Budget Links and Where Do We Go From Here?

By now, everyone knows we’re in midst of the worst recession since World War II, and possibly the Great Depression.

Here’s a collection of graphs providing graphic representations of where we are right now, economically speaking.

And here’s some anecdotal evidence.

In response, President Obama has put forth a budget for fiscal year 2010, projecting into the next 10 years.

The budget bill includes the following:

• $634 billion for health reform, 2009-2019
• higher taxes on the affluent to pay for healthcare reform
• ending the gradual privatization of Medicare
• eliminating overpayments to insurance companies
• $645 billion in revenues: sale of emission allowances
• deficit reduction
• cuts to Agribusiness subsidies
• cuts to large-scale weapons systems
• increases in pay and benefits to military personnel
• elimination of student loan financial intermediaries

Here’s a detailed analysis by Robert Greenstein, executive director of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.

And unlike the Bush budgets, Obama’s is honest:.

At TNR, Bradford Plumer explores the White House’s assumptions in the budget regarding global warming (yes, we can call it global warming now):.

Many economists have expressed varying degrees of optimism regarding the Obama budget. Paul Krugman calls it “very, very good” while expressing concern about longer-term implications about deficits, social security and taxation, all of which he thinks we can address after the economy regains its equilibrium.

Pete Davis supports Obama’s efforts as well.

Stan Collander agrees.

Jeff Frankel, who was at first skeptical, is now enthusiastic about Obama’s budget and analyzes it in terms of its elimination of the various dishonest manipulations of past budgets (especially Bush’s) and its ability to lead to long-term deficit reduction here.

Here’s a collection of links to various reactions to the tax portions of Obama’s budget plan.

As we all know, the GOP is gearing up to present massive resistance to President Obama’s budget bill. This, of course, includes the tea parties being conducted around the country and may very well include use of the filibuster in Congress.

In response to current signs of GOP hostility to the budget bill and in anticipation of more in the coming months, the big scary libruls are gearing up to lobby for President Obama's budget legislation.

Healthcare expert Merrill Goozner discusses the healthcare portions of the Obama budget plan, discusses the politics of the coming battle, and issues a call to action to all of us.

It seems to me that if we expect to get out of this mess, and if we intend to reduce the deficit afterwards, deal with global warming, our declining public education system, our deteriorating healthcare system, and many of the other disasters bequeathed to us by Bush et al, we need to get this budget passed. I really don’t think anything else on any progressive agenda will get done without it.

If you agree, the next question is what we can do to support Obama’s efforts to get the budget through Congress. Please feel free to comment.

Just Like Lincoln

Yes, I know, we only have 4 more days before Barack Obama finally replaces the current occupant of the White House. Why get into a ruckus about Bush’s record? I guess the sheer enormity of the disasters that have befallen this country (and the planet) over the past 8 years makes mindless attempts to defend the record of the man who caused so many of them utterly intolerable to me.

This was prompted by my reading of this little tidbit on Talking Points Memo today about an article in Congressional Quarterly entitled (I kid you not) "History May See Lincoln-Like Greatness in Bush."

I can see what Richard L. Connor means. Bush, like Lincoln, has two arms, two legs and a head. In that sense, Bush is very "Lincoln-like."

Unfortunately, Connor's comparison crumbles after that.

I particularly like this tidbit:

Yes, there are any number of better decisions he could have made. Foremost among them would have been to bring a quick and decisive end to the war in Iraq shortly after it began.

Evidently, the idea of not invading Iraq in the first place seems not to have occurred to Connor. This indicates pretty clearly that he was vacationing on another planet for the past 6 years and thus never was informed that (1) Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11; (2) there were no WMD in Iraq; (3) Mohammed Atta never met with any Czech spy in Prague as claimed by Dick Cheney and others (he was in the U.S. at the time); (4) the Iraqis did not, contra Bush and Cheney, seek uranium yellowcake in Africa; (5) the UN weapons inspectors were able (admittedly, with difficulty) to inspect all the potential weapons manufacturing and storage sites they demanded to see; (6) the UN sanctions (regardless how problematic in re their effects on the Iraqi population) were still in place, as were the no-fly zones; (7) reports from people in the CIA and other government agencies, the transcript published in El Pais of Bush's conversation with Spanish PM Aznar, and the Downing Street memo all show clearly that the mindset in the White House was straight out of Alice in Wonderland: "first the sentence, then the evidence."

There's also this:

...he was commander in chief when the United States was attacked at home on September 11, 2001. He was decisive in his response and showed admirable leadership both at home and abroad.

Well, he was decisive all right, but doesn't it matter to Connor whether the decisions make sense or not? Invading the wrong country (necessitating a diversion of resources away from the hunt for al Qaeda, which DID attack us on 9/11) doesn't strike me as the brightest move I've ever heard of. Nor can I find anything admirable about it.

Connor goes on:

The nation now appears headed for disastrous financial calamity, the worst since The Great Depression. His administration has been forceful in trying to bring calm and to allocate money to industries fighting to survive.

And the economic woes of this country--just like other monumental, sea-change problems--did not simply appear one day or go away the next. Sure, this happened under his watch but the seeds for our mortgage, home loan crisis and those of the domestic automobile industry collapse were sown long before Bush first took office.

My, my. Again, our Olympian president exhibited forcefulness in addressing the economic crisis. I guess that's one way to characterize the dispensing of $350 billion to banks and other non-bank institutions (like AIG) without one iota of oversight--without, by the way, doing a thing for the millions of people drowning in mortgage debt--y'know, the proximate cause of the credit crunch supposedly addressed by the bailout? The money, by the way, went to banks that were relatively stable--not "industries fighting to survive." As to the latter, they still can't get any credit because the recipients of Bush's largess were less than --ahem-- forceful about extending credit once they got the bailout funds.

And by the way, does Connor really believe that 28 years of relentless GOP pressure to deregulate everything in sight, coupled with a pronounced hostility to government, had nothing to do with the economic crisis? More to the point, is Connor unaware that the GOP-supported Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act of 1999 broke down walls between commercial banks, investment banks and insurance companies, thus removing federal oversight from banks and enabling the development of precisely the kinds of risky financial instruments that are at the heart of the current crisis? It is true that the GOP had some help from Democrats, but overwhelmingly, it was the GOP, the Bush administration definitely included, that pushed deregulation from 1981 on with an intensity and persistence bordering on mania. Does Connor truly think that had nothing to do with the economic crisis?

Here's another gem:

If we begin to expect that any chief executive of anything--be it a country or a Fortune 500 company--cannot make a mistake or two among the hundreds, perhaps, thousands of decisions they make, then our standards have reached the point of ridiculousness.

Yes, a mistake or two. Let's do a tally (just off the top of my head--feel free to add your own):

Iraq (see above)
Afghanistan (see above)
The economy (see above)
Hurricane Katrina
Global Warming
Shredding of signed treaties
Contempt for science
Contempt for intellectual inquiry (numerous reports on this can be found in the memoirs of former Bush administration officials)
Politicization and polarization of the country in the aftermath of 9/11
Contempt for diplomacy
Official sanction of torture
Trashing of habeas corpus
A woman’s right to choose

Where on earth did CQ get this guy?

Surveying the Wreckage, Part 576

To get some idea of the sheer scale of the damage Bush & his cronies have done to our government for the past 8 years, take a look at this article in The American Prospect:

It's funny, but although the Prospect compiled quite a list, it somehow feels light. I'm sure there are many more atrocities, blunders and disasters in every category. I guess they had to narrow it down to meet length limits. I have a feeling we'll be mining this particular lode for the rest of our lives. I can't associate the term "productive" with the Bush maladministration, but they certainly have been industrious.

Did you hear that our soon-to-be-retiring (ahem) chief executive, not content to give farewell interview after interview, is now going to infest the airwaves with a farewell speech tomorrow [Correction--It'll be on Thursday.]? Like Sara Palin, he keeps burbling up into media coverage like a backed up toilet. Maybe all this frantic, last-minute self-promotion reflects a defensiveness over the overwhelming consensus that his administration has been a giant train wreck. Understanding is not justification, however. We've endured his idiocy for way too long. The least he can do is summon up enough grace to shut the hell up & sink back into the primordial swamp from whence he came. Kathy G says it all...

Special thanks for the tip to Avram & Linda.

The Tax Cut Scam Cometh (Again)

Obama wants a large stimulus package to avoid having the recession morph into a full-blown depression. He also wants broad bipartisan support for whatever economic plan comes out of Congress. Republicans in Congress, to the surprise of no one who's followed their legislative and ideological history, are steadfast on only one item--more tax cuts. Gee, I wonder which quartile of the population they see as their constituency?

The Economic Policy Institute put out a chart on October 22, courtesy of Moody's, illustrating the relative effectiveness of various approaches to the problem. See for yourself how tax cuts measure versus food stamps, extensions to unemployment insurance and public works projects (to name a few) in terms of effectiveness.

Here's a rather stringent commentary by Brad DeLong about GOP objections to the proposed stimulus package.

Mark Thoma takes a more nuanced approach to the issue of tax cuts, but he too is highly skeptical of the claims and motives of Republicans:.

Clearly, tax cuts can't be the most important component in a package designed to get the economy moving again. As DeLong notes in another post, they may, however, serve a useful political purpose for Obama.

And what would be the estimated effect of the proposed Obama plan on unemployment over the next two years? Tyler Cowan offers a graph showing that without the stimulus plan, unemployment reaches its peak & starts to decline a year later than it will if the stimulus plan goes into effect.

In case you're wondering, a 1% increase in unemployment--at current employment levels--adds up to approximately 1.5 million additional people out of work. (Since the current level isn't constant, 1.5 million is a very rough guess by a non-statistician. The point I'm trying to make, though, is not the specific number, but rather that differences in percentages can mean a lot of human beings.)

Keep this in mind as the debate unfolds over the economic plan in Congress. And now that you've been enlightened (!?!?), please contact your Congresscritters or, if you don't happen to live in a place where said creatures need to be pressured to do the right thing, pass the links above to friends/family/colleagues/etc. living in (ahem) less fortunate places and convince them to contact their alleged representatives in both houses of Congress and urge them to support a stimulus plan that does not rely on tax cuts as a central means of dealing with the economic crisis.

A (Very) Belated Note to My Readers

As you've undoubtedly noticed, I haven't been posting much since the election. There was no point at which I made a conscious decision to cut back on my posting; rather, a combination of things (exhaustion at the end of a year of furious election-related activities, issues related to work and family, an utter lack of interest in the non-stop stream of "news" stories consisting of little more than idle speculation about the choices and implications of Obama administration nominees) combined to divert my attention elsewhere.

I'd like to make a brief statement about the last item in my parenthesized list above. I realize that there are business reasons for the continual production of stories purporting to read the tea leaves about what the future will presumably hold in the upcoming administration. Newspapers/magazines/TV news shows/blogs all want to hold the attention of their audiences. This is especially true of those media outlets dependent on advertising for their income. Eyeballs translate to advertising dollars, etc. That's simply how the game works & I accept that.

On the other hand, I don't pretend for a second to have the ability to read minds or see into the future. Nor do I believe that any of the prognosticators claiming predictive powers have those abilities, either. Predictions about future political events, it seems to me, imply a relatively simple teleology in which objectively observable criteria translate in a relatively straightforward way into concrete political results. I think that implication is grossly misleading because it completely overlooks such imponderables as unforeseen events and, at least as important, the interpersonal dynamics involved, both within a given administration and between that administration and its political constituencies and opponents, domestic as well as foreign.

By way of a quick illustration of what I mean, consider for a moment a few historical examples. Imagine for a moment the possible alternative paths that our political history might have taken had (a) Richard Nixon won the 1960 election rather than JFK; (b) the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King not been assassinated in 1968; (c) the GOP had not decided to cater to the far right with their tacit acceptance of Sen. Joseph McCarthy's witch hunt tactics in the 1950s, Nixon's southern strategy, and their appeals to the religious right from Reagan to the current infestation of the White House. Imagine, for that matter, the kinds of presidential candidates political parties would and would not have been willing to nominate were American culture not afflicted with a widespread attitude according to which hostility to elitism translates to a hostility toward education. Imagine further that the social arrangements into which we've all been socialized since birth were considered to be not merely an accepted natural order of things, but the cumulative results of a series of choices made by humans in response to changing events and contexts.

The point I'm trying to make is that history, culture and politics are the combination of social context, individual personalities and chance. I don't know how those things will shape our world. I feel confident in Obama's ability to make reasoned, principled, humane decisions in the interest of our country and this planet. I have no idea how things will happen. So I wait.

In the interim, as I find things of interest to mull over, I'll share them with you. You have been warned... ;-)

Another Reason I Support Obama

Today's New York Times profile of Cassandra Q. Butts, Barack Obama's nominee for the positions of White House counsel’s office, White House adviser, and assistant to the president for personnel includes this crucial detail:

Is linked to Mr. Obama by: ...She still has his constitutional law book, which she seized as hostage back in college when she lent him a Miles Davis/John Coltrane album [emphasis mine] that he has yet to return.

While I am certainly not an advocate of borrowing things and then not returning them, I'm greatly encouraged by the item involved.

Oh, by the way--Merry Christmas/Happy Hanukkah/Happy Kwanzaa to all. And a Happy New Year, while I'm at it.

Look—A Bird!

Now that the economy is tanking, free market absolutists and various GOP apologists are, predictably enough, twisting themselves into pretzels attempting to dodge responsibility for this latest and perhaps most spectacular of a seemingly endless series of Bush administration disasters. It’s all the fault of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, they claimed. No, it’s those nasty unions. When in doubt, blame Bill Clinton and racial minorities.

Before anyone forgets, here’s a Washington Post article outlining specific things the Bush administration did and did not do to help our economy crumble into the worst recession in years.