Economy
George W. Bush should pick up the check
Sep 5th
From an article in today’s Washington Post:
By Joseph E. Stiglitz and Linda J. Bilmes
Sunday, September 5, 2010Writing in these pages in early 2008, we put the total cost to the United States of the Iraq war at $3 trillion. This price tag dwarfed previous estimates, including the Bush administration’s 2003 projections of a $50 billion to $60 billion war.
This StoryBut today, as the United States ends combat in Iraq, it appears that our $3 trillion estimate (which accounted for both government expenses and the war’s broader impact on the U.S. economy) was, if anything, too low. For example, the cost of diagnosing, treating and compensating disabled veterans has proved higher than we expected.
Democrats’ lack of enthusiasm.
Sep 3rd
Glenn Greenwald has a post on Salon titled:
Glenn Greenwald
Thursday, Sep 2, 2010 10:03 ET
The profound mystery of the “enthusiasm gap”Here’s an excerpt, providing some of the relevant factors Greenwald cites:
(3) Substantial polling data makes clear that Latinos are among the most disenchanted Democratic voting bloc, as they are furious at the White House for repeatedly violating promises on immigration reform.…
(4) At Daily Kos, Joan McCarter documents that progressive and even Democratic Party journalists are now openly acknowledging what has long been clear: President Obama’s Deficit Commission was structured so as to ensure recommendations for, among other things, cuts in Social Security benefits, to be voted on right after the election is nice and over with (an election the Democrats are trying to win by parading around as the protectors of Social Security). Also at Daily Kos, Laurence Lewis describes how similar this dynamic is to prior political controversies, where Democrats held themselves out publicly as believing one thing while privately working for the opposite.
(5) Following Robert Gibbs’ announcement that liberal Obama critics should be drug tested, and before that, Rahm Emanuel’s declaration that the same group is “fucking retarded,” a new book by former Obama “car czar” Steven Rattner describes how Emanuel worked to thwart union interests and declared, in the midst of the auto bailouts: “Fuck the UAW.”
These are among the reasons I myself find this election so difficult. They focus on the White House. I cop to being among those Emanuel and Gibbs were referring to. I feel betrayed. I have a very, very hard time imagining I’ll feel any different in 2012. In fact, if the suspicions about Social Security prove accurate, I’ll feel even worse about Obama.
But that isn’t the whole story. In this district, I’ll be voting in November for a member of Congress, a U.S. Senator, a governor, and several candidates in the state administration (attorney general etc.). I don’t know if it’s really true that all politics is local. But I do know that I’m very enthusiastic about this year’s local election. I will not be voting for or against President Obama. I will be voting for candidates who will think and act independently and not according to White House scripts.
The price of ignorance
Aug 29th
These images leave one torn between laughter and despair. The woman at the top establishes the principle: Ignorance really is dangerous. And of course it’s especially piquant that a teabagger is saying this via a sign that demonstrates her own ignorance:
The next guy’s sign is so ignorant as to be baffling. Granted, that the letters following “CONG” are hidden doesn’t help. Still, what might the word be? “Congo” makes no sense. Is there room for “Congress.” Congress owns slaves?
Is it “SLAVE OWNER TAXPAYER = NIGGAR [Sic]”? Or should the difference in color lead one to understand “TAXPAYER = NIGGAR”? And the assumption is that all slaves are Black? And all Blacks are Niggers?
In many ways, this is the most interesting ass-showing “sign.” The guy makes assertions that suggest he is educated and informed, not ignorant. But then he misspells “Mauritania”!
Who put such words in the mouth (on the teeshirt) of this Koch brothers/Rupert Murdoch puppet? And what are the odds this guy could look at a world map or globe and point immediately to Mauritania or Niger?
Greedy and stingy
Aug 22nd
The following text is an excerpt from an article in the New York Times magazine. The illustration inserted in the middle of the excerpt is mine, so don’t blame the NYT!
The Way We Live Now
The Charitable-Giving DivideFor decades, surveys have shown that upper-income Americans don’t give away as much of their money as they might and are particularly undistinguished as givers when compared with the poor, who are strikingly generous. A number of other studies have shown that lower-income Americans give proportionally more of their incomes to charity than do upper-income Americans. In 2001, Independent Sector, a nonprofit organization focused on charitable giving, found that households earning less than $25,000 a year gave away an average of 4.2 percent of their incomes; those with earnings of more than $75,000 gave away 2.7 percent.
…
But in the larger context of “the psychological culture of wealth versus poverty,” says Paul K. Piff, a Ph.D. candidate in social psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, the paradox makes sense. Piff has made a specialty of studying those cultures in his lab at the Institute of Personality and Social Research, most recently in a series of experiments that tested “lower class” and “upper class” subjects (with earnings ranging from around $15,000 to more than $150,000 a year) to see what kind of psychological factors motivated the well-known differences in their giving behaviors. His study, written with Michael W. Kraus and published online last month by The Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, found that lower-income people were more generous, charitable, trusting and helpful to others than were those with more wealth. They were more attuned to the needs of others and more committed generally to the values of egalitarianism.
“Upper class” people, on the other hand, clung to values that “prioritized their own need.” And, he told me this week, “wealth seems to buffer people from attending to the needs of others.” Empathy and compassion appeared to be the key ingredients in the greater generosity of those with lower incomes. And these two traits proved to be in increasingly short supply as people moved up the income spectrum.
GOP demands that GOP policies not be adopted. Demand it!!
Aug 4th
This really has to start showing up in Democratic ads!
Base Details
Aug 2nd
The English poet Siegfried Sassoon writes ironically about the eagerness of old men to send young men and women to die in war. Sassoon (English, as I said, despite his German first name) was himself one of those young men, losing his life in the First World War. Hearing the eagerness of old men like McCain and Gingrich to fight yet another war simultaneously, one can see that not much has changed.
