Posted inPolitics: National

Democrats are stupid

When Barack Obama was elected president, the nation was facing its worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. For all its flaws — a too-small-stimulus, lack of enough relief for average mortgage holders, etc. — Obama, with the help of Ben Bernanke's Federal Reserve, averted a second Great Depression.

When Obama took office, the unemployment rate was 7.8 percent on its way to 10 percent. Last month it was 5.8 percent…

…The federal deficit was $1.4 trillion or almost 10 percent of gross domestic product. Now it’s about $483 billion or 3.3 percent of GDP. The deficit has fallen faster than any time since the end of World War II…

…America's GDP was $14.4 trillion. In the third quarter of this year it had risen $17.5 trillion, despite the headwinds of a slow recovery. It is the best performance among advanced nations…

…Corporate profits after taxes were about $1 trillion in January 2009. In the second quarter of this year, the most recent data available, they hit a record $1.84 trillion…

…The Dow Jones Industrial Average closed at 7,949 the day he took office. Today it is above 17,652…

…And the Affordable Care Act extended health insurance to millions of Americans, and would have included millions more if not for the cruel obstruction of Republican governors.

In the hands of Ronald Reagan's ad men, this would have been Morning in America. For Democrats this election, it was something from which to run (hat tip to Emil's comment in the previous post). They deserved the destruction that befell them.

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Posted inPolitics: National

Top kill

Our front page editor translates into honest English the typical hate letter that comes to Rogue Columnist:

Dear Mr. Talton: If it wasn’t for
you I’d have an additional 200 percent
equity in my house in my gated community in North Scottsdale. If you
would stop pointing out the minor problems we face in PHX, we could win
the NBA
and my greens fees would be lower.

He adds in his own voice: "We are a
nation of spoiled shits living off of debt and about
40 years past the high water mark of America. The real shame is that it
could all be fixable, but will never be. We live in Scamistan. The U.S. government scamming taxpayers and lenders. CEOs scamming shareholders.
Military
scamming the President. Corporations offloading the real cost of their
fat/salt laden food. BP/Massey Coal on the real cost of energy. Iowa corn farmers on ethanol and water/pesticides killing the Gulf
before BP…. 
People delusional in thinking short term and not long term in fixing
our
problems.  Pols worried about the next election, not the next 20-plus years."

And you think I'm gloomy. To paraphrase Emerson, God offers every mind its choice between truth and American brightsided "optimism." Take which you please — you can never have both. So, tell me, ye brightsiders, what are we to make of the unparalleled, at least in this country, environmental disaster happening off the coast of Louisiana?

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Posted inPolitics: National

Turning and turning

We are told repeatedly by our rulers in business, politics and the media that the big hurdle to addressing climate change and health care is cost. Somehow war without end, the global effects of climate change and the towering costs of health care even as more Americans do without it are "free." And so it goes.

This is how we live now. There was indeed one conservative in last fall's presidential election and he now sits in the White House. Barack Obama fits the Burkean mold of slow change, respectful of tradition and custom, seeking to preserve the best of existing arrangements. Unfortunately, thirty years of right-wing revolution (represented by Mr. Obama's opponent, the wealthy Republican John Sidney McCain III) have driven these laudable benchmarks so far to the extreme that Mr. Obama's innate restraint is exactly the wrong temperament for this pivotal moment in history.

On health care, one wonders if his heart was ever in it. This has been a colossal failure of the Democratic Party. The New Deal was not the product of a single, 2,000-plus page bill, but of scores of pieces of legislation over years. It delivered nearly instant relief to the nation's suffering, in both substance and confidence-building, helping to ensure continued Democratic majorities to keep it going. Under Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi, we have a massive dog's breakfast that will come to no good, and be undone by the Republicans because its good elements will take too long to kick in. Why, for example, not one bill that outlawed the savage practice of denying insurance based on pre-existing conditions, or charging outlandish premiums for it — and having it implemented the moment the president signed the legislation? Another could have instantly required pharmaceutical companies to bid for Medicare drugs, lowering costs at the stroke of a pen. Yet another would have eliminated antitrust protections for the big insurers. And another still would have been a public option, if not Medicare for all — and let the filibuster happen and its instigators pay the fearsome price in the next election.

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Posted inPolitics: National

Two roads to the future?

With the exception of LBJ, Democratic presidents since 1960 have fared badly in their legislative agendas, even when Congress was controlled by their party. President Obama, for all his gifts, may be on track to fare little better. Health care. Cap-and-trade. Financial reform. Big-time tax evasion. Even for this cool-handed moderate, it's a tough sell.

Meanwhile, the media and the salesmen on Wall Street are in a constant search for "green shoots" — signs this historic recession is over. Nobody is thinking through what these shoots will turn into, exactly what the road ahead looks like. But for many, including policymakers, we find a desperate assumption that the economy will pick right up where it left off in 2006.

Two schools of thought are at work here. One says the fundamentals are sound, as President Hoover put it, and the future will look much like the recent past. The other, found more among the outliers, argues we have hit a historic pivot point — but will we realize it and save ourselves?

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