If you have something to say...
Say it on the Huffington Post
If you have something to say...
Say it on the Huffington Post
The Blog
Romney opposes the stimulus, but he needs to state legitimate reasons for doing so, rather than misrepresenting the experience of Springs Fabrication.
Richly detailed, judicious, thorough and timely, Money Well Spent? is a primer on how to evaluate this policy -- and all public policies -- in a highly partisan, polarized, paralyzed political climate.
Mitt Romney's got real economists on his team. If he wants to make the case that things would be better if we followed his plan, which is explicitly anti-stimulus on jobs and would liquidate the housing market, let's see the economic model for how it would work.
I was recently asked how some of the key economic indicators are trending going into 2012 from the perspective of the president's record. When Obama took office in January 2009, employment was absolutely cratering. Now it's growing, and, in the private sector, has been since the spring of 2010. The swing from huge negatives to positives is notable and helpful to the president. So he has some strong trend reversals to point to, though while the trend is his friend, the sheer levels still bedevil. Current profits as a share of GDP signal the return of rising income inequality, a major concern for a lot of people today. But here Obama has a very strong case to make that the Republicans' game plan will only make that problem a lot worse.
How long will we permit the major banks to "game" our economic system? Or, maybe it's time to frankly acknowledge they have become the De facto fourth branch of our government, without any amendment to our Constitution.
Across the U.S., critical military installations are being put at risk by environmental change.
The government can't create jobs. Only the private sector can. So ditch the naïve talk that Uncle Sam can wade into this economic mess and do any...
With the Super Committee meeting, it's time to determine how we should speak about the economy. Some commentators like to analogize government spending to a swimming pool, as if you can only take water from one end and dump it in the other end of the same pool. A dollar that the government spends on stimulus is a dollar someone else won't be spending, so there's no net gain. But this analogy is false. A better way to think of the economy is as a car, with fuel as the demand that propels the car forward. The gas tank is empty, but we've got a tank of gas sitting on the lawn next to the car. If we put the gas in the tank, the car can get started and go somewhere.
Republicans have been chanting that public investment "crowds out" private investment. They are missing a major lesson of Macroeconomics 101: public investment doesn't crowd out private investment in the short run; it does so in the long run.
If history teaches us anything, it's that history teaches us nothing. A decade after the "mission accomplished" banner debacle, many voters still clamor for simple solutions captured by tidy slogans, such as "no new taxes" or "no new spending."
OWS is a peaceful, non-violent form of protest against government policies that produce still greater inequalities in our society. They are the conscience of America, not its enemy. For this we should be thankful and should join in their cause.
If you want to know when the recession will be over and things back to normal, just look at the dates and overlay the 11.1 year cycle, and you will be pretty close to prognosticating the recovery.
Those who are advising President Obama to "play to the base" and tack further to the left are sowing the seeds for a Democratic wipe out more devastat...
Sensible political strategy calls for exploiting the existence of a crisis by using it as an opportunity (excuse) to pursue policies you want, whether or not they are the best responses to the specific crisis.
This brings us to the sad story of Solyndra, and how wasting more than $500 million of taxpayer money on a dubious technology isn't really much of a scandal, at least according to some of my colleagues in the financial press.
Is the United States "broke"? John Boehner, the Republican Speaker of the House, says it is. According to Boehner, the U.S. is like a family in desp...
