Nation-Building

This year, I won't be getting a refund - in fact I had to cut two sizable checks to the Department of Revenue and the Wisconsin Treasury. Yes, it was indeed painful. Fundamentally, the idea of sending your money to faceless bureaucrats is one that provokes some resentment in even the most mild-mannered citizen. In fact, there's a Tea Party rally going on right now in Capitol Square here in Madison full of people who are really angry about it, who think that taxes are a form of tyranny, who are holding signs evoking the Revolutionary War ("Don't Tread on Me", etc.) and who fervently believe that Barack Obama is a socialist/muslim/fascist/communist dedicated to destroying this nation, who will throw you in jail if you don't buy health insurance. That's patriotism, in a way. These people believe that their liberty is being threatened, and they are making their voices heard in defense of what they believe. However, my understanding of patriotism is that freed...

I admit to not having ever seen a Michael Moore movie, though from what I understand his film Roger and Me was probably his defining film, one that predated the Bush era and thus was more balanced in its critiques. Of course his latest effort, a rant against the horrors of unrestrained capitalism, is not going to make any converts. Still, I was intrigued by the positive review of Capitalism: A Love Story at AICN by their resident conservative critic Massawyrm (he lambasted the animated film Happy Feet for being a propaganda film against religion, intended to indoctrinate children, and proclaimed The Ant Bully to be a storybook version of The Communist Manifesto. I have to agree with the former, and haven't seen the latter.). Massawyrm speaks of his admiration for the "old" Michael Moore, invoking Roger and Me, and then makes the claim that this new movie is the closest Moore has come to returning to those genuine speak-truth-to-power roots. And he puts it in contex...

So much economic hand-wringing , yet all its good for is to reiterate the same tired stale posturing from liberals and conservatives alike. Here's the basic problem. 1. Domestic spending can't go down. It's a fantasy to imagine that even draconian cuts would be tolerable or politically viable. Like it or not, Americans want their social services and safety nets. All the conservative handwringing about Socialism is a Red herring, pun intended. Anyway discretionary spending (non defense, non medicare, non social sec) is a tiny fraction of the overall budget anyway so theres very little to cut; American services are actually an incredible bang for the buck, especially compared to European counterparts. 2. Defense spending can't be cut. The world is a bad place. We have to spend a lot of money in a lot of places for basic reasons of security and global policy. Isolationism doesnt work; 9-11 proved that. Bottom line: we need resources to deal with the crap out there and that...

Yesterday's nationwide Tea Bagger tax protests seem to have been reasonably successful, with total turnout probably at least a couple of hundred thousand people. Despite dogma by the conservative blogsphere that the media was ignoring them, it seems that coverage was everywhere - including on NPR , which even interviewed Glenn Reynolds . One of the more fairly written articles about these protests was at The Daily Beast, which pointed out that there was also a substantial Obama Derangement Syndrome (ODS) mentality running through them: But when I saw the giant placard which read “Hussein = Commie,” the time had come for some counseling. The guy holding the sign looked like he could have come over on the subway from Williamsburg, wearing a hoodie, sunglasses, and an iPod. I asked him if the sign was serious. Oh, yes. “Every-time he opens his mouth he spouts textbook Marxism, Communism, Socialism,” said the man who initially gave his name as “Barry Soetoro”—Obama’s name when he ...

The GOP is in full obstructionist mode regarding the economic stimulus plan - there's an excellent summary at myDD of the GOP's general strategy: The GOP's main contention has been now for over 30 years that by reducing the top tax rate on personal and corporate income that a large increase in aggregate total savings would result. Yet the savings rate of American households has been declining for more than a decade and it now stands at the lowest level of the post-WW II era. Since 2003, the combined annual net savings of households, businesses, and government have declined to about one percent of gross national income. So if increasing the savings rate is the goal so as to thus increase investment, cutting taxes hasn't worked. And yet the GOP continues to pitch the idea that tax cuts lift the economy. Well, the Democrats are batting now and they shouldn't swing at balls outside the strike zone. To continue the metaphor, this is the GOP's set up pitch. They wan...

Paul Krugman writes about the prospect of Obama doing a grand FDR-style New Deal to stimulate the economy, then does some back of the envelope calculations on his blog, and frets that an Obama stimulus package might be too small (by design), and explains why that's a bad thing. In a nutshell, you don't want to lowball a stimulus - you need to err on the side of caution by being bold. As Krugman notes, you need about $600 billion to close a 7% output gap, but the Obama people seem ot be leaning towards a stimulus package half that size.

Dave Schuler has a great post on fiscal policy that summarizes the economic picture for the United States and raises some questions about what priorities need to be. I noticed that one of the graphs makes an important point that many people do not seem to appreciate - Social Security is just fine. Look at the flatness of the Social Security line: Overall, I agree that earmarks and other discretionary spending are simply not a significant problem, and Joe's formulation of these representing an operating expense of government is a good one. Likewise, McCain's call for a spending freeze might do more harm than good. Looking at the big picture, it seems clear that the one area that we really do need to control is medicare/medicaid, whose growth will spiral out of control. That in itself is probably the best argument for single-payer healthcare. Actually, I think the best model for healthcare is likely the VA, which may surprise some people, but it's true - the VA system ...