Whether or not you think Emanuel is right about the legislative politics, it seems to significant for the White House Chief of Staff to concede that Krugman is correct about the economics and the legislation President Obama signed into law may, in virtue of its concessions to conservatives, be too small to rescue the economy.
Results tagged “extraneous word” from YGLESIAS errata
There's a lot of dogma about to the effect that jobs working for the government aren't "real" jobs--that somehow the police and teachers and firefighters and the guys who build the bridges and drive the buses aren't creating anything of value.
This amounts to saying "just because nationalization worked in Sweden doesn't mean it'll necessarily work here, so I'll try something else that also might not won't work."
The Congressional Budget Office produces a lot of sober-minded, sensible, reality-based policy analysis. Consequently, 99 days out of a 100 conservatives ignore what it says.
The reality, as Joby Warrick reports for The Washington Post is that when American leadership is popular and respect, al-Qaeda keeps on keeping on. But they have a much harder time getting anyone to follow them:
The torrent of hateful words is part of what terrorism experts now believe is a deliberate, even desperate, propaganda campaign against a president who appears to have gotten under al-Qaeda's skin. The departure of George W. Bush deprived al-Qaeda of a polarizing American leader who reliably drove recruits and donations to the terrorist group.
ad_iconWith Obama, al-Qaeda faces an entirely new challenge, experts say: a U.S. president who campaigned to end the Iraq war and to close the military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and who polls show is well liked throughout the Muslim world.
But then came the "redeemer" governments using a combination of a terrorist violence and state coercion to institute an apartheid system and for a while black elected officials departed from the federal government.
What's more, there's a difference between saying (to use some hypothetical numbers) "here are 1,000 different projects, each costing $1 billion, and each of which is ready to go" and saying "we're ready to go with $1 trillion worth of spending on a 1,000 projects."
But the 40 market-rate units is better for affordability than is letting the site remain as a vacant lot or a very low-density use.
From a political point of view, there are too things I like about this release. One is that it doesn't overpromise. One of the biggest risks facing progressive politics at the moment is that we inherit a deteriorating situation, take action that ensures things get "bad" rather than "terrible," and that get blamed by the public and the right for creating a bad situation. To that end, it's important not to make unrealistic promises about what you're proposing. Romer and Bernstein are clearly saying he that even if this works, we're going to get to a bad place.
In a related news, they're doing a recall on civics textbooks that have led generations of schoolchildren to believe that congress just gets to decide what the laws are without "negotiating" with major corporations.
At a certain point, it became clear to the apartheid leaders that there system was untenable. But they were still more interested in the upholding the interests of white South Africa than in abstract considerations of justice.
