The Senate? That’s your answer? So, Obama isn’t pushing harder because he feels that the Senate (controlled, at least nominally by his own party) would, what? Block his moves? Obstruct him? And, what, he doesn’t want to butt heads with them…or something?
-XT
Who says he isn’t?
Seemingly a lot of my left wing friends think he’s totally dropped the ball on all of their pet issues. Do YOU think he’s done what he’s promised, Fear? Serious question btw.
-XT
I believe he is making a serious effort to pass the legislation he promised. I don’t conclude he has failed if all of it is not passed in the first six months; do you?
Nope…I think he’s doing a fairly decent job, considering the hand he’s been dealt. But then, I’m a centrist, so I’m pretty happy that he seems to be modifying, somewhat, his stances and not trying to push through the heavy handed left wing agenda that some of my friends assumed would be going through by this point.
-XT
I believe he has taken an admirable approach, bi-partisanship, and offered it to a Republican Party wholly unwilling to accept it. A lot of their sensible centrists got eated by Dems, leaving only the true believers, who are convinced that this is all a temporary aberration, that they represent the “real” American majority, electoral results notwithstanding.
Block cloture. He needs 60 votes for cloture. There are 60 nominal Dems, but two of them (Kennedy, Byrd) are ill, and their presence for even an important vote is iffy. So he’s got 58 votes for cloture, minus any Dems that decide to get recalcitrant, plus any Republicans he can persuade to undermine the nearly-solid wall of GOP filibustering.
Do I need to go into more detail, or does that suffice?
So I guess we can conclude he is not, as we were warned by the right wing pundits, the most liberal Democrat who ever ran for president. As a liberal, I do not listen to the most extreme left elements of my party. The Republicans could learn from that.
Rest assured, the Republicans pay no attention to the extreme left elements of their party.
Do your friends think we elected Dennis Kucinich? To a certain extend people project their fantasies on a charismatic candidate, like those who thought Reagan would immediately outlaw abortion. But that is more a criticism of the left and right than of any president.
Much as I’d like him to get rid of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, the stimulus package and healthcare are far more important. What particular other issues are they complaining about?
Why would anyone in the Welfare State age want smaller government? Smaller gov’t & less redistribution of wealth is going to be a worse deal for the majority of society.
If the education system is failing, it’s in that our youth apparently still think the government is taking from them, not giving to them. Maybe that’s because American History classes have trouble reaching 1930 in the time allotted.
Sure. George Will, the late Wm. F. Buckley, um, maybe Mitt Romney, the elder Geo. Bush… But yeah, the base is cultural conservative: white, implicitly sort of Christian, anglophone, afraid of change.
Because he’s not a left winger; he’s a moderate right winger. He’s willing to take the votes of the left, but actually do what they want ? Not much chance of that.
Look at the numbers I posted for Alberta. If smaller government (as a percentage of GDP) means faster economic growth, and if it means balanced budgets and no debt, then you can be in a situation where the absolute amount of dollars spent on social programs is higher, even when taxes are lower, because GDP is higher and because you’re not throwing away 10-20% of all your government revenue to service your debt.
For example, Alberta actually spends more money on public health care per capita than does any other province. But measured as a percentage of GDP, we spend less than most other provinces. Our pro-business, low tax, fiscally conservative policies have put us in a position where we are much wealthier than the other provinces and we have much higher per-capita incomes, so we can maintain lower tax rates and still have higher social spending. I will grant that as of today a large part of the gap has to do with oil revenue, but the gap also existed in 1998, when oil revenue was low.
Look back at the data I posted for BC vs AB. BC also has huge amounts of natural resources. At the start of the 1990’s, we had similar GDP per capita. BC decided to go with a high-tax, high-regulation, anti-business government with lots of social programs. Alberta elected a pro-business, low tax, fiscally conservative government. By the end of that decade, the average Albertan was earning $7,000 per year more than the average BC resident. That difference alone pays for all our health care spending, and then some.
Today, Alberta has by far the lowest taxes in Canada, yet we spend more money on health care, and until the current fiscal downturn we were running surplus budgets AND sending billions of dollars per year to the rest of Canada in transfer payments.
The trick is to get your economic house in order FIRST. Keep your budget under control. Keep taxes low. Keep government as small as possible. Attract investment. Build your export base. Diversify your economy.
Or, you could look at Europe’s way of doing things. High taxes, lots of debt, big social programs - and low growth. If country A adopts a high growth political environment, and country B has higher social programs and debt servicing which costs it 2% of GDP growth, then in 35 years country A will have TWICE the per-capita GDP as country B. Country A could then spend far more on social programs in absolute dollars than country B, while maintaining the lower taxes and pro-growth regulatory regime.
This isn’t just theoretical. Have a look at this chart. There is a direct, strong correlation between the size of government in the various OECD countries and the amount of economic growth they experience. Countries where government spending was less than 25% of GDP grew at an average rate of 6.6%. Countries where the government spent more than 60% of GDP grew at 1.8%. With a difference in growth that large, the first group of countries would find their economies to have doubled in 15 years as compared to the low growth countries. You could argue that the <25 number reflects the rapid growth of countries starting from a more repressed level, such as the former Soviet States. But the relationship holds between every category - countries that had governments that spent 40% of GDP grew faster than countries where the government spent 50%, etc.
You can see the individual countries in this Scatter Plot.
I have seen variations on this graph applied to countries, to US states, and to Canadian provinces. The relationship almost always holds - the bigger the government, the lower the growth.
Here’s another interesting chart - earlier in the thread someone asked if any governments had actually managed to cut spending. I brought up Alberta, and showed how our spending cuts improved our economy. But the governments of New Zealand, Ireland, and the United Kingdom also cut government spending as a percentage of GDP. this table shows the affect of shrinking government budgets on GDP. As you can see, in every case GDP grew more rapidly during periods of shrinking government than it did during periods of governmental growth.
Would you rather have a society where the government spends 20% of an $18,000 per-capita GDP on health care, or one that spends 15% of a $36,000 per-capita GDP on health care? Which one should have better health outcomes? In which one is health care more affordable?
If country A has 10% of the population living below a poverty line of $10,000, and country B has 15% of the people living below a poverty line of $20,000, in which country do you thnk the poor are better served?
How exactly does that mechanism work? Are you saying that unruly classrooms are because students have been told how wonderful the government is? That poor teacher quality is because teachers think the kids are ingrates? Or what? Please expound on this theory.
Maybe its because you ran all the poor folks off, Sam? You say it was painful for the middle class. Mostly, when the middle class catches cold, the underclass catches pneumonia. So a rough guess is that if this time was kinda tough for the middle, it was really tough on the poor.
So maybe they left. Kinda like Okies, but Berties. And wouldn’t that mean that the average wealth of the remaining is going to go up? And who leaves? Well, the ones who can, the marginally poor, the working poor, almost making it. If you’re really poor, relocating like that is next to impossible. Skims off the cream, as it were.
So, they go somewhere else, and become somebody else’s problem, and the money squandered caring for your fellow citizens is now available to feed the dark demons of dreaded Debt.
No doubt, the fiscal health of Albertans will improve, once the economic dead wood is cut away. And once the tough times are over, the poor who remain will be a hardy, sturdy breed, the beneficiaries of economic eugenics.
Now, given the impressive statistics you have mounted, this can’t account for all of it. And I don’t mean to suggest it was the central cog in an evil plan, that anyone deliberately plotted to drive the poor folks out.
Frankly, I doubt anyone much thought about it at all. Except maybe for those wildly emotional lefties, you know, kicking and screaming.
I’m not going to bother asking you for a cite, since you admitted that this was a ‘guess’. But you’re fond of saying that reality has a leftward tilt, so I’m sure you’ll be swayed by the actual facts.
As for conservatives ‘not thinking about it at all’… I advocated for those reforms and studied the issue very carefully, and the potential problems were debated at length. Alberta’s welfare reform was very carefully thought out. It wasn’t just a matter of cutting budgets and throwing people on the streets. The problems were well known, the solutions logical, and it worked. The problem of welfare was primarily a problem of incentives, and the solution was to provide positive incentives to get off it, and to make sure only those who absolutely had no choice got on it in the first place.
Alberta’s health care reforms became the model for other provinces and for the welfare reform of the Clinton era. You can thank us later.
Alberta cut its welfare rolls by about 50%, and here’s a paper which describes what actually happened.
Other reports have better data. And here’s what actually happened:
First, like many places in Canada at the time, Alberta’s welfare system paid recipients more money than they could earn working a minimum wage job. This meant that Alberta’s welfare rolls were steadily growing, to the tune of about 14,000 people per year.
There is a common pattern when welfare pays as much or more than minimum wage: When an economic downturn happens, and people in the least productive jobs lose them, they are generally unwilling to undergo much hardship before turning to welfare. They may even choose welfare over another minimum wage job. Then once they are on it, they find it hard or impossible to get off, because their time away from the workforce makes them even less employable and all they could get would be minimum wage jobs. Since welfare pays more, there’s no incentive to get off it. So you get bursts of new applicants during the bad times, and the rolls don’t shrink as much in the good times as they grew in the bad. So over time, you get a steadily rising percentage of the population on welfare. That was happening in all Provinces, and in the U.S. as well.
The welfare system also had perverse incentives, such as that getting a job meant being cut off from welfare. So people on welfare had no incentive to look for work. Plus, the system was bloated, the government was overworked handling the increasing caseloads, and as a result there was a huge amount of fraud which made welfare even more lucrative.
The Klein government cut welfare benefits so that welfare paid slightly less than minimum wage. However, it also instituted a program whereby additional income earned through a job would not eliminate welfare eligibility - it would simply reduce the welfare payment, but not by as much as the job income. So people found a net economic benefit to working.
Almost overnight, these reforms slashed the rate of new welfare applications. This allowed the government to expend more resources on fraud, and it found a whole lot of it and cut a bunch of people off of welfare who should never have been on it in the first place.
The government also put in place incentives for people getting off welfare to go back to school for retraining, and a lot of them did just that.
Alberta then started undergoing a jobs boom because of the increased business investment, and possibly because of the influx of available cheap labor from the welfare rolls. Data since the report I linked suggests that 58% of the people kicked off welfare found immediate work (immediate in the sense that they found work either before the benefits cut off). A large percentage went back to school. A smaller percentage eventually wound up back on welfare. There’s no evidence of a massive outpouring of poor people fleeing Alberta.
So the data suggests that the sudden supply of labor actually stimulated a supply-side spurt in job creation.
Sam, would it be fair to say that the paper cited for authority was put out by a political organization with an agenda rather similar to your own? The C.D. Howe Inst., described by Wiki as "…funded mainly by large corporations, and generally advocates market-oriented economic policies such as tax cuts.
Would that be a fair assessment, Sam?
Okay, look: Why don’t you do some of the research for once, and actually look it up yourself? If I’m being so disingenuous, I’m sure you can find lots of lefty cites that will show how horrible Alberta’s performance under a fiscally conservative government really is. And of course, a cite from ThinkProgress or the NDP party will automatically be much more authoritative than anything from the right, won’t it? After all, reality has a leftward bias. So it should be easy for you to refute all this.
Or, rather than just leaping to catch whatever thin straw you can find and playing the bias card, you might notice that everything I’ve posted so far has plenty of references and citations for the data, including such notorious right-wing sources as Statistics Canada, the Journal of Economic Literature, the British Columbia Ministry of Social Services, and the Center for the Study of the State and Welfare at the University of Toronto.
Have you ever actually lived through a time when there was an economic boom near you? I’m thinking not, in which case you gave an even more amazingly accurate description of what happens.
Oh calm down, Sam. I haven’t any doubt that, in your own mind, the references and data you present are one hundred percent kosher. No implication of dishonestly is offered, only that you were likely aware that your source was somewhat partisan. Myself, I would have thought that worthy of mention, but that’s just me.
Why? Because as we both know, economics is not one of those “hard” sciences where proof positive is likely, or even possible. The study and its conclusions depends on interpretation at least as much as upon data.
Let’s take the hypothetical you offer, suppose Mr. Krugman were a Doper, and answered your glowing testament to the Wonders with some skepticism. Is that impossible, Sam? Is your case so utterly rock solid that no such criticism is admissable, it could only be the product of a willful bending of the truth to fit a partisan agenda?
Your honesty is not in queston, and your dignity is not at risk. “Tsk tsk” is not “you lying hound!”. I could hammer swords into plowshares on the anvil of your dignity, and it would not be dented.
Gorgonzola: I try not to pretend that my personal experience proves anything. I am a partisan, and make no bones about it. I generally try to carry a salt shaker with me, so as to have several grains at hand if I find something that proves my viewpoint is one hundred percent correct. I’m a pretty smart cookie, but perfection eludes me. YMMV.
