It’s not much fun reading this report:
Friday’s better-than-expected jobs report, while cheering stock investors, hasn’t taken the threat of a double-dip recession off the table.
Even as the jobless rate held steady at 9.7 percent and the 36,000 workers laid off in February was much less than expected, economists and investment analysts said it’s still too early to discount the economy’s chances of revisiting recession.
Remind me once again why I was supposed to think that government could effectively administer a public option for health care. As we can see, it can’t even competently manage its own finances:
A new congressional report released Friday says the United States’ long-term fiscal woes are even worse than predicted by President Barack Obama’s grim budget submission last month.
The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office predicts that Obama’s budget plans would generate deficits over the upcoming decade that would total $9.8 trillion. That’s $1.2 trillion more than predicted by the administration.
The agency says its future-year predictions of tax revenues are more pessimistic than the administration’s. That’s because CBO projects slightly slower economic growth than the White House.
We have occasion to comment on some strange written offerings from Paul Krugman. Yeah, I know, “dog bites man.” Nevertheless, some discussion is in order.
Peter Suderman’s article on why we cannot trust CBO estimates concerning the value of the stimulus is a must-read:
Here’s what the Congressional Budget Office’s (CBO) most recent report on the matter estimates the stimulus’ effects were in the fourth quarter of 2009: Thanks to the stimulus, America is somewhere between 1 and 2.1 million jobs richer than it would have been with no government intervention. Federal dollars have fattened up our GDP as well, adding somewhere between 1.5 and 3.5 percent to the GDP.
Naturally, the Obama administration is keen to take credit. And in touting the CBO’s stimulus figures, the White House repeatedly employed the phrase “created or saved.” After widespread eye-rolling at such an obvious rhetorical gimmick—not to mention significant evidence that many of the jobs it was claiming credit for were not, in fact, created or saved—the administration altered its lingo and started referring to jobs “funded.” But this too is not as accurate as it could be, at least in the context of the CBO’s reports; a better phrase might have been “created or saved or estimated or assumed.”
America can regenerate as a new society, as we have before. But first we need to get past the idea that there are easy fixes, where “easy” means that someone else takes all the pain.
I guess that no one will be surprised to read this:
Iranian security forces have detained film director Jafar Panahi, winner of many international awards, an opposition website said on Tuesday.
Panahi was held at his home together with his wife Mahnaz Mohammadi, daughter and 15 guests on Monday evening, opposition leader Mirhossein Mousavi’s website Kaleme said.
Panahi’s home was searched and some of his belongings seized, it added.
The director supported Mousavi in last year’s disputed presidential election, which plunged the Islamic Republic into months of political turmoil.
By Pejman Yousefzadeh
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Posted in Chequer-Board
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Also tagged Ali Khamenei, Barack Obama, Democracy, Demonstrations, Dictatorship, Dishonesty, Foreign Affairs, foreign policy, Hossein Ali Montazeri, Incompetence, inflation, Iran, Kahrizak, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Mir Hossein Mousavi, Moharram, Neda, Obama Administration, Ramin Pourandarjani, Stolen Elections, Totalitarianism
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These people want to determine health care policy. Really, it’s amazing.
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In addition to providing some well-deserved snark regarding Maxine Waters’s financial illiteracy, Michael Moynihan refers us to this piece by Elizabeth MacDonald, which points out–in fairness to Waters–that hers were not the only mind-bendingly bad questions confronting Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke:
February 26, 2010 – 7:07 am
Thanks to the downturn, food production and distribution will start getting more difficult as everything else gets easier. Artisan farming, particularly in proximity to large cities, will make a comeback.
February 25, 2010 – 2:16 am
Bruce Bartlett is the author of The New American Economy. Bartlett himself submitted to an interview about his book, the transcript of which follows below.
By Pejman Yousefzadeh
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Posted in Chequer-Board, Features
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Also tagged Book Review, Books, Bruce Bartlett, Federal Deficit, Keynesianism, National Debt, Supply-Side Economics, taxes, The New American Economy, VAT
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February 23, 2010 – 11:13 pm
As explained by Paul Ryan in a Q&A with the New York Times’s Deborah Solomon:
Your “Road Map,” we should explain, is a somewhat alarming document that proposes, in 600-plus pages, erasing the federal deficit by radically restricting the government’s role in social programs like Social Security and Medicare. The president described it as “a serious proposal.”
Right. And then the next day his budget director starts ripping me and then the day after that the entire Democratic National Committee political machine starts launching demagogic attacks on me and my plan. So when you hear the word “bipartisanship” come from the president and then you see his political machine get in full-force attack mode, it comes across as very insincere.
He seems genuinely pained by what he has called the “obstinacy” of Congressional Republicans and their just-say-no obstructionism.
You know, casting the other side as somehow nefarious and evil and poorly intended is the oldest trick in the book.
February 22, 2010 – 5:44 pm
Because credit card companies simply find ways to circumvent them. Port-siders who are in love with regulation believe that this is proof positive that credit card companies are evil, and that this is the end of the story. But Nick Gillespie points out that the narrative is just a bit more complicated than that:
