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obama the plumber...

obamaplumber
Of Dystopias and Alphas


By MAUREEN DOWD

WASHINGTON

President Obama was on the way to Alpha when a plea came for him to be, well, more alpha.

LuAnn Lavine, a real estate agent from Geneseo, a rural town just up the road from Alpha, Ill., the last stop on the president’s Midwestern bus tour, told The Times’s Jeff Zeleny: “Everyone was so hopeful with him, but Washington grabbed him and here we are. I just want him to stay strong and don’t take the guff. We want a president who is a leader, and I want him to be a little bit stronger.”

Hers was a gentler message than the sign stuck on a post outside Alpha: “One Term President.”

But her three words summed it up: Washington grabbed him. Why did this man whose contempt for Congress is clear, who ran on the idea that he could transform a broken Washington, surrender to its conventional timetable and bureaucratic language?

The “supercommittee” that’s supposed to save us just sounds like more government bloat — supersizing something just as unhealthy as McDonald’s.

Is Obama so isolated he can’t see that Americans are curled up in a ball, beaten down by a financial crisis, an identity crisis, a political crisis and a leadership crisis?

He got the job by blaming Washington. But once you’re in the White House, you are Washington. It’s like the plumber who came to fix the sink waiting for the sink to fix itself.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/21/opinion/dowd-of-dystopias-and-alphas.html?pagewanted=print

we rather suffer than help you make it better...

Surely They Can Read a Spreadsheet


When the federal government was on the brink of default and the economy hung in the balance, the nation’s business leaders had a chance to step forward and push for a long-term solution. They could have supported a grand bargain that cut spending and raised tax revenue. They could have warned House Republicans that it was far too risky to use the debt ceiling for political leverage.

Instead, the United States Chamber of Commerce, the Financial Services Forum and other important players wrote a series of weak letters to the White House and Congress saying, in essence, “just don’t default.”

Business leaders had reason to worry. Unlike many Republican politicians who saw the standoff as political theater, or a chance to bring “big government” to its knees, they knew what default would mean for their bottom lines. But just avoiding that cataclysm is not enough. The economy is in profound trouble, and the political system is in desperate need of responsible voices promoting sound ideas for both growth and deficit reduction.

This is not the time for the usual demands by business for fewer regulations and lower taxes. The economy is too fragile and the deficit too high — in no small part because the George W. Bush administration spent eight years giving business and the wealthy exactly what they asked for.

Instead, business leaders should be pushing Washington for what is needed to avoid another recession: more near-term spending to stimulate the economy, more revenue to help pay for it, and a balanced approach to the long-term deficit by reducing health care costs and strengthening the tax base.

If Republicans continue to obstruct President Obama’s proposals to coax the economy back to life, it will not be just the unemployed who will suffer — it will be corporate bottom lines as well.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/21/opinion/sunday/surely-they-can-read-a-spreadsheet.html?pagewanted=print

Keynes right all over again....

Keynes Was Right


By

“The boom, not the slump, is the right time for austerity at the Treasury.” So declared John Maynard Keynes in 1937, even as F.D.R. was about to prove him right by trying to balance the budget too soon, sending the United States economy — which had been steadily recovering up to that point — into a severe recession. Slashing government spending in a depressed economy depresses the economy further; austerity should wait until a strong recovery is well under way.

Unfortunately, in late 2010 and early 2011, politicians and policy makers in much of the Western world believed that they knew better, that we should focus on deficits, not jobs, even though our economies had barely begun to recover from the slump that followed the financial crisis. And by acting on that anti-Keynesian belief, they ended up proving Keynes right all over again.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/30/opinion/keynes-was-right.html?_r=1&pagewanted=print