Tag: Recovery X

Economic Policy Institute gives us a simple chart:

38.7% of all of the income growth accrued to the upper 1% over the 1979-2007 period: a greater share than the 36.3% share received by the entire bottom 90% of the population.

Those in the top 10% of the income scale received 63.7% of all the income growth generated over the 1979-2007 period. In contrast, the bottom 20% of all earners saw such a small share of income growth – just 0.4% – that it barely shows up on the included pie chart.

Let’s repeat: over the last ~30 years, the top 10% got about 60% of all income growth. Everybody else: not so much.
There should be no speech, no appearance, no utterance, no anything involving any Democrat anywhere a camera, microphone, or goodly crowd may gather that does not include this chart. Every time, every day, every hour between now and November.

Don’t hold your breath.

Never confuse “plan” and “scenario”

Alyssa Battistoni notes the creeping cost of “privatization” (read: funding cuts) that is resulting in kids being sent to school with their own toilet paper because the school will not be providing any:

The worst-case scenario, though, is that reduced public spending on essential goods and services will continue to hollow out our infrastructure and reduce our capacity to meet the needs of most Americans. And that rather than have a real conversation about which public goods we consider essential and what we’re willing to do to pay for them, we’ll gradually starve core programs until working- and middle-class Americans grow accustomed to a lower standard of living while better-off Americans pay out of pocket for benefits that everyone once enjoyed.

We’ll leave aside her usage of “backdoor privatization” in this context and just say that this is not some worst case scenario, but rather is a succinct encapsulation of the GOP “roadmap” for America’s “future.”
However: if you’re explaining, you’re losing; let’s instead get all Democrats saying this rather elegant formulation (from Natasha Chart):

Because nothing says ‘superpower’ like when your public schools can’t afford toilet paper.

Cheap and effective.

No, this has nothing to do with sound economic policy. [It’s] about a dysfunctional and corrupt political culture, in which Congress won’t take action to revive the economy, pleads poverty when it comes to protecting the jobs of schoolteachers and firefighters, but declares cost no object when it comes to sparing the already wealthy even the slightest financial inconvenience.

Paul Krugman summarizing in 50 words or less exactly why all of us on drugs out here are dispirited.

Obama’s Watergate

This paragraph from Yglesias got me thinking:

This is the oddity of American politics in 2010. To simply appropriate funds to give to poor foreigners (”foreign aid”) is hideously unpopular and politically unthinkable. To appropriate funds to give to state governments to keep the public sector operating is also politically untenable. But to appropriate the funds to build facilities for Americans but located in Afghanistan is easy.

In a nutshell: while we’re turning out the streetlights in Colorado and chopping up paved roads that states can no longer manage to pay up-keep on (and etc…), the Congress can always find plenty of money for our overseas adventures.

So: whoever Obama’s edition of Oliver North is, that person should build up some kind of sufficiently large yet sufficiently innocuous project that just needs doing over to Afghanistan. Money in hand, said North should then redirect that money to secret infrastructure improvements in this country. We can call it the Tuttle Initiative. Tuttlegate inevitably follows.

That this seems not only doable but probably the only way such a project gets done says a lot about our collapsing empire. Tap tap tap.

Message Consistency

Bob Corker (R ,TN) 2009: After the president forced the firing of General Motors chief executive G. Richard Wagoner Jr., Republican Sen. Bob Corker (Tenn.) proclaimed Obama’s actions “truly breathtaking” and said the government ownership roles at Chrysler and GM “should send a chill through all Americans who believe in free enterprise.”
Bob Corker (R, TN) 2010: The ideas we [Republicans] laid out there were followed through. I take some pleasure out of helping make that contribution. . . . I think what we did is we forced a debate and we forced a hard look at these companies.

No One Could Have Expected

Are you trying to tell me that immigrants spend money?

In a 2008 study, she found that Arizona immigrants contributed $29 billion annually to the state economy, representing about 8% of its activity.

When immigrants leave, Gans said, “stores experience dramatic drops in sales. Apartment owners who rent to immigrants have high vacancy rates and risk losing their buildings. Legal workers or renters or consumers don’t generally step in quickly enough to prevent these businesses from experiencing real additional hardship.”

At 43rd and Thomas, such short-term economic perils are no abstraction.

“If people don’t come here, I don’t make money and I don’t pay taxes,” Katchi said.

[…]

merchants say the repercussions are clear — not just in how it’s prompted many families to leave the state, but scared others enough to curtail their regular activities.

“The economy’s already bad, but on top of it [SB 1070] is like a bullet in the head to us,” said Osameh Odeh, 35, whose Eden Wear clothing store was empty one recent afternoon. “People don’t come out of their houses anymore.”

Odeh has laid off workers and doesn’t pay his utility bills until the day they come due. He’s not sure he can stay open and notes that the effect spreads well beyond the rough-and-tumble streets of Maryvale. A resident of the middle-class suburb of Gilbert, Odeh has cut back his purchases at home.

No One Could Have Expected

The Plan

Ezra Klein notes the outcome of some polling on what the average American thinks should be done:

1. Raise the limit on taxable earnings so it covers 90% of total earnings.
2. Reduce spending on health care and non-defense discretionary spending by at least 5%.
3. Raise tax rates on corporate income and those earning more than $1 million.
4. Raise the age for receiving full Social Security benefits to 69.
5. Reduce defense spending by 10% – 15%.
6. Create a carbon and securities-transaction tax.

I don’t see any of these that are antithetical to the broad strokes of Democratic policy, at least as it has played out under Obama. Plus, these are the popular ideas. So steal them. This should be the Aims for a Renewed America (or whatever). You run on it across the board. Individual candidates may feel free to leaven in some Wall St. Fatcat mentions such that they can play down #4.

You’ve already allowed the Republicans to devestate whatever recovery there was…you’d damned well better have a platform that, in a stroke, both recognizes that we have a serious problem and outlines real, substantive, measurable ways to address it. Starting our First Day back in the Congress.

You got a better idea, Reid? Didn’t think so.

southpol:

The Third Depression:

We are now, I fear, in the early stages of a third depression. It will probably look more like the Long Depression than the much more severe Great Depression. But the cost — to the world economy and, above all, to the millions of lives blighted by the absence of jobs — will nonetheless be immense.

And this third depression will be primarily a failure of policy. Around the world — most recently at last weekend’s deeply discouraging G-20 meeting — governments are obsessing about inflation when the real threat is deflation, preaching the need for belt-tightening when the real problem is inadequate spending.

I’d agree with all that Krugman says above (and in the editorial), but take small issue with this part:

In the face of this grim picture, you might have expected policy makers to realize that they haven’t yet done enough to promote recovery.

I think the GOP leadership realizes all too well that not enough has been done. They have chosen to use the crisis for short-term political gain. There is no other explanation for the withdrawal of unemployment benefits. None. They just want to maximize pain to the citizens out there that may be inclined to vote come 2010 and, more urgently from the GOP perspective, in the 2012 follow-on when they could well be poised to take power in both branches.

Then, of course, they’ll fix it all with a rigorous program of tax cuts for the wealthy. Which is touched on in the closer:

And who will pay the price for this triumph of orthodoxy? The answer is, tens of millions of unemployed workers, many of whom will go jobless for years, and some of whom will never work again.

Yep.