Prairie Weather

Bad news. 2015 will not be a new year.

Ezra Klein: Have you seen plans from any politicians, or even any think tanks, for addressing income inequality that feel to you equal to the scale of the problem? I feel like you hear politicians rail on income inequality as a defining challenge of our time, and then they want to raise the top marginal tax rate by three percent or something. There's a real gap between the scale of the problem people are describing and the solutions they’re willing to embrace. Do you think this is a problem we actually know how to solve?

Paul Krugman: I think it is, but we know that it takes an extraordinary political environment to change it. The Great Compression took place under FDR. They took a society that was about as unequal as what we have now, maybe more so because of a weaker social safety net, and turned it into a broadly middle-class society that lasted for more than a generation. But that was done through a combination of a dramatic increase in unionization, extremely high rates of progressive taxation, and wage controls during the war that were used to compress the wage distribution.

So we can describe a set of policies that will restore a middle-class society, but they take FDR-sized majorities in Congress, and even then, it took a war to really bring those changes about. Which is why everybody, me included, talks about chipping away at the margins and hopes that, cumulatively, you're going to get something done.  ...Vox

Oh, that crazy little pope

The headline at The Hill is pretty big. 

Pope Francis splits with GOP

Some little south-of-the-border jerk -- a freak of some kind wearing white robes -- has challenged our Republican leaders.  As The Hill report puts it, this maniac is "flexing his muscles internationally"  and "increasingly driving a wedge between conservatives and the Catholic Church," even as he rants on about climate change and income inequality.

Who does this wanker think he is? I mean, pissing off Republicans like that?

Jeb leaves another company: Bloomberg

Jeb Bush is quietly -- well, perhaps not so quietly -- moving away from his posts on boards of large,well-known corporations and banks in order to simulate clean hands for a presidential campaign.  He's at the stage --"actively exploring" -- of weighing up the possibilities of running in 2016.

But Jeb is already too much like Mitt Romney in ways that make the average voter.  Now he's moving away from his seat on the Bloomberg board of directors and "advistory roles" in other capitalist ventures.

Bloomberg's Business News, as reported by The Hill, understands the problem.

A Bloomberg BusinessWeek report released earlier this month suggested that Bush would run into the same problems as the 2012 GOP nominee, Mitt Romney, who was a partner at Bain Capital. Romney’s time at Bain was often used against him on the campaign trail, with former Texas Gov. Rick Perry (R) famously calling him a “vulture capitalist.”

Bush has defended his private equity dealings, arguing that the business experience he’s gained would be useful if he ends up in Washington.

“I’m not ashamed,” he said in one interview. “I think taking risks and creating jobs is what we ought to have more of.” ...TheHill

See? 

What a good guy!

Going to all that trouble to create jobs for other people!

A saint!

Just like Mitt Romney and Bain.  Remember?

Is the right going back to being pathetic?

I don't know.  It seems unlikely since they just won control of Congress.  But something's going on.  Possibly they'll stop short of pathetic and just, like, back off... just get a little civilized.

Molly Ball of The Atlantic visited Erick Erickson and begins her profile of the beefy righty with a description of him eating boneless chicken wings (what are they good for, anyway?) with knife and fork.  Erickson is described as "a fastidious man who dislikes getting his hands messy with finger food..."  He's known for being polite, Ball reports, but adds:

Which was interesting, because Erickson is famous for saying things that are not polite. There was the time, in 2009, when he called retired Supreme Court Justice David Souter a “goat fucking child molester.” During the Occupy protests, he said his heart was gladdened by “watching a hippie protester get Tased.” He nicknamed Wendy Davis, the Texas state senator, “Abortion Barbie.” And in a blog post considering whether President Obama was “shagging hookers,” he called Michelle Obama a “marxist harpy” who “would go Lorena Bobbit [sic] on him should he even think about it.” (The press, Erickson wrote, wouldn’t care: Obama “could be a serial killing transvestite and the media would turn a blind eye.”) ...TheAtlantic

The tea party, which used some pretty godawful and often brutish tactics during its first campaign, are his homeboys.  Except his actual homeboys in Georgia's tea party.  They hate him, he reports.  Truth be told, checking out Molly Ball's entire profile of Erickson is kind of like wading through mud.  Time for a change, I kept thinking.  These conservative pundits are worse than awful by now: they're yesterday's dog's dinner. They're about as enticing as vintage gym socks.

It would be interesting to go back a little way and figure out when the self-styled conservatives on the right lost their T.  Did it happen in a blazing moment that we missed or has it been happening for a while?  Did they do something definitive to lose their power to anger so many?  Or did they get really boring about two hours after the November midterms? 

Or was Obama's smart decision to punch his way right past them after the midterms the kickoff?  It certainly was a signal that the right isn't (and probably never was) as potent as it likes to think.

Truth without drama

Reading the papers in a leisurely manner -- this is  the holiday season, after all, a time to eat well and rant less -- it's hard  not to notice a thread running through much of the end-of-year reporting and commentary.  Pretty much top story in the world of news and opinion keeps coming back to "What the hay!  Obamanomics has saved us!" 

Of course, over on the right the grumbling is loud and resentful.  But "loud and resentful" just isn't cutting it anymore. An economist and economics commentator set the record straight after six years of Republican whining.

David Cay Johnston, the investigative reporter who has revealed, over the years, the full extent of corporate and top 10% individual greed, writes about the Obama recovery and the efforts of the Republican Congress to prevent it.

By a host of measures, the American economy has done exceptionally well under President Barack Obama. So why does he receive such poor approval ratings, especially from the most prosperous and economically conservative Americans?

The investor class should be thrilled. Under Obama the Dow has risen an astonishing 126 percent to a record high of 18,030. Under President George W. Bush the index fell by a quarter, from 10,587 to 7,949.

Corporate America should exult. Profits, both before and after taxes, have doubled since Obama took office in 2009.

Fiscal hawks should cheer, because the federal budget deficit is down from 10 percent of the economy in Obama’s first year to less than 3 percent in fiscal year 2015, which began Oct. 1. With continued job growth this might even turn into a surplus before Obama leaves. And while Bush was a spendthrift, Obama has been the most tightfisted president in the last half century in terms of discretionary federal spending. ...Johnston,AlJazeera

Corporations (most notably, the health industry) have done very well.  But wait!  Individuals have not done so well.  The underlying sense that there continue to be losers in the current boom has a solid foundation.  Wage earners have seen their pay stagnate. But is that Obama's fault? 

No.  It's not.

Imagine how much better off we would all be but for a meeting of 14 top Republicans, 12 of them members of Congress, on the very day Obama was inaugurated six years ago. They agreed to oppose Obama’s economic policies, as Gingrich, a former speaker of the House, and others have boasted. ...

... The GOP decision six years ago to oppose Obama’s economic policies despite the Great Recession immediately harmed the economy. Congress enacted an economic stimulus bill that was much too small to counter the drop in private spending, though research has since shown it was key to reviving the economy and keeping America from falling into a much deeper hole.  ...Johnston,AlJazeera

In the end, America slowly wakes up to reality.  Okay, so Obama saved us from a depression.  We're bouncing back. But why has it taken so long?  Why aren't we experiencing a boom?

Brace yourself:

Had Congressional Republicans cooperated with the president our economy would be larger by 3 percent, or about $529 billion, the St. Louis Federal Reserve and other researchers estimate. Unrealized economic output is a terrible waste, especially when it results from petty political animus. ...Johnston,AlJazeera

And then ask yourself what voters for these destructive crazies really want for America.

___

Please, please!  Not more "austerity," Paul Krugman writes.  The austerity kick foisted off on us by Congressional Republicans crippled our economy.

You know the spiel: that the U.S. economy is ailing because Obamacare is a job-killer and the president is a redistributionist, that Mr. Obama’s anti-business speeches (he hasn’t actually made any, but never mind) have hurt entrepreneurs’ feelings, inducing them to take their marbles and go home.

This story line never made much sense. The truth is that the private sector has done surprisingly well under Mr. Obama, adding 6.7 million jobs since he took office, compared with just 3.1 million at this point under President George W. Bush. Corporate profits have soared, as have stock prices. What held us back was unprecedented public-sector austerity: At this point in the Bush years, government employment was up by 1.2 million, but under Mr. Obama it’s down by 600,000. Sure enough, now that this de facto austerity is easing, the economy is perking up.

And what this bounce tells you is that the alleged faults of Obamanomics had nothing to do with the pain we were feeling. We weren’t hurting because we were sick; we were hurting because we kept hitting ourselves with that baseball bat, and we’re feeling a lot better now that we’ve stopped. ...Krugman,NYT

Effing tired of effing right-wing dramatics

It’s odd that so many continue to see Obama as a radical and a socialist even as the Dow hits record levels and the wealthy continue to do very nicely. If he is a socialist, he is surely the most incompetent practitioner in the history of Marxism. The reaction to Obama is part of a larger difficulty that involves pretending we are philosophically far more divided than we are. ...Dionne,WaPo