’ll have to rebuild it in the coming years. Why do it later, when it will cost us more and we very likely won’t have massive unemployment in the construction sector, as opposed to now, when the market will pay us to invest in our infrastructure and we have an unemployment crisis to address?

More than 16 percent of Americans are unemployed or underemployed: This would be a good time for an employer tax cut to goose hiring, or a larger payroll tax cut to help families make ends meet.

State and local budgets are wrecked, and one casualty has been higher education. California, for instance, is hacking away at the University of California system, which is far and away the finest public higher-education system in the world. If we permanently damage our public colleges and universities, we’ll have lost a major source of economic strength. But it needn’t be that way. Kindly investors the world over are willing to pay the federal government to save our education system.

Everyone knows we have worthwhile investments to make. The real reason we won’t take advantage of this remarkable opportunity is ideology: Republicans argue that deficits are the only thing that matters for our recovery — unless anyone attempts to close them through tax increases, and then tax rates are the only thing that matters for our recovery. And Democrats have stopped even attempting to challenge them.

As an economic theory, that’s just dead wrong. Deficits matter, but in the long and medium term. What matters now is getting the unemployment rate down.

Need proof? Well, what’s worrisome about deficits? That high federal deficits will crowd out private borrowing. And how do we know if that’s happening? High interest rates. And where are interest rates now? They’re negative.

They won’t be negative forever, of course. The path forward is obvious: We should borrow now and put in place a firm plan to cut deficits later, once the economy is back on track and investors have other places to put their money. But refusing better-than-free money now in order to talk about reducing our deficit later? Well, that may be the craziest sentence I’ve ever had to include in a column.

Republican Tax Cut Hypocrisy

It’s not exactly a newsflash, but the Republicans are blatantly hypocritical when it comes to their no taxes pledge.  They now want to let the payroll tax cut expire at the end of the year, adding about $1,000 a year to working Americans’ tax bills.  The same Republicans who were willing to let America default are now willing to endorse what amounts to a $120 billion tax increase.

Ezra Klein looks at this today:

One possible answer is that a large tax increase in an election year is good for them because it’s bad for President Obama and the economy. But that’s a pretty cynical explanation. Another is that they care more about tax rates on the rich than they do about tax rates on the poor. But they resist that argument. The real answer, Republicans says, is that they just don’t like temporary tax cuts.

”We don’t need short-term gestures,” explained Sen. Lamar Alexander. “Temporary tax rebates don’t work to create economic growth,” said Rep. Paul Ryan. Brad Dayspring, the spokesman for House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, says his boss “has never believed that this type of temporary tax relief is the best way to grow the economy.”

But as Jon Chait noted, Republicans proposed and passed temporary tax cuts in 2001 and 2008. Ryan voted for both packages. So did Cantor. And Alexander. So the GOP seemed to believe in temporary tax cuts when George W. Bush was president.

[…]

In other words, Republicans have frequently fought for temporary tax cuts. When offered the choice between a larger temporary tax cut and a smaller permanent tax cut, as happened in 2001 and 2003 and 2010, they have opted for the temporary tax cut. Now that Obama has come to endorse a temporary tax cut, they have stopped supporting it — a pattern we’ve seen on many other issues, as well. But the idea that the party has had some steady, policy-based objection to temporary tax cuts just doesn’t fit the record.

I’ll take the cynical views that Ezra mentions in his post.  Mitch McConnell’s stated goal was to keep President Obama to one term.  That’s pretty bold honesty from a politician.  To me, it looks like two things.  The Republicans are willing to screw the working poor and middle class to protect the rich.  The Republicans are also completely unwilling to do anything that President Obama wants to do, whether it’s good for the country or not.

During the budget ceiling and deficit reduction debate, Republicans were unwilling to consider any new revenues at all.  Let’s leave aside the obvious lie from Sen. Alexander (of course temporary measures help – all stimulus programs are temporary).  We need stimulus for this economy.  Some economists believe that the US economy is already in recession.  Again.  And all they’re doing in Washington is blathering on about the need for deficit reduction. 

We don’t need deficit reduction at all.  What we need is a robust jobs program.  We need to help the long term unemployed.  They face a real human catastrophe.  We need to get those people back to work.  The deficit will be reduced just by people working again and paying taxes again.  Keynes was right.  Government needs to step in during times when the economy is weak.  Republicans either forgot that, or don’t care.

The Republicans have forgotten – or again, don’t care – that they need to govern.  And that means doing what’s right, not trying to stack the deck with a weak economy so that Obama’s reelection chances are lessened.  A poor economy could benefit the Republicans weak presidential field in 2012.  So they do what they can to keep the economy weak and the working poor and middle class continue to suffer, and the Republicans rich friends keep getting richer.

The Misguided Deficit Reduction Meme

All the talk these days is about how the United States simply must reduce its budget deficit.  There’s a target reduction of $1.5 trillion over 10 years.  Democrats and Republicans, predictably, differ on how to get that done.  I think they’re both misguided at the moment.  We need to be focusing on jobs.

We seem to be forgetting our history in this country.  It’s a cliché, but those who don’t know history are doomed to repeat it.  We’re worried about reducing the deficit at a time when the economy is still sluggish, just as we did in the 1930s.  The difference here, though, is that there isn’t another world war on the horizon to pull us out of it.

It all comes back to jobs.  If we get people working again, like we did in the 1990s, we will increase tax receipts, which in turn reduces the deficit.  We have so many projects that need to be done.  The freeways are in horrible shape, as are airports, BART stations (to say nothing of their cars), bridges, and so on.  Some of this stimulus was done in 2009.  But much, much more is needed.  We absolutely have to get people working again.

Despite the Standard & Poor’s downgrade of US Treasury debt, interest rates on that debt remain incredibly cheap.  This is definitely the progressive, Keynesian view, but we should be borrowing more, not less, right now.  And then we need to be investing in infrastructure and other projects that get people working again.  If we can get companies hiring again, the economy will start to grow at a healthy rate.  And that will reduce the deficit, and the debt.

But instead, the Democrats (and let’s not forget the mainstream Republican complicity in this, using and abetting the tea party movement as a path back to power) let a small faction of extremely conservative people completely control the debate.  So any stimulus is dead on arrival.  And the economy just sputters along.  People’s lives just sputter along.  How does that serve anyone?