Political Bloviation

The New Poor – Despite Signs of Recovery, Long-Term Unemployment Rises – Series – NYTimes.com.
Brother can you spare a dime? – Tom Waits version. No one can give voice to the pain of a working man without a job like Tom.
I guess the song is making a come back…

Getting the Facts Straight — Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.

Here’s a very cogent observation from the comments at Tyler Cowen’s Marginal Revolution econoblog:
It seems to me that the American political system is simply broken. Canada could reduce the size of government and keep health care spending in check because in a parliamentary system with strong party loyalty, individual politicans are given “cover” by their [...]

Foreigners cut Treasury stakes; rates could rise – washingtonpost.com.
The Wapo notes that the Japanese have overtaken the Chinese as the number one purchasers of American government debt.
Apparently we’ve gotten to 88 mph in the Delorean and the flux capacitor has taken us back to 1985…
Fear the Japanese Overlords!
h/t Ezra Klein
The real danger is that the [...]

Matthew Yglesias » Judd Gregg, When Left to His Own Devices, Is an Orthodox Conservative Who Doesn’t Care About the Deficit.
h/t to Ezra Klein who points out that no one who voted for the programs that drive the deficit (Bush Era tax cuts, Medicare Part D, two unfunded wars, financial bail out and the regulatory [...]

My personal favorite Nobel Prize winning economist has a take on why Canada came out of the recent banking disaster relatively unscathed, while the US economy and financial institutions took a major beat down. It all comes back to the regulatory environment. The US decided, or rather the captains of industry in banking and a [...]

Obama announces a “financial responsibility tax” to impact large financial firms that benefited from TARP*. This is to remain in place until all TARP money is re-paid and internal practices regarding risk taking and ridiculous compensation and bonuses are changed. That may strikes the right note of populist anger.
I’m not sure that it will have [...]

This is galling.

Getting your wealth from daddy: capitalist.
Getting your Congressional seat from daddy: capitalist.
Being a VP at Merrill Lynch and benefiting from billions in government bailout money: capitalist.
Paying bloated bailouts because they did so well: capitalist.

Suggesting that executive bonuses and pay be limited  in companies that brought us to the verge of a new [...]

Mark Thoma passes along an article that points to a third way of dealing with stimulating the economy and doesn’t raise the deficit:
As the latest job figures demonstrate, the economies of the United States, the euro area, Japan, and the United Kingdom are suffering from historically high rates of unemployment. In all four economies, the [...]

Krugman is right more often than his colleagues in economics. There’s a reason he’s a Nobel prize winner in economics.
The good news is that the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, a k a the Obama stimulus plan, is working just about the way textbook macroeconomics said it would. But that’s also the bad news — [...]

Sadly, for fat fools like Rush Limbaugh cheering for the President’s polices to fail, comes this bit of terrible news:
GDP Expanded 3.5% in 3rd Quarter, WSJ: The economy expanded in the third quarter after shrinking for four consecutive quarters, likely marking an end to the worst recession since World War II. But the recovery is [...]

I’m not sure what the answer is, but what we’ve been doing doesn’t seem to work for anyone, except maybe Goldman Sachs.
The sector officially labeled “securities, commodity contracts and investments” has grown especially fast, from only 0.3 percent of G.D.P. in the late 1970s to 1.7 percent of G.D.P. in 2007.
Such growth would be fine [...]

Florida ranks 48th in state GDP growth.
In case anyone around here didn’t know, Florida has really been hard hit by the recession. Only Alaska and Delaware fared worse last year.

via A View From Your Recession | The Daily Dish | By Andrew Sullivan.
One of Sullivan’s readers captures the angst of many in the middle class:
…We’ve also been helping out my wife’s parents quite a bit. Her father’s contracting work completely dried up a year ago and they are facing destitution having used up [...]

So they want to prevent companies and wealthy individuals from sheltering assets offshore? Let the GOP wailing begin! We are sure to see, any moment now, complaints that this is a tax increase. No kidding, huh? They’re not paying taxes on income now so if they do in the future, of course it will increase [...]

Economist’s View: The Bad News Continues….
6.1% contraction in Q1, wow that exceeds most of the expectations and not in a good way. Seems likw we’re going to drag along the bottom a while before things pick-up and employment improves.

Why would anyone think these guys are worth a tenth of what they’re being paid?
via How obscene Wall Street salaries are proof of market failure – How the World Works – Salon.com.
Who didn’t feel their hackles rise at the mere sight of the headline in the Sunday New York Times business section, “After Off Year, [...]

I found these links via Digby:
Eating our Seed Corn: How the Financial Industry Managed to Extract Equity from Just About Everybody | The Agonist.
The #Money Thing | Stirling Newberry’s blog
I found them both depressing. Not so much for me but for my 20 month old daughter. Stirling Newberry takes a larger cross-national macro view of [...]

Obama Says No to More Auto Industry Bailout Money | Crooks and Liars.
My favorite suburban guerilla captures my feelings of disgust at the way this has been handled. Screw working class people but dole out trillions, yes trillions, to greedy multi-millionares. After all they must be more deserving, they’re rich aren’t they?

Stocks Surge On Bank Plan, Rise In Home Sales – NPR.org
Stock markets took a big upward swing Monday on news of the Fed’s and the Treasury’s plans to encourage private investors to buy up to $2 trillion in real estate assets from banks. Also real estate showed  improvement, according to the Washington Post, with an [...]