Where we start

From Robert Reich and Bob Edgar, Fixing America’s politics.

So we’re deeply distressed at the dysfunctional state of America’s political culture. We believe that unless our leaders – in both parties – undertake a comprehensive effort to reform our politics, it will be impossible to make lasting progress to revive our economy, rescue the middle class, corral runaway deficits and solve other national problems.

It’s hard, frankly, to see how much can be done when so many leaders in both parties seem so intent on destroying the opposition — whatever the cost. Nonetheless, we suggest these steps as a start:

• Republicans and Democrats, conservatives and liberals, should declare their independence from big money in politics, or at least bring that money into the open. That means passing the DISCLOSE Act, requiring groups like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce to reveal the identity of donors to their political activities. Americans need to know who is financing our elections.

• We need to overhaul the way we pay for political campaigns so that candidates and elected officials spend less time courting donors and more time listening to voters. Candidates should be able to run for office on a blend of small donations and limited public funds.

• Public officials must open themselves and their work to independent scrutiny. It’s long past time to strengthen the federal Freedom of Information Act and make government more open. President Barack Obama set an example by posting online details of stimulus spending. The House’s new Republican majority should follow his lead by strengthening, not closing, the independent Office of Congressional Ethics. Senators should create a similar independent body to investigate ethics cases in their chamber.

• The Senate should overhaul its filibuster rule, taking care to protect the minority’s right to be heard but removing its ability to hold the majority hostage.

In 2006, angry voters shifted control of Congress from Republicans to Democrats. This year, angry voters restored Republicans to power in the House but kept Democrats – albeit by a narrower margin – in charge in the Senate.

Between these congressional contests, Obama was elected president. We believe his victory was largely due to his message of hope — a hope that he could break the cycle of dysfunction. But the Nov. 2 “shellacking” reflects a sense among voters that he has become part of the problem.

Beyond that, the dramatic swings of the last three elections reflect the public’s concern that our politicians can’t fix the nation’s problems until they fix their own.

It’s hard to argue with the premise that we likely won’t clean up, or fix, our politics in this country until we have a system in place that will elect clean politicians. Meaning politicians who are accountable to the people how vote for them and not the corporations that fund their campaigns now. It’s also extremely unlikely that those elected by this system will do anything to change it, unless the people make them.

Who is going to fight for the middle class?

There really only seems one member of the US Senate willing to do this. What (Sen.) Bernie (Sanders) Said on Friday drives that home. This article by Katrina vanden Heuvel, to me, shows Obama’s main fault so far.

There is no question, in a political system warped and broken by corporate money and lobbyists, that a president intent on achieving “victories for the American people,” as he described them, would require a sense of pragmatism, and a willingness to accept the compromises that, at times, will flow from it.

But too often, this president is so singularly focused on seeking common ground that he fails to define his – and our – principles. The tax cut deal is just the most recent example. Obama began those negotiations telegraphing his endgame, with eyes set unwaveringly on resolution. He chose not to passionately articulate his values, or to define the GOP’s, and in the aftermath of the battle, he refused to explain where it’s all meant to lead us.

This, he might conclude, is a minor complaint from a dismissible left. But the truth is, without a president who is able – and willing to – lay out a clear, strong and principled argument, without a president who will stand up for the ideals he ran on, even as he seeks resolution, the progressive worldview becomes muted, and the conservative worldview validated.

Obama has reinforced the notion, not by compromise but by relative silence, that we should fear changing tax rates in a time of economic crisis, even when economists of all stripes tell us that tax cuts for the wealthy offer extraordinary cost and zero benefit to the nation. He speaks most passionately not while lambasting a Republican Party that would drown the middle class on behalf of the wealthy, but when criticizing the left for not offering support at a time when he doesn’t deserve it. Because he rightly expects the worst from the far right, he seems to have lost his sense of outrage toward them. The left, in turn, receives his overcharged and misplaced anger – suggesting an equivalence between the two when, in truth, there is none.

He wants to go straight to the compromise without even having the fight. He doesn’t seem to understand that his enemies – the GOP – will just ask for more. The fight is a must and without it the middle class will continue to suffer. This from Peter S. Goodman at the HuffPo, Middle Class Left Out of Conversation.

Oh, to live in Washington, where the annoyances of external reality are so conveniently ignored and The Conversation can be changed like an un-liked song on the national iPod.

Was it not just a couple of weeks ago that The Conversation was all about the supposed five-alarm emergency of the federal budget deficit and the hellish consequences that surely awaited the continuation of profligate spending? Never mind. The political establishment decided to tack another $900 billion on the federal tab to stave off an apparently more dire crisis: the prospect that tax cuts lavished on people wealthy enough to worry about mooring charges might soon expire.

Now, the only talk that seems capable of sustaining the Conversation is whether tax cuts for the richest will be extended again two years forward, and how this will play for those determined to become President.

How can we generate quality jobs by the million and prevent more homeowners from sliding into foreclosure? How can we arrest the long-running breakdown in American middle class life? These are fragments of a narrative long since discarded as politically infertile. They no longer fit into the format of the Sunday talk shows, where the only real question is who won the week, because no one is even trying to win on these points. Not this week. Not any week. The unemployment rate remains snagged at nearly 10 percent and 6.3 million people have been officially out of work for six months and longer, but the Conversation has moved on.

If only the topic of discussion could be so easily be dispatched around the dining room tables of ordinary Americans (an institution increasingly dependent on food stamps). There, the conversation seems stuck on the puzzle of the age: How to get by with less. How to pretend that, despite all indications to the contrary, better days lie ahead, because that’s how things are supposed to go in the movie version of this land of limitless opportunity.

He then goes on the reference this report from the Economic Security Institute, Standing on Shaky Ground, which is about, “How Americans perceive and experience economic insecurity”. It’s as if Washington is a whole different planet from that of the middle class and poor Americans. More from Goodman.

And yet, despite the conspicuous evidence that large numbers of people are still ensnared by this recession, despite the abundance of signs that the last quarter-century has proven cruelly inadequate for people accustomed to living on what they can earn, The Conversation in Washington is surreally divorced from this reality. President Obama and his advisers insist they had to accept the extension of tax cuts for the wealthiest — a primary source of the aggravated inequality that has afflicted the economy — in order to get some relief. This was the cost of extending emergency unemployment benefits for people who have reached the limit. This was the cost of lowering payroll taxes in a bid to spur jobs.

But none of that addresses the long-term vibrancy of the economy. None of that amounts to a viable plan to help nurture new industries and provoke serious job growth. That will take money and time and political fight. It will require a sustained effort and a willingness to take on the enemies of change in Washington — a bipartisan interest group that seems to hold the votes on everything. And there is no sign of that today, alas.

It is as if the mode of thinking on Wall Street — where prosperity is measured in incremental movements in share prices — has so saturated the Congress and the Obama administration that an unemployment epidemic and a foreclosure crisis is, as they say, already priced into the market. It has been accepted as the new baseline of the political discussion, a facet of life so taken for granted that it is hardly even worth discussing.

If the findings in the paper released this day were new, they would surely inspire immediate action. If terrorists were planning a plot that could, in one cataclysm, visit such damage on American households as has been collectively absorbed in recent years, whole arms of the government would now be in full crisis mode. Instead, the chattering class goes on, picking over the electoral implications of one tax scheme or another. The Conversation is a small-minded, dispiriting drone.

“There’s planet earth and there’s planet Washington,” says Yale University political scientist Jacob S. Hacker, the study’s lead author. “The telescopes on planet Washington seem not powerful enough to reach to planet earth.”

It’s down right despicable that this is going on in the “Good ‘ol U S of A”!! It’s getting harder by the day to understand why no one with political power in this country is even trying to set out a long-term agenda to fix this problem. Looks like Naomi Klein had this nailed.  We, the middle class, really needed Obama and the Democrats to work for us.  As someone recently said, we will have to be the change we want to see in the world.  Now we’ve got to start over again.  We should use Bernie’s speech from Friday as our guide.

Galbraith & Lakoff – two must reads

James K. Galbraith, Whose Side Is the White House On?

We’ve learned from Vic Fingerhut and Mike Lux that the administration went down in public esteem when people realized it was working for the banks and not for them. Why did they think this? Why did they go from “blaming Bush and Wall Street to blaming Obama and Wall Street”? Because plainly they could see what was in front of their faces. Except in manner, President Bush never really pretended to be a President for ordinary folks; President Obama did. Bush was who he was; Obama held out, fostered, and promoted vast hopes, mobilizing the American population behind his leadership on that basis. And he disappointed those hopes — to use a very harsh word, one could say he has betrayed those hopes. How can one therefore blame the voters for acting as they have acted?

What happens next? Let’s again not kid ourselves, we have lost a great many seats in the House of Representatives and the House of Representatives isn’t coming back into a Democratic majority in the near future. Simply because of the balance of exposures — the larger numbers of Democratic Senators exposed to reelection in the next cycle, the greatest likelihood is that the Senate will also go Republican in two years time. President Obama has set his course. He has surrounded himself with the advisers of his choice and as he moves to replace President Summers we hear from the press that the priority is to “repair the rift with his investors on Wall Street.” What does that tell you? It tells me that he does not have President Clinton’s fighting and survival instincts. I’ve not heard one good reason all day to believe that we are going to see from this White House the fight that we want, that he could win in two years, or any reason we should be backing him now.

The Democratic Party has become too associated with Wall Street. This is a fact. It is a structural problem. It seems to me that we as progressives need — this is my personal position — we need to draw a line and decide that we would be better off with an under-funded, fighting progressive minority party than a party marked by obvious duplicity and constant losses on every policy front as a result of the reversals in our own leadership.

What is at stake in the long run? Two things, mainly, in my view. First, it seems to me that we as progressives need to make an honorable defense of the great legacies of the New Deal and Great Society — programs and institutions that brought America out of the Great Depression and bought us through the Second World War, brought us to our period of greatest prosperity, and the greatest advances in social justice. Social Security, Medicare, housing finance — the front-line right now is the foreclosure crisis, the crisis, I should say, of foreclosure fraud — the progressive tax code, anti-poverty policy, public investment, public safety, and human and civil rights. We are going to lose these battles– get used to it. But we need to make an honorable fight, to state clearly what our principles are and to lay down a record which is trustworthy for the future.

That dovetails perfectly with what George Lakoff recently wrote, Untellable Truths.

Democrats need to unite behind a simple set of moral principles and to create an effective language to express them. President Obama in his campaign expressed those principles simply, as the basis of American democracy. (1) Empathy — Americans care about each other. (2) Responsibility, both personal and social. We have to act on that care. (3) The ethic of excellence. We have to make ourselves better so we can make our families, our communities, our country and the world better. Government has special missions: to protect and empower our citizens to have at least the necessities. I don’t know any Democrats who don’t believe in these principles. They need to be said out loud and repeated over and over.

[...]

If there is a teachable communication moment for President Obama, this is it. Bring back “empathy” — “the most important thing my mother taught me.” Speak of “empathy” for “people who are hurting.” Say again how empathy is basis of democracy (“caring for your fellow citizens”), how we have a responsibility to act on that empathy: social as well as personal responsibility. Bring the central role of empathy in democracy to the media. And make it clear that personal responsibility alone is anti-patriotic, the opposite of what America is fundamentally about. That is the first step in telling our most important untellable truths. And it is a necessary step in loosening the conservative grip on public discourse.

For videos of the president speaking about empathy, Google: Obama Empathy Youtube, and Obama Empathy Speeches.

That’s the case. Over the last two years Obama and the majority or elected Democrats have done little, if anything, to show empathy and support for those who are hurting economically in this country, by pushing a broad-based plan for an economic resurgent. In other words a these two men have stated, they should have shown empathy for the American people instead of the banksters. If they had, we would all be in a much better place today.

Bernie! Bernie! Bernie!

I wish Bernie Sanders was my US Senator.

In case you aren’t paying attention he’s filibustering The Obama/GOP tax bill that will kill Social Security.

Watch it HERE.

What I can’t figure out

Michael Lind wrote a great column in Salon this week.  It’s does a great job of encapsulating what the problem is with our country, Nobody represents the American people.

The disconnect between the actions of the government and public opinion is the central fact of American politics today. It doesn’t seem to matter whether liberal Democrats or conservative Republicans are in power. Only minor, marginal reforms ever take place. The basic outlines of American economic policy and foreign policy remain the same, even as Congress and the White House change hands. The changes promised by progressive Democrats and Tea Party Republicans are quickly discarded after the elections.

The changes that do take place are often the opposite of those that majorities of Americans want. Most Americans want Social Security to be strengthened and American manufacturing protected. But the conversation among elites inside the Beltway-New York bubble is about cutting Social Security and more one-sided “free trade” deals with mercantilist nations that, unlike the U.S., protect and promote their domestic industries.

Many Americans have come to the conclusion that nobody represents them in Washington anymore. They are right.

For the rest of the column he goes on to describe how the decline of “mass membership organizations” – unions, political parties and non-profits like the United Way and UNICEF – has changed our system. Non-profits and the political parties used to be funded by the people, and the organizations were imbued with the spirit of those people who were working together for a common purpose. But that has now changed because of how these organizations are now funded, by very few wealthy elites.

Mass membership organizations were important in the nonprofit sector as well. Local chapters of organizations like the United Way were part of state and national federations.

In the last half-century, as scholars like Robert Putnam have shown, these civic armies have more or less collapsed and have been replaced by small, elite organizations that specialize in raising money from a shrinking number of Americans who monopolize a growing share of the gains from national economic growth. This is as true on the political left as on the political right.

The national parties have long since ceased to be healthy mass membership federations. The national and state parties have been reduced to shells. Most Democratic and Republican politicians are independent entrepreneurs, raising as much money as they can on their own. Like the bank robber Willie Sutton, they go to where the money is. It is more efficient to get a few big checks from billionaires and industry lobbies than lots of little donations.

Again and again our ills turn back to what has transpired over the last 30 years – increasing income inequality, stagnant wages, and the destruction of the middle class. The story of the United States is one of the constant power struggle, the ebb and flow, between the people and the powerful. We are obviously in an era where the powerful.

There is another place where this is having and tremendous impact and that is in our country’s social make-up at the most basic governing level – marriage and family life. This from a recent PEW study called, “The Decline of Marriage and the Rise of New Families“.

A new “marriage gap” in the United States is increasingly aligned with a growing income gap.

As the social safety net and protections that were put in place after the Great Depression and World War II – that we’re responsible for the creation of the middle class in America – have been eroded and decimated over the last 30 years, it should come as no surprise that the same thing has happened to the middle class.

Union membership, public education funding, higher education funding, the GI Bill, higher taxes on wealth and the wealthy, the internet, research and development, a man on the moon (NASA), the interstate highway system, and on, and on, and on, as well as the largest middle class the world had ever known are all either gone or in steep decline or disarray. All because those with so much, want to make sure they have more.

My wife and I discuss all the time the lack of historic perspective in our country, which likely is a result of the decline in education and critical thinking.  To me the answer to our problem is in our history.  We’ve been in this predicament before and got out of it.  But no one in Washington, with any real power to change things, seems to be aware of that, much less represents me and  my view.  How to change our country so that the people, and not the powerful, are well represented is what I have not been able to figure out.

Why won’t Obama fight for the middle class?

I, as have many others, struggle with what seems to be a lack of willingness on the part of Barack Obama to take-on his GOP detractors on most issues.  And a recent blog post brought up some nagging questions about President Obama.  It’s not so much about Obama being ignorant of history but he appears to have, post-New Deal/Great Society, belief in the almighty free market, way of looking at the economy which is not good.

The one thing that has always stuck in my mind and given me pause about Barack Obama, was that he spent time at the University of Chicago.  Where so much of the bad – often horrific – economic ideas of the past 40 or so years were dreamed up.  Where the mythical free-market libertarianism was brought into vogue, and what Naomi Klein has called “disaster capitalism”, in her book The Shock Doctrine, found it’s genesis.

It is the belief in the free market as all great and all knowing, that has kept him from becoming a modern day protector of the middle class and working Americans that many had hoped he was.  Which is why all of this came to mind when I saw this, Is Obama a secret Tea-Bagger at heart? (Obama vs FDR Pt. 1). But in particular this statement that Obama made regarding FDR and the beginning of his term as President.

This notion that somehow I could have gone and made the case around the country for a far bigger stimulus because of the magnitude of the crisis, well, we understood the magnitude of the crisis. We didn’t actually, I think, do what Franklin Delano Roosevelt did, which was basically wait for six months until the thing had gotten so bad that it became an easier sell politically because we thought that was irresponsible. We had to act quickly.

As the post goes on to point out.

I took this to be a particular statement, given that FDR’s first “100 Days” is easily the most famous legislative period in American history. But today, Thomas Ferguson (father of the “investment theory of political parties”) has piece “The Story Behind Obama’s Remarks on FDR” cross-posted at New Deal 2.0 and Huffington Post that first explains Obama was referring to the period between the election and the inauguration–a period of four months, not six, and then discusses what actually happened during this time.

The Ferguson post goes on to show how Obama, in making these remarks, has not only adopted the false “New Deal” revisionism of a hack historian like Amity Shlaes, but has also adopted the rhetoric of the failed banksters and Republicans of pre-New Deal Hooverism.  What I feared in Obama’s association with the “Chicago School” was that he had a belief in the failed mythical power of markets alone on an economy.

The problem is not – to get all Rumsfeldian on you -  that he didn’t do what he believes Roosevelt didn’t do, in reality it’s that he didn’t do what Roosevelt did.  And that’s having the power, political will, and internal makeup to  try anything and everything until something actually worked to put Americans back to work.  In reality he didn’t need to, if he would have followed FDR and Keynes example, we’d likely be in much better shape now.  Here’s how Krugman put it in his post mid-term election column, The Focus Hocus-Pocus.

Mr. Obama’s problem wasn’t lack of focus; it was lack of audacity. At the start of his administration he settled for an economic plan that was far too weak. He compounded this original sin both by pretending that everything was on track and by adopting the rhetoric of his enemies.

The aftermath of major financial crises is almost always terrible: severe crises are typically followed by multiple years of very high unemployment. And when Mr. Obama took office, America had just suffered its worst financial crisis since the 1930s. What the nation needed, given this grim prospect, was a really ambitious recovery plan.

Could Mr. Obama actually have offered such a plan? He might not have been able to get a big plan through Congress, or at least not without using extraordinary political tactics. Still, he could have chosen to be bold — to make Plan A the passage of a truly adequate economic plan, with Plan B being to place blame for the economy’s troubles on Republicans if they succeeded in blocking such a plan.

But he chose a seemingly safer course: a medium-size stimulus package that was clearly not up to the task. And that’s not 20/20 hindsight. In early 2009, many economists, yours truly included, were more or less frantically warning that the administration’s proposals were nowhere near bold enough.

Worse, there was no Plan B. By late 2009, it was already obvious that the worriers had been right, that the program was much too small. Mr. Obama could have gone to the nation and said, “My predecessor left the economy in even worse shape than we realized, and we need further action.” But he didn’t. Instead, he and his officials continued to claim that their original plan was just right, damaging their credibility even further as the economy continued to fall short.

Meanwhile, the administration’s bank-friendly policies and rhetoric — dictated by fear of hurting financial confidence — ended up fueling populist anger, to the benefit of even more bank-friendly Republicans. Mr. Obama added to his problems by effectively conceding the argument over the role of government in a depressed economy.

What all of us – working and middle-class Americans – who aren’t banksters or make six-figures and over was hoping for was a leader who, for once in our life times (me a child of the later Sixties), truly fought for us first, and not one who fought for us to get a bigger share of the corporate leftovers. Which has been the best we’ve gotten in recent decades.

It’s been surmised that the reason FDR was  so successful – able to regulate big money and help create the middle class – was mainly because of two unique qualities he had. One was because he came from wealth and privilege and he became a Traitor to His Class.  Being from that socioeconomic group he didn’t need their money, but was also able to allay some of their fears.  The second was that he went through a major personal tragedy and learned empathy for those in need.

But we’re a long way from the New Deal, the middle class is on life support, and working Americans have no one with any real power advocating for them.  That’s why Obama’s inability to fight for them and against the GOP, banksters, and big money has distressed so many of us that voted for him in 2008.  Especially in light of the fact that it’s D-Day in the Class War.

Both “bipartisan” bodies claim that “tough decisions” must be made. Yet their policies are only really tough if you happen to belong to America’s struggling working middle class. They want to inflict the “pain” on the government programs that have traditionally given working people a slight leg up. In these “bipartisan” schemes the financial services crooks who wrecked the economy come away smelling like roses.

Are we forgetting that it was working- and middle-class taxpayers who bailed out Wall Street’s biggest investment banks in what could be the greatest gesture of working-class benevolence toward the super-rich in American history? Working-class taxpayers also paid for the unemployment insurance and infrastructure projects that were needed following the pillaging of America’s housing sector. Working-class taxpayers continue to foot the bill for the bloated military budget and two wars. (They’ve also sent their sons and daughters off to fight.) And about eight million of them who had jobs in 2005 didn’t have them anymore by the middle of 2009.

And how are working taxpayers repaid for the assistance they’ve given to their fellow citizens of the investing class? They get “commissions” and “foundations” and elite “study groups” that are orchestrating the next giant rip-off of America’s middle class.

Few in the press seem to want to educate the public about how we got into this fiscal crisis in the first place or why projected budget surpluses at the beginning of the Bush years were so needlessly squandered. And remember, those surpluses were turned into deficits through “bipartisan” agreements, such as the Bush tax cuts, the wars, and the bailouts. There’s also precious little mention of the grotesque inequality in American society these days, which is worse than even during the Gilded Age. The establishment press seems determined to avoid the obvious conclusion: The rich, the super-rich, and the super-duper rich (as well as the conglomerates) must pay more in taxes to get the United States through the crisis. Ending the two debilitating wars and rolling back what Eisenhower called the “military-industrial complex” should be next. And the billions of dollars wasted in corporate welfare each year must be diverted to human needs.

These steps should be the top priorities before any “deficit-reduction plan” is seriously considered — “bipartisan” or otherwise. At this moment in American history, after large swathes of the middle class have been wiped out, the last thing we need is another elite-driven assault on the living standards of working people.

Even though it was Wall Street that fostered the conditions that produced our current economic state, we’re told from pundits across the political spectrum that we mustn’t tax the rich because it will stymie job-creating investments. But I’m sure Lloyd Blankfein, Hank Paulson, Angelo Mozilo, and their ilk can afford to kick in a little more in taxes to save the country they claim (when under oath at least) to love so much.

In the 2010 midterm elections, the super-rich and their business associations threw around hundreds of millions of dollars in campaign cash like it was so much chump change. And they’re gearing up to set new spending records in 2012. They appear to be very civic-minded plutocrats. Yet where is their “pain” and “sacrifice” when it comes to reducing the federal deficit? What “tough decisions” that affect their bottom lines are they being asked to make? And what happened to the quaint notion that those who have so greatly benefited from the opportunities American society has bestowed upon them having a special obligation to pay a little more when their country is in crisis? We’re all in this together, right?

President Obama and the Tea Party Congress will most likely end up culling the absolute worst elements from the deficit reduction plans put forth so far, tie them together into a “package,” slap a “bipartisan” label on it (which inside the Beltway is close to godliness), and then ram it down our throats by triangulating against what remains of the progressives in Congress.

Politicians, pundits, commentators, and citizens must choose a side now. You’re either on the oligarchy’s side or on the people’s side. It’s D-Day in the class war.

Certainly Obama has to be aware of the problems facing working Americans. And for him to still seem unwilling to fight, tooth-and-nail, against the GOP and their wealthy backers, and for the middle class leaves many questioning his intent.  Obama’s intentions are not, and never were, to bring about the next New Deal or be the next FDR.  He believes that there can be some happy “middle ground” found somewhere between FDR and the Chicago School where we can all live in harmony.  And it appears he believes he can get there with reason and logic, when his opponents don’t believe in either.  Unless he figures out that’s not going to work and he wants to fight, which right now seems unlikely, little if anything is likely to change in the near future.

Myths of the campaign

Everything many voters think they know is wrong.  Obama and the Democrats have not spent too much, they’ve spent too little. And anyone who believes the myths listed below is voting to make things worse for our country.  That is the gist of this post from the Campaign for America’s Future, Eight False Things The Public “Knows” Prior To Election Day.

Here are eight of the biggest myths that are out there:
1) President Obama tripled the deficit.
Reality: Bush’s last budget had a $1.416 trillion deficit. Obama’s first budget reduced that to $1.29 trillion.
2) President Obama raised taxes, which hurt the economy.
Reality: Obama cut taxes. 40% of the “stimulus” was wasted on tax cuts which only create debt, which is why it was so much less effective than it could have been.
3) President Obama bailed out the banks.
Reality: While many people conflate the “stimulus” with the bank bailouts, the bank bailouts were requested by President Bush and his Treasury Secretary, former Goldman Sachs CEO Henry Paulson. (Paulson also wanted the bailouts to be “non-reviewable by any court or any agency.”) The bailouts passed and began before the 2008 election of President Obama.
4) The stimulus didn’t work.
Reality: The stimulus worked, but was not enough. In fact, according to the Congressional Budget Office, the stimulus raised employment by between 1.4 million and 3.3 million jobs.
5) Businesses will hire if they get tax cuts.
Reality: A business hires the right number of employees to meet demand. Having extra cash does not cause a business to hire, but a business that has a demand for what it does will find the money to hire. Businesses want customers, not tax cuts.
6) Health care reform costs $1 trillion.
Reality: The health care reform reduces government deficits by $138 billion.
7) Social Security is a Ponzi scheme, is “going broke,” people live longer, fewer workers per retiree, etc.
Reality: Social Security has run a surplus since it began, has a trust fund in the trillions, is completely sound for at least 25 more years and cannot legally borrow so cannot contribute to the deficit (compare that to the military budget!) Life expectancy is only longer because fewer babies die; people who reach 65 live about the same number of years as they used to.
8) Government spending takes money out of the economy.
Reality: Government is We, the People and the money it spends is on We, the People. Many people do not know that it is government that builds the roads, airports, ports, courts, schools and other things that are the soil in which business thrives. Many people think that all government spending is on “welfare” and “foreign aid” when that is only a small part of the government’s budget.
This stuff really matters.

As Paul Krugman (re)states in his column today, Falling Into the Chasm, he again shows how too little was done, which will have bad consequences for our nation.

The real story of this election, then, is that of an economic policy that failed to deliver. Why? Because it was greatly inadequate to the task.

When Mr. Obama took office, he inherited an economy in dire straits — more dire, it seems, than he or his top economic advisers realized. They knew that America was in the midst of a severe financial crisis. But they don’t seem to have taken on board the lesson of history, which is that major financial crises are normally followed by a protracted period of very high unemployment.

If you look back now at the economic forecast originally used to justify the Obama economic plan, what’s striking is that forecast’s optimism about the economy’s ability to heal itself. Even without their plan, Obama economists predicted, the unemployment rate would peak at 9 percent, then fall rapidly. Fiscal stimulus was needed only to mitigate the worst — as an “insurance package against catastrophic failure,” as Lawrence Summers, later the administration’s top economist, reportedly said in a memo to the president-elect.

But economies that have experienced a severe financial crisis generally don’t heal quickly. From the Panic of 1893, to the Swedish crisis of 1992, to Japan’s lost decade, financial crises have consistently been followed by long periods of economic distress. And that has been true even when, as in the case of Sweden, the government moved quickly and decisively to fix the banking system.

To avoid this fate, America needed a much stronger program than what it actually got — a modest rise in federal spending that was barely enough to offset cutbacks at the state and local level. This isn’t 20-20 hindsight: the inadequacy of the stimulus was obvious from the beginning.

[...]

The tragedy here is that if voters do turn on Democrats, they will in effect be voting to make things even worse.

The resurgent Republicans have learned nothing from the economic crisis, except that doing everything they can to undermine Mr. Obama is a winning political strategy. Tax cuts and deregulation are still the alpha and omega of their economic vision.

[...]

But right now it looks as if the too-cautious attempt to jump across that economic chasm has fallen short — and we’re about to hit rock bottom.

Because supposed safe “half-measures”, that would get the hoped-for bipartisan agreement, were tried instead of doing what may not have been safe, but needed, it looks like we will have to go further down, before we can get back up.