Guys like Grover Norquist are one of the reason America faces financial ruin. His insane positions on tax cuts and how government should function have resulted in what we have today. He once said:
My goal is to cut government in half in twenty-five years," he says, "to get it down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub."
He almost succeeded in drowning U.S. citizens instead. Anyway, the Saturday Stock Shows were all freaking out since Obama won the election and their free market, deregulation style has been a disaster, but that won't stop them from crying about how much money the "rich" people are paying in taxes. The guys at Forbes and Cavuto were just screaming "tax cuts" throughout.
While debating David Sirota last week on CNBC, Grover actually said this:
The economy is in the present state because when the Democrats took the House and Senate in 2006, you knew those tax increases were going to come in 2010, the stock market began to collapse as soon as you recognized those old tax rates were coming back.
Why are these people still on our TV? They lie, lie, and lie.,...
The bubble has burst; the era of sunny-side up capitalism is over. Washington may resuscitate the credit market, but will U.S. politics ever be the same? Paul Krugman, author, Professor of Economics and International Affairs at Princeton's Woodrow Wilson School, and New York Times columnist, visits Zócalo to explain exactly what happened.
As President-elect Barack Obama unveils his top economic team, a leading progressive thinker challenges America's next leader with a controversial plan for economic recovery.
Robert Kuttner, author of the new book "Obama's Challenge," talks to NOW on PBS about the enormous obstacles to -- and potential solutions for -- getting America's economy back on track.
Kuttner offers his advice on how Obama should stimulate a recovery: spending $600-700 billion per year over several years to fundamentally change the economy. "We need the government big time to prevent this from becoming the Great Depression II," Kuttner tells NOW's David Brancaccio.
Will Obama usher in the most sweeping reforms since the New Deal to get the economy working again?
President-Elect Barack Obama held his third press conference in as many days today to announce some more of the brilliant economic minds he has chosen to surround himself with. Former Federal Reserve chairman Paul Volcker will head up the President's Economic Recovery Advisory Board, and the board's top staff official will be Austan Goolsbee.
MSNBC:
President-elect Barack Obama named a board of economic experts from outside the government to advise him, in his latest bid to reassure nervous consumers and financial markets that he will bring swift economic relief as president.
Obama made the announcement Wednesday in Chicago at a morning news conference in which he tried to reassure Americans that "help is on the way" for the economy.
"I was elected with the charge of getting this economy back in shape," Obama said Wednesday. "We are going to implement starting Day One when I come into office."
Isn't it nice to finally have some adults in charge?
Fox's Neil Cavuto -- like a whole raft of right-wing ideologues -- is appalled, just appalled, these days by all the people who are succumbing to the liberal siren song on economics -- including his guest yesterday, former NYSE chair Richard Grasso:
You know what retirement has done for you? You've become like a liberal. You trust the government!
The problem for conservatives is that, as much as the Wall Street and Big Money types may have loved them back in the day -- when Reaganism/Bushism set them free to roam at will -- they've fallen out of favor because of what their ideology hath wrought: A collapse of the economy.
Money guys love you when you let them do what they want. But when doing that makes them lose their shirts, money guys get serious about doing what it takes to fix it.
And it's abundantly clear to everyone who's serious about money that the cause of this collapse has been the Perfect Storm created by conservative ideology put into practice: excessive deregulation, tax-code favoritism, and massive military spending and adventurism.
If the guys with the money are serious about getting back on their feet -- and they are -- they know this nonsense has to come to an end. So conservatives are now being treated like the slutty woman Wall Streeters met on that weekend getaway. It was fun while it lasted, but hey, got a wife and kids back home, ya know.
Sure, you still get diehard koolaid drinkers like AmSpec's Matthew Vadum, who keep wanting to lay the debacle at the feet of liberals (it's all those minority lending programs!). And there aren't many takers, especially when it comes to people for whom the bottom line trumps ideology.
Yes, it's clear that we're going to get a good solid dose of liberal economic policy -- which certainly worked to spectacular effect back in the 1990s. You had Pat Buchanan on MSNBC this morning bemoaning the looming reality: "We are on the way to a European economy." And their worst nightmare would be that it might actually work well.
It must drive the right insane to realize that their own portfolios' health depends on Barack Obama's success. And all those dittoheads out there talking about "the Obama recession" are really going to choke if they ever are forced to utter the words "the Obama recovery."
Looking for new ideas to help the economy? Please don't look to Rep. John Boehner for any new ideas. And this is not from the debate episode of the West Wing.
He said this on FNS:
“If we’re really serious about creating jobs, what we ought to do is, we ought to eliminate the capital gains tax for the next two years on any equities that are purchased,” he said. He argued that cutting the corporate income tax would help boost employment.
The answer is, eliminate the capital gains tax. Now, what was the question?
This brings back a memory: on Sept. 13, 2001, I got frantic calls from staffers on Capitol Hill. They informed me that Republican leaders in the House were trying to use the terrorist attack to ram through, you guessed it, a cut in the capital gains tax.
Meanwhile, at a panel discussion with Rich Lowry of National Review, I heard the latest argument against the Employee Free Choice Act: now would be a really bad time to make union organizing easier, because it would hurt business confidence in a recession.
Recession, recovery, whatever: it’s always proof that the Bush years should continue forever.
You guys [Team Obama] own the economy at 12 o'clock eastern time today, correct? When Senator Obama announces his Treasury Secretary, announces the Larry Summers position. It is now Barack Obama's responsibility on the economy, is that not correct?
As C&Lers know, I actually watched many of Schiff's appearances on the Conservative-dominated stock shows and indeed all the free-market, screw-the-middle-class blowhards routinely laughed at him as he tried to bring some reality to their petty world. Things were terrible and nothing their cheerleading could do would change any of it ... as we've seen.
With the economy in tatters, President-Elect Obama held a news conference this afternoon to announce the nomination of four members of his core economic team.
Melody Barnes- Director of the Domestic Policy Council
"Again, this won't be easy. There are no shortcuts or quick fixes to this crisis, which has been many years in the making - and the economy is likely to get worse before it gets better. Full recovery won't happen immediately. And to make the investments we need, we'll have to scour our federal budget, line-by-line, and make meaningful cuts and sacrifices as well - something I'll be discussing further tomorrow."
In other economic news, Citigroup just received a much-needed transfusion from the government:
Wall Street showed clear relief Monday over the government's plan to bail out Citigroup Inc. — a move it hopes will help quiet some of the uncertainty hounding the financial sector and the overall economy. The major indexes jumped more than 2 percent, extending Friday's big rally.
In case there was any doubt about how serious this crisis is, President Obama plans on signing an economic stimulus package into law on the very first day he takes over.
Conservatives have been trying to blame Obama for the market drop ever since he won the election. What a shock, right?
Neil Cavuto and Ben Stein got into a screaming match over the state of the economy after the bailout Saturday morning on Fox's Cavuto for Business. I've never seen them go at it like that before. It started immediately when Cavuto opened up the segment by saying we've spent 2 trillion dollars so far to fix the problem, which is patently false, and Stein called him out on it. (rough transcript.)
Stein: The $2 trillion dollar number you cited at the beginning is a completely made up number, I don't know where you got it from.
We asked, no, no no Ben.,..
Cavuto: What do you think it is?
Stein: Closer to $300 billion...
Cavuto: Oh, no, no, no, Ben I gotta stop you there...
Stein: Could I answer your question?
Cavuto: When you are supporting one institution after the other ...
Stein: You are doing the classic post hoc ergo prop drop fallacy. You may as well say because there was a World Series, the market dropped 4000 points. The Federal government has to stabilize this economy.
Cavuto: No it doesn't, Ben. No, no, and by the way, we were pre-hocking on this ...
Stein: The Federal government is the only one that can stabilize this economy.
Cavuto: It is a slippery slope Ben...
Stein: Then otherwise we fall into a great depression. Maybe not a problem for you, but a problem for everybody else.
Cavuto: Oh, stop the nonsense.
Stein: It isn't nonsense.
Cavuto: Where do you draw the nonsensical line.
Stein: We go in for as much Federal stimulus as it takes keep us out of a great depression. That is basic common sense ... We need to bail out the auto companies, we need to have a massive stimulus package. This economy is about to fall off a cliff. We need major stimulus.
Cavuto attacks Pelosi too....And it goes on from there. There is great fear among economists whenever they get honest. It's no joke. Obama has inherited a nightmare. Just so you know, Cavuto was yelling at McCain's people when they tried to play with the bailout, so he has no credibility when it comes to crying about things now.
Ben Stein favors the Paul Krugman plan or if I may say, the Keynesian approach to the depression-like state of our economy. He believes, as do a lot of us, that Obama should not hold back government spending at all and help rescue the auto industry, or Armageddon will befall us. It really is that simple. And when these Conservatives talk about letting actual cities go bankrupt, well, they are insane. And many of them like Steve Forbes, who is in that camp, can just move to another city. They really want to see things get worse in our country to help Republicans...
President-elect Barack Obama announces he has directed his economic team to assemble an Economic Recovery Plan that will save or create 2.5 million more jobs by January of 2011. For more information, visit http://change.gov.
The Man who predicted the economic meltdown believes we need a massive goverment stimulus package because all the macro news coming out has been much worse than expected.
The goodnews is that America has just elected a president with leadership, vision and great intelligence.
However, Obama will inherit and economic and financial mess worse than anything the U.S. has faced in decades: the most severe recession in 50 years; the worst financial and banking crisis since the Great Depression; a ballooning fiscal deficit that may be as high as a trillion dollar in 2009 and 2010; a huge current account deficit; a financial system that is in a severe crisis and where deleveraging is still occurring at a very rapid pace, thus causing a worsening of the credit crunch; a household sector where millions of households are insolvent, into negative equity territory and on the verge of losing their homes; a serious risk of deflation as the slack in goods, labor and commodity markets becomes deeper; the risk that we will end in a deflationary liquidity trap as the Fed is fast approaching the zero-bound constraint for the Fed Funds rate; the risk of a severe debt deflation as the real value of nominal liabilities will rise given price deflation while the value of financial assets is still plunging. This is the bitter gift that the Bush administration has bequeathed to Obama and the Democrats.
