Contending Obama -- critics of the Presidents economic policy

The prophets of doom

Meet the Cassandras, 14 economists, bloggers, politicians and businesspeople of all political stripes who have become the most strident critics of President Obama's stewardship of the economy.

on tax reform... which is need in a bad way...

Taxing times for tax policy

It makes you wonder if the tax reform thing is serious.

Moreover, recent history on tax reform panels is not encouraging.  You might recall that President Bush also called for tax reform, and his bipartisan panel produced a pretty good plan.  But Bush pretended that some other president had asked for the report and ignored it. 

Obama's also not making this easy.  For one thing, his tax proposals would further gum up the tax code.  For example, his proposal to limit itemized deductions has gotten charities in a tither because they think it would stifle philanthropy. But it’s also really, really complicated.  Think “alternative maximum deduction,” cousin to the dreaded Alternative Minimum Tax.  Not a good idea.

And Obama would add to the hodge podge of credits and deductions that already mystify the tax system. 

Another problem: Obama keeps promising to never, ever raise taxes on 95 percent of Americans.  That pretty much rules out meaningful reform because you can't replace an irrational system with a rational one without changing some people's taxes.  Unless you're talking about major tax cuts (a bad idea), some people's taxes have to go up.

The president and the country have a unique opportunity to rethink taxes.  The stimulus bill passed in January enacted many of Obama's tax campaign promises through 2010, and most of the Bush tax cuts also run through '10.   If we’re very lucky and the economy recovers over the next year, the president will have a truckload of political capital that he could use to enact meaningful reform.

Meanwhile, let’s take a “time out” from unnecessary tax changes while we figure out how to make the tax system simpler, fairer, and maybe even capable of raising enough to pay for government. 

Posted via web from jimnichols's posterous

tax day

Via the inbox

As President Obama moves to make significant changes in the Federal budget, we're forever hearing that the rich pay too much, that their taxes should be cut (and cut...and cut...and cut), but the opposite is true. There are some surprises here. See especially Lakoff's article:

"Progressive Taxation: Some Hidden Truths." By George Lakoff, Bruce Budner
http://www.rockridgeinstitute.org/research/lakoff/progressive-taxation-some-hidden-truths

"Gilded Age Taxation." By Robert L. Borosage, Eric Lotke and Hillary Hampton. Institute for America's Future. April 13, 2009.
http://assets.ourfuture.org/documents/eco-20090410-gilded-taxation.pdf

"Is 'Tax Day' Too Burdensome for the Rich?: The U.S. Tax System Is Not as Progressive as You Think"
http://salsa.democracyinaction.org/dia/track.jsp?v=2&c=z%2FhsrYZ6mJ6AMIC1NyX%2FKJJKeHGRI%2B0D

"Answers to Your Tax Day Questions"
http://salsa.democracyinaction.org/dia/track.jsp?v=2&c=oXpaiwWlzynaBXenxDyKTpJKeHGRI%2B0D

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What Would a "Bipartisan" Obama Look Like?

 (Hint: A Lot Like the One We're Seeing)

More essentially, however, bipartisanship, as Obama intended the term, should not necessarily be confused for "compromise". Rather, it implied behaving in good-faith -- hearing out opinions from different sides of the aisle and identifying the best ideas regardless of their partisan origin. Bipartisanship, to Obama, was a process rather than an outcome. He could plausibly have been acting in a bipartisan manner, even if he hadn't gotten many Republicans to go along with his agenda.

As Mark Schmitt wrote in his excellent article on the Obama's "theory of change" in December 2007:

What I find most interesting about Obama's approach to bipartisanship is how seriously he takes conservatism. As Michael Tomasky describes it in his review of The Audacity of Hope, "The chapters boil down to a pattern: here's what the right believes about subject X, and here's what the left believes; and while I basically side with the left, I think the right has a point or two that we should consider, and the left can sometimes get a little carried away." What I find fascinating about his language about unity and cross-partisanship is that it is not premised on finding Republicans who agree with him, but on taking in good faith the language and positions of actual conservatism -- people who don't agree with him. That's very different from the longed-for consensus of the Washington Post editorial page.

The reason the conservative power structure has been so dangerous, and is especially dangerous in opposition, is that it can operate almost entirely on bad faith. It thrives on protest, complaint, fear: higher taxes, you won't be able to choose your doctor, liberals coddle terrorists, etc. One way to deal with that kind of bad-faith opposition is to draw the person in, treat them as if they were operating in good faith, and draw them into a conversation about how they actually would solve the problem. If they have nothing, it shows. And that's not a tactic of bipartisan Washington idealists -- it's a hard-nosed tactic of community organizers, who are acutely aware of power and conflict. It's how you deal with people with intractable demands -- put ‘em on a committee. Then define the committee's mission your way.

Perhaps I'm making assumptions about the degree to which Obama is conscious that his pitch is a tactic of change. But his speeches show all the passion of Edwards or Clinton, his history is as a community organizer and aggressive reformer (I first heard his name 10 years ago because he was on the board of the Joyce Foundation in Chicago, which was the leading supporter of real campaign finance reform at the time, and he has shown extraordinary political skill in drawing Senator Clinton into a clumsy overreaction. If we understand Obama's approach as a means, and not the limit of what he understands about American politics, it has great promise as a theory of change, probably greater promise than either "work for it" or "demand it," although we'll need a large dose of hard work and an engaged social movement as well.

Note that, in Schmitt's explication of Obama's "bipartisanship", we are operating somewhat in the conditional tense. We start by assuming that one's opponents are acting in good faith, extending an olive branch to them and therefore pressing the reset button on the ongoing game of tit-for-tat. If the opponent demonstrates that they are not acting in good faith, however, all bets are off and we are back in the partisan game.

Have the Republicans in Congress been behaving in good faith? It is easy to argue that they have not been:

Exhibit A: The Stimulus Package. The stimulus package proposed by the Obama administration contained less public spending, and more tax cuts, than most liberal economists were calling for. And yet, it received zero Republican votes in the House. Nor did any House Republicans vote for the conference report after the bill had passed the Senate, even though it represented tangible movement toward the Republican position.

Exhibit B: TARP. Sixteen Republican Senators -- Bennett, Bond, Burr, Chambliss, Collins, Coburn, Ensign, Graham, Grassley, Hutchison, Isakson, Martinez, McCain, McConnell, Specter and Thune -- voted to withhold the second half of the $700 billion in TARP funds, even though they had voted to authorize the TARP program in October when George W. Bush was still in office. Although one can certainly have changed one's position on TARP based on the facts and circumstances on the ground, it is unlikely that almost half of the remaining Republican delegation would have changed their position within 60 days based on the sanctity of the ideas alone.

Exhibit C: The Budget. One fairly inscrutable characteristic of good faith negotiation is that one is willing to offer an intellectually coherent alternative. This is not something which can be said of the Republican budget, where the numbers, such as they are, don't really add up.

Exhibit D: Nomination Holds. Republican efforts to delay the appointment of two key members of Obama's Council of Economic Advisers, as well as his Labor Secretary, are hard to justify from any position other than partisan gamesmanship.

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brought to you and made by socialism

Obsidian Wings: The Regulatory Origins of the Internet:

Patrick Ruffini argues that Obama's alleged regulatory overreaching could (or at least should) move Silicon Valley back into the Republican camp.  I'm not really diving into that, but I wanted to quibble with this statement:

The irony here is that many of the entreprenuers who succeeded in the most unregulated environment possible -- the Internet -- are at once hyper-capitalist and socially-liberal Obama voters. (Good luck creating Twitter or Facebook in any industry as tightly regulated as the auto or banking sectors in the Age of Obama.)

This really can't be repeated enough -- the Internet was regulated.  Regulation is what made it work.  Indeed, the Internet's phenomenal success stemmed directly from the underlying common carrier regulation that made it possible. There was no immaculate conception.  The Internet came about because of sustained federal funding for research and development.  Originally, the data services that ultimately evolved into what we now call "the Internet" depended entirely on access to the underlying phone networks. And so when these data services got going, the federal government faced a choice.  A crossroads, if you will.  The government could ensure that Internet/data services had nondiscriminatory access to the underlying phone networks on which they "rode."  Or, it could have allowed the phone companies (i.e., AT&T) to dictate the terms of access.  (This is basically how most wireless service in America works -- it's the "walled garden" approach.  And don't you loves it?).

Wisely, in the Computer Inquiries proceedings, the FCC opted for open, nondiscriminatory access.  The Twitters of yesteryear didn't need permission from AT&T to start their business.  The nondiscriminatory access that made the Internet successful didn't happen because AT&T was full of benevolent, far-seeing souls.  It was because of government regulation.  (On an aside, that's why the fight over net neutrality is actually a battle to maintain a ridiculously successful status quo).

Given that the Internet is probably the single greatest advance of mankind since the printing press, you could plausibly argue that the Internet is regulation's crown jewel.

Posted via web from jimnichols's posterous

Sarah Palin's looks hurt Republicans last November

So says a recent study, Sarah Palin - Objectification - Reaction - Situation

Two researchers at the University of South Florida have developed a study that suggests . . . that a random group of Republicans and independents asked to focus on Palin’s attractiveness felt less likely to vote for the GOP ticket in last November’s elections.

“The idea is that when you focus on a woman’s appearance, this objectifies her, or turns her into an object in your eyes,” said Jamie L. Goldenberg, an associate professor of psychology at USF and co-author of the study, titled “Objectifying Sarah Palin: Evidence that Objectification Causes Women to be Perceived as Less Competent and Fully Human.” “What we found is these perceptions influenced people’s likelihood of voting.”

In their experiment, Goldenberg and graduate student Nathan A. Heflick assembled a group of 133 undergraduates at the school a month before the election. After noting their characteristics — 27 percent were male, 45 percent were Democrats, 24 percent were Republicans and the rest were independents — they were randomly separated into four groups.

Two groups were asked to write about Palin and two groups were asked to write about actor Angelina Jolie. Within each pair, one group was asked to write their thoughts and feelings about the subject’s appearance, and the other was asked to write about the person. They then asked respondents how they would vote in the coming election.

Goldenberg said that, after factoring out Democratic respondents (who solidly supported Obama), the Republicans and independents asked to write about Palin’s appearance said they were less likely to vote GOP than those who simply considered Palin as a person.

“There was an overall tendency to perceive Sarah Palin as less competent than Angelina Jolie,” said Goldenberg, noting their results fell in line with previous studies indicating that, in high status and political jobs, attractive women were perceived as less competent in ways attractive men and women in other jobs were not.

. . . .Goldenberg said the study, which is to be published in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, may spark more questions than it answers.

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Baracknophobia...

Baracknophobia: Hannity, Bachmann, And Beck Terrified Of Obama (VIDEO)

"the mid-term election are coming up in 20 months... pace your rage!"

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Obama mimics Bush on State Secrets

Expert Consensus: Obama Mimics Bush On State Secrets

Is the Obama administration mimicking its predecessor on issues of secrecy and the war on terror?

 

During the presidential campaign, Obama criticized Bush for being too quick to invoke the state secrets claim. But last Friday, his Justice Department filed a motion in a warrantless wiretapping lawsuit, brought by the digital-rights group EFF. And the Obama-ites took a page out of the Bush DOJ's playbook by demanding that the suit, Jewel v. NSA, be dismissed entirely under the state secrets privilege, arguing that allowing it go forward would jeopardize national security.

Coming on the heels of the two other recent cases in which the new administration has asserted the state secrets privilege, the motion sparked outrage among civil libertarians and many progressive commentators. Salon's Glenn Greenwald wrote that the move "demonstrates that the Obama DOJ plans to invoke the exact radical doctrines of executive secrecy which Bush used." MSNBC's Keith Olbermann called it "deja vu all over again". An online petition -- "Tell Obama: Stop blocking court review of illegal wiretapping" -- soon appeared.

Not having Greenwald's training in constitutional law (and perhaps lacking Olbermann's all-conquering self-confidence), we wanted to get a sense from a few independent experts as to how to assess the administration's position on the case. Does it represent a continuation of the Bushies' obsession with putting secrecy and executive power above basic constitutional rights? Is it a sweeping power grab by the executive branch, that sets set a broad and dangerous precedent for future cases by asserting that the government has the right to get lawsuits dismissed merely by claiming that state secrets are at stake, without giving judges any discretion whatsoever?

In a word, yes.

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Obama is a "socialist" (in as big and scary of a voice as I can muster...)

Really Existing Socialism

Since 1989 American conservatives have been saying that European countries like France, Germany, Sweden, Britain, and Spain are "socialist." They are pretty nice places: lots of parks, lots of museums, good public transportation, no worries about being unable to pay for health care, good food, wine that approaches that of California, et cetera.

As a result, when you ask the young about "socialism" they think of wetern Europe--quite a change from the days when really existing socialism was East Germany or the Soviet Union.

Posted via web from jimnichols's posterous

Ocean of debt

Jason Pye is on the long term deficit crisis meme... I'll outsource to economist Brad Delong on this one...

We need to worry about the deficits in 2015, 2020, 2025, and beyond--not about the deficits in 2009, 2010, and 2011...

The key to dealing with the deficits in 2015, 2020, 2025, and beyond is--you guessed it--health care. That is the entire ballgame...

[These] long-run deficits...are not much, much worse than they were in 2003--they are somewhat better. Obama has cut the long-run deficit. Bush boosted it. It remains a big problem--but it's not a problem of Clinton's or Obama's or Pelosi's or Reed's creation, it's a problem created by Bush and his cheerleaders

CEPR's done the leg work regarding this with their IOUSA Budget Deficit Calculator which:

allows you to see what the projected U.S. budget deficit would be, as a percentage of GDP, if the United States had the same per person health care costs as various other countries which enjoy longer life expectancies than the United States.

Its time we join the rest of the industrialized world and have some form of Universal Health Care reform--those who oppose competition in the marketplace, which would hurt the profits of insurance companies and help lower the costs for consumers--are the ones creating this long term crisis.

As if ranking 37th in the world for health care isn't bad enough for people... our kids are paying to subsidize private profits...

To see more on our progress in regards to the budget itself you can check out Congressional Budgets Pass Early Tests on Deficits and Economy, but Questions Remain from CBPP

On the whole, the budget plans that the House and Senate approved yesterday pass the twin tests of: (1) beginning to address long-term deficits, or at least not making these deficits worse; and (2) not undermining the fiscal stimulus Congress recently passed. [i] The Senate’s adoption, however, of amendments that are intended both to facilitate a further large tax cut for the estates of the nation’s wealthiest individuals and to make it less likely that Congress will allow the Bush tax cuts to expire for people at the top of the income scale suggests that significant dangers lie ahead. The adoption of these measures raises questions about Senators’ professed concerns about deficits and debt and about whether Congress has the fortitude to begin making hard choices.

From the In-box

Apprears MoveOn.Org is calling for Summers to be fired as advisors to the President:

Click here to tell Treasury Secretary Geithner: "We can't trust the same people who got us into this financial mess to help lead us out...

Let us not forget that he was a key player (the name Rubin comes to mind as well) in creating this crisis.

sigh... a boy can dream can't he?

Obama channels Cheney and McCain | Juan Cole

Obama channels Cheney and McCain | Juan Cole:

"President Barack Obama may or may not be doing the right thing in Afghanistan, but the rationale he gave for it on Friday is almost certainly wrong. Obama has presented us with a 21st century version of the domino theory. The U.S. is not, contrary to what the president said, mainly fighting 'al-Qaida' in Afghanistan. In blaming everything on al-Qaida, Obama broke with his pledge of straight talk to the public and fell back on Bush-style boogeymen and implausible conspiracy theories."

Go read the whole thing, Juan Cole knows his stuff.

competition is good for the marketplace

The Case For A Public Health Care Plan

Though President Obama and 73 percent of voters strongly support a new public health insurance plan that can compete with private insurers equally and transparently within an insurance exchange, some lawmakers have indicated that a public plan may not be part of the final reform legislation.

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repeating Japan's mistakes....

Does Obama Have a Plan B?

In short, the U.S. government is looking to shovel capital into the banks without sufficient conditions, hiding rather than confronting the actual situation.

That is just like the Japanese government in their lost decade, or the U.S. officials during the 1980s before they really tackled the savings-and-loan crisis. In those cases, the delay simply made the problem worse over time and in the end the government had to put more money into the troubled banks directly, taking over or shutting down the weakest of them. Whatever the political culture, it would seem we have not learned from experience. Or perhaps we cannot act on our learning. The universal barrier would appear to be the political difficulty of recapitalizing banks. That seems obvious, but the constraint it puts on good policy is enormous.

That is why the Geithner plan is so complex and jury-rigged, to avoid the need for public requests for more money for banks. Unfortunately, it is unlikely to succeed absent additional public money and more-intrusive government action. The plan will buy some time and certainly some appreciation in bank share prices. Current shareholders will be getting a new lease on life with subsidies from taxpayers. For that reason alone, the plan certainly will cost the taxpayer more in the end than a more direct recapitalization with public control would have.

A year or two down the road, we will know for certain whether it worked. By then the banks will either return to normal pre-crisis lending or they will be both too distrusted and too distrustful even to borrow from each other again. As we have seen over the last 18 months, the latter is what near- insolvent banks do. When I was working with the U.S. Council of Economic Advisers and the Japanese business federation Keidanren in 2001-02 encouraging the Japanese government to do finally what was needed, it was the commitment of public money with tough conditions on the banks that we pushed for, and it was the normalization of the interbank market and then of lending behavior that showed success.

In essence, the U.S. Treasury’s plan to subsidize private investors’ purchases of the banks’ toxic assets is a too-clever-by-half mechanism to fix the banks while avoiding going to Congress for more upfront on-budget expenditures. One can imagine the discussions at the White House: We have a budget to pass, and cannot give up those goals to give the bankers still more. Figure out some way to do this off-budget. And so the Geithner plan hugely bribes private investors with taxpayer money, as Simon Johnson, Paul Krugman, Jeffrey Sachs, and I have all described, with one-way government insured bets. Yet the bets are contingent, they only pay when the taxpayer loses—and those losses first appear on the Fed or FDIC balance sheet, not subject to congressional approval.

I know that the very same self-limiting discussions took place at Okurasho, the Japanese Ministry of Finance circa 1995-1998. And they ended with the same result, a series of bank-recapitalization plans that tried to mobilize private-sector monies and overpay for distressed bank assets without forcing the banks to truly write off the losses. Even though the top Japanese technocrats at the ministry were even more insulated from a weak Diet than the congressionally unconfirmed advisers currently running economic policy for the Obama administration, they did worse. Whatever the political context, countries usually try to end banking crises on the cheap, with a limited public role at first, overpaying for distressed assets and failing to change banks’ behavior, only to have to go back in a couple of years later.

I hope the Geithner plan, combined with the other financial measures under way, proves to be an exception to the rule and succeeds in stabilizing the U.S. banking system. It could remove some of the bad assets from the banks’ balance sheets and put some capital into the banks. Even in that best case, though, it is clear that the avoidance of on-budget costs makes it penny-wise, pound-foolish, for the U.S. taxpayer. It will likely cost the taxpayer more on net, between the subsidies given and the transfer of most upside gains to the private investors, and the overpayments to current bank shareholders for toxic assets. If the U.S. government steps in more aggressively to take full ownership and pays a low price for these assets, the taxpayer would stand to get the full upside, even though it would require more cash up front. That would still be better than the Japanese experience.

But the pattern of these crises—Japan in the 1990s or the U.S. in the 1980s, and elsewhere around the world—leads me to believe that this partial fix will be temporary at best. The banks will still have the worst toxic assets on their books; their managers and shareholders’ incentives will not have changed. The banks will be playing with a fresh stack of public money with insufficient strings and probably insufficient capital. Then, 18 months or so down the road, the U.S. government will still have to put capital into the banks, because credit markets will break down again, with many banks again under water. But in that case, the necessary recapitalization would have to take place after this round of money is squandered and the current fiscal stimulus will have run out.

Part of the problem is that some of these distressed assets are genuinely toxic. They cannot be consistently valued and priced by anyone because they are part of larger securitized packages and so purchasers cannot disentangle the underlying investments behind them. Under the Treasury plan, those toxic assets are not restructured, but sold as-is just because of the federal guarantee offered against losses. Restructuring these assets would require government supermajority ownership, which so far seems to be politically unpalatable. In which case, the FDIC will end up paying out on the insurance for overpriced assets.

What the Obama team is proposing is disconcertingly similar to the actions of Japanese Prime Ministers Hashimoti, Obuchi, and Mori in 1995 and 1998: Rather than ask the legislature for straightforward recapitalization money, you have the political leadership preferring to risk overpaying current owners of toxic assets rather than forcing sales. For all of Japan’s supposed intervention in markets, its government still lacked the stomach for taking over banks, let alone closing them.

H.G. Wells, London, and the failure of summits By Dani Rodrik

What will a future H.G. Wells say of the London summit?

TPMDC | Talking Points Memo | Before Coming to the White House, Orszag Called For 'Clarity' on Insolvent Banks

Talking Points Memo | Before Coming to the White House, Orszag Called For "Clarity" on Insolvent Banks

Before he became White House budget director, Peter Orszag headed the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office -- and in a little-noticed blog post six months ago, he called for "more clarity" on the relative solvency of individual banks as a means to help heal the economic crisis.

Orszag's call for transparency about the financial health of banks came during the early days of the bailout debate, before the Bush Treasury Department abandoned its plan to purchase toxic assets from banks and decided to provide large-scale capital injections instead. The bulk of his blog post is dedicated to a defense of mark-to-market accounting standards, which government financial regulators are about to relax.

Yet Orszag's emphasis on clarifying the solvency question is worth heeding as the Obama Treasury sends mixed signals on whether the results of its coming bank "stress tests" will be made public. The head of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation said last month that the administration would look to the banks themselves to reveal the outcome of the "stress tests" to the public, while the Times reported outright that not every bank's solvency information would be openly revealed.

TPMCafe | Talking Points Memo | Rush Gets Played by Rahm

TPMCafe | TalkingPoints Memo | Rush Gets Played by Rahm

I had lunch with a very conservative friend today. We haven't seem eachother since early October of last year, before the Obama victory. The lunch was very civil and we found some common ground when my friend said upfront, he was glad Obama beat McCain and Palin. And then we found some more common ground on Health and Education Reform. So the meal was a lot less tempestuous than I expected. As we were getting in our cars, I asked him "How did Rush allow himself to get played like a stradavarius by Rahm Emanuel?".

It was at this point that my friend went ballistic on me and said "Obama was a chicken" not to debate Limbaugh one on one, like Rush has been asking on the air for weeks.

As I was driving away he was still ranting and I thought, only if Rush is the Republican Presidential candidate in four years, will he actually get a one on one debate with President Obama. Until then, he's just a bystander who helps the Democrats attract the 80% of the country who think El Rushbo is a drug addled loon.

Because he is becoming the Republican Brand, Limbaugh will find out just how small his "base" of white males really is. This is what I call the "Whig" strategy. Make your party's base so small that centrist's (like Abe Lincoln leaving the Whigs) break away and form a new party. Leaving you with just the dittoheads and the crackers.

I think its actually quite shocking how most conservatives I know in GA don't realize what a small group they are. I had great working relationships with Republicans in California... I have next to nothing in common with folks here. I'm not really sure why. One thing I noticed is that most "debates" on issues that I had with Republicans in Cali were productive and I learned a lot from. Most "debates" here are spent dwelling on basic facts, and acknowledgement of how government, markets, human beings exist.

Then again, notice I keep saying "Republicans in California." I guess the point is most Republicans here in GA are conservatives.

Keep on talking Rush... keep on talking. It only helps Barrack Hussein Obama, which will hopefully mean a new New Deal coalition of moderates, liberals, and the left.

Former Labor Secretary Robert Reich on Obamanomics

Marketplace: Introducing the era of Obamanomics

Robert Reich:

After more than a quarter century, the era of Reaganomics is over, replaced by Obamanomics.

The first principle of Reaganomics was that lower taxes on the wealthy made them work harder and invest more, and the benefits trickle down to everyone else. Rarely in economic history has a theory been more tested in the real world and proven so wrong. Nothing trickled down. After the Reagan tax cuts, the median wage slowed, adjusted for inflation. After George W. Bush's tax cuts for the wealthy, the median wage actually dropped.

Meanwhile, most of the income went to the top. In 1980, just before the Reagan revolution, the richest 1 percent took home 9 percent of total national income. But by 2007, the richest 1 percent was taking home 22 percent. Obamanomics, by contrast, will increase taxes on the top, and it will use these proceeds to raise the living standards of average Americans by giving them lower taxes, better schools, and more affordable health insurance.

Reaganomics' second principle was that deregulated markets function better. Well, energy markets were deregulated and we wound up with Enron. Carbon emissions weren't controlled, and now we face global warming. Financial markets were deregulated and we have a global meltdown. Obamanomics, by contrast, accepts important roles for government: Creating incentives for non-fossil based energy, setting an overall cap on carbon emissions, and ensuring the solvency and security of financial companies.

The third and least well-known principle of Reaganomics is that government can keep the economy moving full tilt by spending like crazy and not worrying too much about budget deficits. Reagan's big spending was on national defense. Some of us called it "military Keynesianism." Problem was, it didn't stop when the economy got to capacity, thereby threatening inflation. Obama's stimulus intends to avoid this by reducing deficits as the nation moves back toward full capacity.

Under Reaganomics, government is the problem. It can still be a problem. But Obanaomics at least recognizes there are even bigger problems out there that can't be solved without government.

I could learn from Obama...

David Pacini a Philosopher over at Emory has always pushed me to look long term and be more stoic, in fact he turned me on to the Stoics when we first met. Epictitus' The Art of Living is one of the most influential works I have ever read.

Pacini has pointed to how smart Obama is at navigating politics, and I have to agree, bumps in the road not withstanding the guy is shrewed, elegant, and restrained. I guess you'd call him a leader?

Thought Bob Herbert had some good points this morning in the Times:

While Lindsey Graham was behaving like a 6-year-old on the Senate floor and Pete Sessions was studying passages in his Taliban handbook, Mr. Obama and his aides were assessing what's achievable in terms of stimulus legislation and how best to get there.

I'd personally like to see a more robust stimulus package, with increased infrastructure spending and fewer tax cuts. But the reality is that Mr. Obama needs at least a handful of Republican votes in the Senate to get anything at all done, and he can't afford to lose this first crucial legislative fight of his presidency.

The Democrats may succeed in bolstering their package somewhat in conference, but I think Mr. Obama would have been satisfied all along to start his presidency off with an $800 billion-plus stimulus program.

The leadership is refreshing because I think it leads to good government, which will help end some of the apathy and frustration of nonvoters... which is vital to have in a healthy democracy--which for better or worse is something to desire.

Professor President

Appiah on Obama