Via Ian Welsh, Dr. Peter Morici, a SUNY business professor, puts banker bonuses into perspective:
How much is $140 billion?
The U.S. economy grew at a $89 billion annualized rate in the third quarter. That was the first growth since the second quarter of 2008 and came to $22 billion in actual growth in the third quarter.
The bankers, after causing the greatest economic calamity since the Great Depression, are rewarded with six times the growth accomplished so far in the much heralded “economic recovery.”
Meanwhile, seven million families face foreclosure and 25 million Americans can’t find full time work.
This morning on NBC’s Today, RNC chair Michael Steele said that in order for banks to start lending to small businesses, the federal government should reduce the unemployment tax:
STEELE: Well, I think, first off, he should recognize that banks aren’t going to lend money to people who can’t pay them back. … So there’s — there’s this whole cycle of not understanding exactly how the economy works with respect to small-business owners. Take that pressure off of them. Let’s — let’s eliminate the capital gains tax. Let’s reduce the unemployment tax.
They have much more on why this is a terrible idea. Tax cuts and more tax cuts and the working class be damned. That's all these guys have got.
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George Will quotes free-trader Milton Friedman to trash the idea of "shovel-ready" projects while continuing his defense of George Bush's economic policies. I'm guessing that George Will has refused to go within fifty feet of Naomi Klein's book The Shock Doctrine since he holds Friedman in such high regard.
PODESTA: I want to come back to Eric Cantor, which is no cost, no jobs, no ideas. I mean, it seems to me that the Republican Party on the Hill has become the party of no.
Maybe I'd say that it looks, a little bit from his defense of no regulation that it's become the party of Bush, that we've seen how that movie played out. It ended in the in financial meltdown and the great recession. It seems that...
STEPHANOPOULOS: Is Ed Gillespie right that it's no risk?
WILL: What?
STEPHANOPOULOS: This strategy?
WILL: I think there is no risk at this point because I think the American people understand that the greatest job creation machine in the history of the world is a reasonably lightly taxed and lightly regulated economy. But one idea, John, that, happily, we're not hearing. When we began this year with...
PODESTA: George Bush had the lowest job creation since World War II, lightly taxed, lightly regulated...
GILLESPIE: Fifty-two months of uninterrupted job creation, the longest in the history of the United States of America.
PODESTA: ... major recession.
STEPHANOPOULOS: What's the one idea?
WILL: The one idea that we seem to have dropped, happily so -- remember the phrase was "shovel-ready"? We were going to create government jobs.
It put me in mind of a great story Milton Friedman used to tell. He went to Asia in the 1960s and was proudly taken by the government to see a public works project. They were building a canal. He was struck everyone was digging the canal with shovels. Friedman says, why no heavy earth-moving equipment?
They said, oh, this is a jobs program. So Friedman says, why don't you give them spoons instead of shovels? I think we understand, now, the sterility of government trying to create jobs.
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Donna Brazile takes the rest of the CNN panel to task for their concern for the deficit at a time when our main concern should be putting people back to work. Of course Bill Bennett continues to claim we need more tax cuts and thinks the Democrats are going to "go off the cliff" if they increase the deficit. Brazile reminds him "we've been off the cliff".
KING: And, Donna, on that point, I want you to listen to Larry Summers because Gloria notes they're starting to talk about the deficit because they're going to raise the federal debt ceiling this week and the numbers get incredibly high. Republicans are starting to say, you know, where's the fiscal discipline here?
And yet, if the you listen to Larry Summers, he seems convinced that they have a little more political space to make the case, that, in the short term, spending to help the economy is more important than reducing the deficit.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
SUMMERS: We've got to do a lot more. There's no more important issue facing the country than job growth because, if we don't create jobs, we've got no prospect that the kind of budget deficits we want. If unemployment stays high, we're not going to have the strength in the world that we want, if unemployment stays high.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
KING: They get away with that a bit longer?
BRAZILE: All the politics aside, the administration is walking a real tightrope between creating the jobs that the American people clearly want and trying to focus on the long-term fiscal health of the nation, the debt.
The Republicans raised the debt ceiling 2002, 2003, 2004, 2007. SO this is customary sometimes during a budget process, to raise it that way. But because of the additional spending that we have on the wars and other issues, we have to raise it again. That's a responsible thing that Congress needs to do.
On the other hand, I think the president is absolutely right to use some of the additional TARP money that will be utilized to pay down the deficit, but to use some of it to create jobs.
Now, hopefully, the private sector -- the president will be able to put some fire under the bankers tomorrow for them to start lending to small businesses so we don't have to continue this rate of government spending.
Another year has come and almost gone. It's been a tough one for the entire country, but I think we're doing our best, and so has our entire Team Crooks. I've also been a volunteer for Blue America and the support you have shown our Campaign for Health Care Choice and the many great progressive candidates we've endorsed like Alan Grayson has been incredible.
We're reaching out to our readers again and asking for help so that the MSM doesn't overrun the blogosphere. They are pouring millions of dollars in to try and compete with bloggers. Their new twist to fool America is that they have the nerve to call themselves "bloggers." Paid journalists from corporations are trying to co-opt the term.
C&L has been expanding and improving the site and we need your help to continue to make improvements. We're almost finished with a new design that will also include a "diaries" function for people that are registered C&L users which will have a neat video format that will be open to you also. More shall be revealed when we unveil the new design. We hope to have it ready in January. This has taken a lot of time and a lot of dedication from many, many people. Please donate what you can.
In the coming year we're also trying to reach out into the blogosphere to hire more people to make C&L an even better site. We'll be looking for video bloggers, a researcher, site monitors an investigative journalist and interns as well, but we can't do it without your help. (You can email resumes at crooksandliars@gmail.com) I'll post more about that soon.
In 2009, TIME Magazine called us one of the Top 25 Blogs of the year.
In 2008, C&L won the Web Blog award for Best Political Blog on the net.
Anyway, Gore asks the question that a Sarah Palin could never answer logically: Why are the polar ice caps disappearing? The batshit crazy deniers like Palin don't know the caps exist maybe because she can't see them from her house...
MITCHELL: Congratulations on the book. You write in your new book, "Our Choice," "The global warming deniers' arguments are fraudulent and often nonsensical." Yet even today, one of the best-known voices in the Republican Party, Sarah Palin, has an op-ed in the Washington Post, and she is escalating a major attack against Copenhagen and against -- against the summit. Palin calls it "junk science." She says, "The agenda-driven policies being pushed in Copenhagen won't change the weather, but they would change our economy for the worst."
What's your response to that?
GORE: Well, you know, the -- the global warming deniers persist in this air of unreality. After all, the entire north polar icecap, which has been there for most of the last 3 million years, is disappearing before our eyes. Forty percent is already gone. The rest is expected to go completely within the next decade. What do they think is causing this?
The mountain glaciers in every region of the world are melting, many of them at an accelerated rate, threatening drinking supplies -- drinking water supplies and agricultural water supplies. We have these record storms, drought, floods, fires, three deaths (ph) in the American West, climate refugees beginning now, expected to rise to the hundreds of millions unless we take action.
These effects are taking place all over the world exactly as predicted by the scientists, who have warned for years that, if we continue putting 90 million tons of global warming pollution into the atmosphere every day, the accumulation -- that's going to trap lots more heat, raise temperatures, and cause all of these consequences that are already beginning.
MITCHELL: Well, one of the things that she has written recently on Facebook is that this is doomsday scare tactics pushed by an environmental priesthood that makes the public feel like owning an SUV is a sin against the planet.
GORE: Well, the scientific community has worked very intensively for 20 years within this international process, and they now say the evidence is unequivocal. A hundred and fifty years ago this year was the discovery that CO-2 traps heat. That is a -- a principle in physics. It's not a question of debate. It's like gravity; it exists.
Like gravity it exists. You see, there's the proven. In the mind of conservatives, it doesn't matter what's provable -- only what can be denied. And as we've come to expect from Fred Hiatt and the Washington Post, they reprinted a Sarah Palin op-ed that is littered with so much false information on climate change that it boggles the mind. They have turned the news paper op-ed section into a celebrity rag that could care less about truth and accuracy. I'm shocked the op-ed didn't come with Sarah Palin celebrity photos.
Amid the Copenhagen climate summit, Fred Hiatt has chosen to descend the paper to a new low, seeming to prove that there is somehow a balance between outright falsehoods and ignorance, on the one side, and scientific knowledge and honest discourse on the other.
And here's a response to Dean Baker at the dubious Politico:
Dean Baker: It’s amazing that the Post feels the need to print a column that is chock full of distortions and misinformation just because it was written by a celebrity (Sarah Palin’s pro-global warming diatribe).
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CNN's Jessica Yellin talks to TARP Congressional Oversight Chair Elizabeth Warren about the details of her report about to be released to Congress. Warren stressed the need to get legislation passed to give the government resolution authority over these "too-big-to-fail" institutions so the taxpayers aren't put on the hook again when they "mess up". That's a kind way to put it, but she's right.
You've gotta' love Jessica Yellin asking if it's "un-American" to regulate these industries. Unbelievable. I've got to wonder just how much more out of control she thinks they should be allowed to get before it's "American" to do something about it.
YELLIN: Well, the white house plan is just the latest controversy over T.A.R.P. the Congressional oversight committee is about to release a December report, a detailed review of T.A.R.P. to date. Elizabeth Warren is the chair of the T.A.R.P. Congressional oversight committee and joins me now from Washington.
Elizabeth, so good to see you again. The bailout, we know, was unpopular, as the president acknowledged today. But I remember a year ago, the prognosticators were warning of economic calamity. People certainly are hurting today, more than 60 million unemployed. But a second great Congressional didn't happen. So could we argue that the bailout actually worked?
WARREN: Absolutely. One of the things that we conclude in our report, which will be out tomorrow, is that the bailout was part of a larger, strong government response that probably kept this economy from tumbling over the abyss. So in that sense, we have to admit T.A.R.P. did its job. Now, T.A.R.P. was also supposed to do a lot of other things and we should also evaluate along those metrics. But for the number one thing, that is stop the crisis and stop that feeling that it's all tumbling into depression, it did it.
YELLIN: All right. Let's talk about some of the other things. It was supposed to unfreeze credit and make sure credit was flowing. It was supposed to help keep jobs and businesses from laying off employees. It was supposed to help homeowners in some way through a trickle-down effect to keep their homes. How well has it scored on some of those measures?
Towards the end of the interview, Glick asked him what his “solutions” are to the problems the country faces, prompting Hatch to respond that he’d start by putting the country “back into conservative Republican hands” and keeping the Bush tax cuts:
FOXBIZ: What are your solutions to jobs, the unemployment situation, rising health care costs, energy costs that are rising, inflation that is still a concern, how do we solve these issues right now? Are we trying to do too much too quickly?
HATCH: Number one you get the arrogance of power by throwing the Democrats and get the control back into conservative Republican hands. Number two we should not do away with the Bush tax cuts, those marginal tax cuts are a major help to try and keep the economy going. Number three we should use fifty state labratories to do health care.
No president in modern times walks a tightrope as exquisitely as this one. His balance is a thing of beauty. But when it comes to this economy right now -- an economy fundamentally out of balance -- we need a federal government that moves boldly and swiftly to counter-balance the huge recessionary forces still at large.
States and cities, for example, are estimated to be $350 billion hole this year and next. They can't run deficits so they're wildly cutting spending, cutting jobs, cutting contracts, and raising taxes and fees. That's a huge anti-stimulus package roughly as big as the remaining direct spending in the old federal stimulus package. Which means, Obama's "new" stimulus, announced today, is about all we have, and it's not nearly enough.
[...]
There is no reason to tolerate this degree of misery. We know exactly what to do. The government has the fiscal tools to do it. Start by bailing out state and local governments (if Congress would prefer to call it a loan and require payback over the next five years, fine). Renew unemployment and COBRA benefits. Increase federal spending on infrastructure. If we have to, hire people directly. The package should be $400 billion over two years.
When Ed Schultz noted that the credit markets need to be loosened up for small businesses and that he thought the TARP money should be used for that and not only for government jobs, Reich responded:
Ed it is the right thing to do. I wish though when we bailed out the big banks, one of the reasons we bailed out the big banks was so they would turn around and provide credit for small businesses. Actually nothing like that happened. We bailed out the big banks and now we're bailing out small businesses.
Just one more of the many strings that should have been attached to that money. Of course the Republicans won't want to go along with any of it and scream more about the need for deficit reductions. Unless of course that interferes with tax cuts for the rich or military spending. Then the sky's the limit and deficits don't matter.
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(The Wolf at the front door is starting to look like the family pet)
The never ending story of the Economy, and the ever perplexing world of Reaganomics of the 1980s. Probably not a revelatory view, but one given by Donald C. Platten, who was in 1983 Chairman and CEO of Chemical Bank. The interview via CBS News Face The Nation on August 14, 1983 gives some indication where things were heading.
Donald Platten (Chemical Bank): “The feeling I personally go to bed with every night is that the economy will shortly stop being in a recovery mode, in other words we will have reached the former peak of the economy and that there will be a growth that we’ll be able to talk about as far as our economy in the months ahead. I think what is going on now in the economy is very healthy. I don’t think we have to worry about it being over exuberant. I think there will be a good economy going from now right straight through the year end into 1984. I think there will be pauses. I think in certain industries there’s going to be really no basic recovery in a significant way. I’m afraid that the problem of unemployment is going to continue with us for some time to come, and that really is the biggest thing in the country today. We’ve dispensed with the word Inflation, really. It’s a non-subject, why? Because it’s down to around 3 to 4 percent as against 14 percent a couple of years, so now the unemployment factor is the one that’s on most peoples minds. And that is going to continue down as the economy continues to grow, that it will not affect everybody as well as some other people, there’s no question about that.”
Hindsight and the reading of Tea Leaves. Twenty-six years ago they were doing it. Twenty-six years later, they still are.
Very good news, I think, on the climate change front. This is an excellent way to sidestep the political process and keep the necessary changes from getting bogged down in the politics:
The Obama administration will formally declare Monday that carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gas emissions pose a danger to the public's health and welfare, a move that lays the groundwork for an economy-wide carbon cap even if Congress fails to enact climate legislation, sources familiar with the process said.
The move, which Environmental Protection Agency administrator Lisa P. Jackson will announce at an afternoon press conference, comes as the largest climate change conference in history gets underway in Copenhagen. It will finalize an initial "endangerment finding" by the government in April.
While an EPA spokeswoman declined to comment on the matter, the agency sent out a press advisory that Jackson will make "a significant climate announcement at a press briefing" at 1:15 p.m. at EPA headquarters. Jackson will also speak at the U.N.-sponsored climate conference Wednesday; her address is titled "Taking Action at Home." Obama, who will attend the end of the U.N. talks Dec. 18, has sent a series of recent signals to the international community that the United States will curb its carbon output as part of a new global climate deal.
The endangerment finding stems from a 2007 Supreme Court decision in which the court ordered the EPA to determine whether greenhouse gases qualify as a pollutant under the Clean Air Act. It could trigger a series of federal regulations affecting polluters, from vehicles to coal-fired power plants.
Businesses argue that such a finding would mean even emitters as small as a mom-and-pop grocery store would be forced to comply with onerous greenhouse gas regulations. The administration has crafted rules that would exempt facilities that emit less than 25,000 tons of carbon dioxide or its equivalent annually. But it remains unclear if that exemption would hold up in court.
"An endangerment finding from the EPA could result in a top-down command-and-control regime that will choke off growth by adding new mandates to virtually every major construction and renovation project," Thomas Donohue, president and CEO of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, said in a statement. "The devil will be in the details, and we look forward to working with the government to ensure we don't stifle our economic recovery."
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Mitt Romney is asked what he thinks the Obama administration needs to do to stimulate the economy and surprise, surprise...he recommends more tax cuts. How'd those tax cuts work out under George W. Bush Mitt? Of course Romney also thinks we need to get rid of the stimulus plan which wasn't big enough in the first place. Let the private sector take care of everything. It will all work out just fine.
How is a jobs program different from a second stimulus? It’s a matter of priorities. The 2009 Obama stimulus bill was focused on restoring economic growth. It was, in effect, based on the belief that if you build G.D.P., the jobs will come. That strategy might have worked if the stimulus had been big enough — but it wasn’t. And as a matter of political reality, it’s hard to see how the administration could pass a second stimulus big enough to make up for the original shortfall.
So our best hope now is for a somewhat cheaper program that generates more jobs for the buck. Such a program should shy away from measures, like general tax cuts, that at best lead only indirectly to job creation, with many possible disconnects along the way. Instead, it should consist of measures that more or less directly save or add jobs.
KING: What should the president do in the short term? A lot of Republicans have said we're in this deficit, we can't run up more deficits. What should he do in the short term to create jobs?
ROMNEY: Well, put the brakes on the stimulus plan. Stop spending money on government, and instead create incentives for businesses to buy things and to hire people, by, for instance, having a more robust investment tax credit, by letting businesses expense capital expenditures in the first year for the next year or two, by lowering the payroll tax. At the same time, stop all the talk about cap-and- trade. That holds back job growth.
And of course, this plan to take over the health care system means that about one-fifth of the economy has put its brakes on and is not willing to invest because they're so concerned.
