Backing up here - Before you get on your high horse, Left-Dopers, know that the Senate Republicans were all for an immediate vote on the jobs bill. As in, go direct to voting for it. Harry Reid changed Senate rules in order to avoid that, because he believed his own party would reject it and didn’t want to udnercut his own party’s President. (I’m not certain, but I think even he was dubious about the bill.)
Solution? Well, at this point, any solution is going to be painful. I’m not really interested in cutting taxes now, as I doubt we can afford it. I favor a three-pronged program:
(1) Massive review and cancellation of federal regulations which no longer serve anyone much. Way, way too many regs are outdated and often served dubious purposes to begin with. (2) With border security assured, open up immigration for any western national, political refugee, or more or less any educated person. (A great many commenters get confused: it is illegal immigration, not legal, which angers so many Conservatives. If the people are legal, choose to come here, and . Open a temporary worker program almost anyone who don’t want to permanently stay but would like work. (3) Hi Opal! (4) Break the TSA, IRS, and (5) Tax Reform. Simplify the tax code, make it a moderately graduated income tax (basically, split the difference between the progressive and flat tax). Almost everyone should pay some tax. We’ve been undercutting the tax base for years, and that’s a pretty good way to hurt yourself. (6) Legalize marijuana, with essentially the same restrictions as alchohol. (7) Make international financial transfers and transactions free, or nearly so. Politicians love to complain about corporations “tax dodging” or whatever. But nobody has a duty to pay more money because you write a bad law. If you stop putting hefty taxes on funds transfers, they’ll keep money here while waiting to use it, which will result in more investment funds being available and making it more likely they’ll be put to use here. Plus, these are massive headaches - companies keep giant staffs just to figure these out. (8) Begin using goals-based financial review. Right now, the various Federal bureacracies tend to go with a “last year’s budget plus X” approach. They don’t talk in terms of “We can accomplish X at budget level Y, X+1 at budget level Y+2, or even X+5 at budget level Y+6.” Basically, zero-based budgeting, and keep people to it. Failing to meet your goals by a significant amount should be a minor scandal and lead to trouble if not switfly corrected.
I think the Republicans made a huge mistake in the polical arena. What they should have done was publicly state that they oppose the bill but so not to be obstructionist, they will vote for it provided the President and Congressional Democrats take full responsibility for the outcomes even if unemployment does not decrease in the next year.
Now next November as unemployment is at 9.1% or higher, the Republicans run on the platform that they gave the Democrats a chance and their policies did no good whatsoever.
You are. The vote for cloture only applies if there is a filibuster. With the procedural filibuster, the minority leader informs the majority leader that they will filibuster and the cloture vote is taken at that time. BUT if the minority leader does not indicate that it will be filibustered, the normal procedures of debate, amendments, etc. go into effect but not cloture vote.
Well, it’s obvious: There’s still some room in the Dems for people – activists and officeholders – who sensibly blame the corporations/overclass as such.
(4) is not going to happen. Some organization will have to be responsible for collecting taxes and enforcing airline security.
(5) would essentially raise taxes on the poor and middle class, decreasing the amount of disposible income for these groups, lowering demand for goods. I don’t see how this could ever help the economy.
(6) No disagreement, but I fail to see how this would have any meaningful effect on the economy.
(7) I’m also not sure how this raises the employment level.
(8) Gov’t agencies are already doing this as an attempt to lower the federal budget deficit. While it needs to be done, it can have nothing but a negative effect on the economy. All cuts to gov’t spending comes out of someone’s paycheck.
Your average person just wants immediate solutions, with long term consequences being damned. If you poll the average person, that will be your answer.
But let’s take the stimulus package into consideration again. By all rights a Keynesian stimulus should work. Your average person, given a bunch of money and told that it will solve the problems of the economy by people he trusts, will go out and spend the money, and the economy will be fixed. In this case, the stimulus was both a short and long term plan to fix the economy. If you poll the average person, he’ll say that he asked for a chance to work, and quickly after the stimulus, companies started hiring again; he got what he wanted.
You run that same simulation in a world with FOX news saying the same thing as I did in post 39, and suddenly your stimulus fails. The average person is hearing from a lot of smart people that a stimulus will work, will bring him jobs, will fix the economy, etc. But he’s also hearing from an equal number of smart people that a stimulus won’t work, will drive the economy into deeper debt, and make everything worse. Minus any alternative proposal, he’ll poll as being positive for the stimulus – because he hopes it will work. But then he’ll take the money the government gives him and stick in it a bank account, not spending it, because he doesn’t really understand how a stimulus is meant to work, and doesn’t correlate its failure to function on his personal actions.
Basically, the average Joe is the pawn of talking heads. If the talking heads don’t have any ideas of their own and are just arguing in circles, all the average Joe can do is collect in parks or in front of banks and demand for “smart people” to figure out the problem and solve it. They don’t know what that answer is and probably wouldn’t recognize it if it bit them in the ass, so polling them about what they think the answer should be isn’t particularly useful. They aren’t policy makers, they aren’t economists. They’re just people. But to satisfy the people, you have to satisfy the employers, the policy makers, and the media that things are good, because that’s where the people get their lead from.
You’re assuming that spending the money is optional for Joseph Blow, that he might not buy new school clothes for his kids, a new washing machine, etc. Best guess is that he probably will.
@ Sage Rat - Your premise was flawed as well… One simple fact. The deficit didn’t cause the economy to tank. Rampant risk taking (aka “greed”) + lax regulation of the financial sector in the form of repealing Glass-Steagall, and a regulatory agency that was in bed with the people they were meant to watchdog did much, much more.
I’d suggest anyone who is saying anything else; 1. should be given a polygraph. 2. Is trying to sell you something - so read the fine print. or 3. Had too much Kool-Aid. 4. Hasn’t stopped to think about it long enough.
Play it fairly. In order to get past the Repub filibuster, it needed 60 votes. That has become the new norm, since the Repubs have given themselves over to the blind right. They filibuster everything.
Once a head count is taken and a Dem sees there is no way to get it through the Repub bloc, they sometimes will vote against a bill to play up to their constituents.
Yes, I want to play that game. But play fair.
If that’s what needs to be added to make the leaders of the nation feel satisfied that the nation is on a firm footing, then add it to the list of things which can be done, should be done, and which can reasonably be put into policy.
I don’t feel that the lack of those is the cause of the double-dip recession that’s lead to the current protests and whatnot, but I’m not opposed to mending finance regulations where there’s agreement that the underlying issues are understood, and the solutions directly address those issues. I don’t think that Republicans would be able to obstruct such proposals either.
But I wouldn’t think that the government was caving to special interests if the proposals were less than bloggers want. Bloggers don’t have the same information as policy makers do. At the moment, I have little reason to believe that the measures which were passed several years ago weren’t sufficient.
This makes me sick. State and local governments are starved for cash right now. The bill would have provided $85 billion in aid to state and local governments. Right now municipal governments are just having so much fun right now: declaring bankruptcy in Harrisburg, removing street lights in Michigan to avoid paying electric costs, converting paved roads to gravel, delaying critical maintenance on infrastructure, and even repealing domestic violence laws to save on court costs. Cites: blog post summary, news article.
This bill included funding for infrastructure maintenance and repair, among other things. I’ve said before that it’s a win-win, and I’m very frustrated that this bill did not go through. For more on infrastructure spending refer to my previous topic.
Were there enough Democratic votes to pass this bill? I thought there wasn’t, but I could be mistaken. If not, then this was just a bit of political theater before they went about slicing it up into more palatable pieces.