Blogger is Bloggered
There is something wrong with Blogger today, it does not seem to be accepting comments unless you are signed in and using your Google ID. I checked Twitter and see that everybody is complaining about the same thing happening, so it's not just us. Hopefully the site administrators are aware of the problem and will get it fixed.
posted by JimK at 5:00 PM
13 Comments:
khjd
I guess that means it works again...
"Obama may be moving toward something resembling a doctrine. One of his advisers described the president’s actions in Libya as “leading from behind.”
— Ryan Lizza, the New Yorker
"To be precise, leading from behind is a style, not a doctrine. Doctrines involve ideas, but since there are no discernible ones that make sense of Obama foreign policy — Lizza’s painstaking two-year chronicle shows it to be as ad hoc, erratic and confused as it appears — this will have to do.
And it surely is an accurate description, from President Obama’s shocking passivity during Iran’s 2009 Green Revolution to his dithering on Libya, acting at the very last moment, then handing off to a bickering coalition, yielding the current bloody stalemate. It’s been a foreign policy of hesitation, delay and indecision, marked by plaintive appeals to the fictional “international community” to do what only America can.
But underlying that style, assures this Obama adviser, there really are “two unspoken beliefs,” explains Lizza. “That the relative power of the U.S. is declining, as rivals like China rise, and that the U.S. is reviled in many parts of the world.”
Amazing. This is why Obama is deliberately diminishing American presence, standing and leadership in the world?
Take proposition one: We must “lead from behind” because U.S. relative power is declining. Even if you accept the premise, it’s a complete non sequitur. What does China’s rising GDP have to do with American buck-passing on Libya, misjudging Iran, appeasing Syria?
True, China is rising. But first, it is the only power of any significance rising militarily relative to us. Russia is recovering from levels of military strength so low that it barely registers globally. And European power is in true decline."
"And second, the challenge of a rising Chinese military is still exclusively regional. It would affect a war over Taiwan. It has zero effect on anything significantly beyond China’s coast. China has no blue-water navy. It has no foreign bases. It cannot project power globally. It might in the future — but by what logic should that paralyze us today?
Proposition two: We must lead from behind because we are reviled. Pray tell, when were we not? During Vietnam? Or earlier, under Eisenhower? When his vice president was sent on a goodwill trip to Latin America, he was spat upon and so threatened by the crowds that he had to cut short his trip. Or maybe later, under the blessed Reagan? The Reagan years were marked by vast demonstrations in the capitals of our closest allies denouncing America as a warmongering menace taking the world into nuclear winter.
“Obama came of age politically,” explains Lizza, “during the post-Cold War era, a time when America’s unmatched power created widespread resentment.” But the world did not begin with the coming to consciousness of Barack Obama. Cold War resentments ran just as deep.
It is the fate of any assertive superpower to be envied, denounced and blamed for everything under the sun. Nothing has changed. Moreover, for a country so deeply reviled, why during the massive unrest in Tunisia, Egypt, Bahrain, Yemen, Jordan and Syria have anti-American demonstrations been such a rarity?
Who truly reviles America the hegemon? The world that Obama lived in and shaped him intellectually: the elite universities; his Hyde Park milieu, including his not-to-be-mentioned friends, terrorists William Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn; the church he attended for two decades, ringing with sermons more virulently anti-American than anything heard in today’s full-throated uprising of the Arab Street.
It is the liberal elites who revile the American colossus and devoutly wish to see it cut down to size. Leading from behind — diminishing America’s global standing and assertiveness — is a reaction to their view of America, not the world’s.
Other presidents have taken anti-Americanism as a given, rather than evidence of American malignancy, believing — as do most Americans — in the rightness of our cause and the nobility of our intentions. Obama thinks anti-Americanism is a verdict on America’s fitness for leadership. I would suggest that “leading from behind” is a verdict on Obama’s fitness for leadership.
Leading from behind is not leading. It is abdicating. It is also an oxymoron."
whenever I see m-o-r-o-n all together, I think of the intellectually challenged people who voted for Barracks Obomba
"For three long years, the U.S. has been undertaking an experiment in economic policy. Could record levels of government spending, waves of new regulation and political credit allocation, and unprecedented monetary stimulus re-ignite growth? The results have been rolling in, and they represent what increasingly looks like an historic mistake that deserves to be called the Keynesian growth discount.
***
The latest evidence is yesterday's disappointing report of 1.8% in first quarter GDP. At this stage of recovery after a deep recession, the economy is typically growing by 4% or more as consumer confidence returns and businesses accelerate investment as their profits revive. Yet in this recovery consumers are still cautious and business investment remains weak.
The most recent recession of comparable depth and job loss was in 1981-1982, when unemployment hit 10.8%. Huge chunks of industrial America shut down and never re-opened. Yet once the recovery began in earnest in the first quarter of 1983, the economy boomed. As the nearby table shows, growth exceeded 7.1% for five consecutive quarters, and it kept growing at nearly a 4% pace for another two years. This was the Reagan boom.
Now look at the first seven quarters of the current recovery. Only briefly has growth hit 5%, in the fourth quarter of 2009 as businesses rebuilt inventories that had been pared to the bone. Growth has been mediocre ever since, sputtering to a near-stall in the middle of last year, accelerating modestly late last year, and now slowing again.
Most striking is that this weak growth follows everything that the Keynesian playbook said politicians should throw at the economy. First came $168 billion in one-time tax rebates in February 2008 under George W. Bush, then $814 billion more in spending spread over 2009-2010, cash for clunkers, the $8,000 home buyer tax credit, Hamp to prevent home foreclosures, the Detroit auto bailouts, billions for green jobs, a payroll tax cut for 2011, and of course near-zero interest rates for 28 months buttressed by quantitative easing I and II. We're probably forgetting something.
Imagine if President Obama had introduced his original stimulus in February 2009 with the vow that, 26 months later, GDP would be growing by 1.8% and the jobless rate would be 8.8%. Does anyone think it would have passed?
With deficits this year estimated to hit $1.65 trillion, are we really supposed to believe that more deficit spending will produce faster growth? Would $2 trillion do the trick, or how about $3 trillion? Two years after the stimulus debate began, the critics who said all of this spending would provide at most a temporary lift to GDP while saddling the economy with record deficits have been proven right.
Then there's the threat of higher tax rates on investment and business that we dodged for two years after the GOP won Congress but that President Obama has now promised for 2013 if he is re-elected. This too deters the animal spirits necessary for robust growth. The great risk is stagflation, a la the 1970s, when easy money tried to compensate for bad fiscal and regulatory policy, which led to sluggish growth, rising prices and declines in real wages.
***
The contrast in results between the current recovery and the Reagan years is instructive because the policy mix was so different. In the 1980s, the policy goals were to cut tax rates, reduce regulatory costs and uncertainty, let the private economy allocate capital free of political direction, and focus monetary policy on price stability rather than on reducing unemployment. This is the policy mix we need to rediscover if we are going to escape our current malaise and stop suffering from the Keynesian discount."
In the 1980s, the policy goals were to cut tax rates, reduce regulatory costs and uncertainty, let the private economy allocate capital free of political direction, and focus monetary policy on price stability
Well maybe they did have those "policy goals" back then, but AnonSybil's nameless WSJ opinion writer didn't tell us what budget bills were actually passed during the Reagan years in the effort to reach those "goals." Everybody knows he cut taxes, but few people remember Ronald Reagan raised taxes five times in order to try to slow the growth of the federal deficit. His deficit reduction efforts failed and the deficit more than doubled while Reagan was in office.
Here are five Reagan tax hikes:
1. In 1982, Reagan signed into law the largest peace time tax increase in US history, TEFRA, which among other things increased both the FUTA (federal unemployment tax) wage base and tax rate.
2. That same year, Reagan signed into law the Highway Revenue Act, which increased the gasoline excise tax from 4 cents to 9 cents to fund infrastructure projects like roads and bridges.
3. In 1984, Reagan signed into law the Deficit Reduction Act of 1984 because the deficit was still growing even after the two tax hikes above.
4. In 1985, Reagan signed into law COBRA, which denied "income tax deductions to employers (generally those with 20 or more full time equivalent employees) for contributions to a group health plan unless such plan meets certain continuing coverage requirements. The violation for failing to meet those criteria was subsequently changed to an excise tax."
5. In 1986, Reagan signed into law Tax Reform Act of 1986, which "is the only time in the history of the U.S. income tax (which dates back to the passage of the Revenue Act of 1862) that the top rate was reduced and the bottom rate increased concomitantly. In addition, capital gains faced the same tax rate as ordinary income."
During Reagan's first year in office, he signed the Economic Recovery Tax Act, which slashed corporate and individual income tax rates with the biggest cuts at the top. Reagan promised his tax cuts would shock the economy back to life. True voodoo economics believers went so far as to suggest that the economy would grow fast enough that tax revenues would actually rise, making the tax cuts painless.
But that didn't happen. Reagan's tax cuts instead busted the federal budget. The federal deficit bubbled up from 2.7% of GDP in 1980 to 6% of GDP in 1983, the largest peacetime deficit in history, and was still 5% of GDP in 1986. Tax revenues did pick up, especially after the 1983 payroll tax increase kicked in, reducing the deficit a bit. But from 1979-1989 tax revenues grew only 2.5%, while between 1989 and 2000 tax revenues grew 4.1%. The deficit was finally conquered under President Clinton and life was good.
History, all of it, not some selected few quarters of GDP growth tells us what we need to do if we want to climb up out of this huge deficit hole: cut spending AND raise revenues.
The GOP only sees one side of this equation but it's time for both sides to give. Cut spending (devil in the details to come) AND bring back the Clinton tax rates.
sad...Bea doesn't get it
Reagan's tax policies produced growth because they reduced the marginal tax rate, incentivizing growth
that worked
Obama's "stimulus" plan didn't, despite what he learned about Keynes in Econ 101
the percentage of the GDP represented by government spending is out of whack
it is higher than it has ever been, excepting WWII
the American people know that means spending, not taxes, is the problem
spending, not taxes, is the problem
Golly Anon, when you're wrong, you're really wrong.
Both increased spending AND decreased revenues are causes of the deficit, which won't get fixed unless we fix both deficit-producing causes like we did under Clinton's watch.
The WaPo has an informative article on the left side above the fold on the front page this morning:
Running in the red: How the U.S., on the road to surplus, detoured to massive debt
"The nation’s unnerving descent into debt began a decade ago with a choice, not a crisis.
In January 2001, with the budget balanced and clear sailing ahead, the Congressional Budget Office forecast ever-larger annual surpluses indefinitely. The outlook was so rosy, the CBO said, that Washington would have enough money by the end of the decade to pay off everything it owed.
Voices of caution were swept aside in the rush to take advantage of the apparent bounty. Political leaders chose to cut taxes, jack up spending and, for the first time in U.S. history, wage two wars solely with borrowed funds. “In the end, the floodgates opened,” said former senator Pete Domenici (R-N.M.), who chaired the Senate Budget Committee when the first tax-cut bill hit Capitol Hill in early 2001.
Now, instead of tending a nest egg of more than $2 trillion, the federal government expects to owe more than $10 trillion to outside investors by the end of this year. The national debt is larger, as a percentage of the economy, than at any time in U.S. history except for the period shortly after World War II.
Polls show that a large majority of Americans blame wasteful or unnecessary federal programs for the nation’s budget problems. But routine increases in defense and domestic spending account for only about 15 percent of the financial deterioration, according to a new analysis of CBO data.
The biggest culprit, by far, has been an erosion of tax revenue triggered largely by two recessions and multiple rounds of tax cuts. Together, the economy and the tax bills enacted under former president George W. Bush, and to a lesser extent by President Obama, wiped out $6.3 trillion in anticipated revenue. That’s nearly half of the $12.7 trillion swing from projected surpluses to real debt. Federal tax collections now stand at their lowest level as a percentage of the economy in 60 years...."
Now that my vegetable garden has been planted and is being gently soaked in, I have time to correct another of Anon's mistakes.
the American people know that means spending, not taxes, is the problem
This statement of Anon's opinion is false according to numerous polls published this year.
In fact, a growing majority of Americans know two things need to happen to get us out of this deficit hole dug by the Bush administration's spenders and borrowers: we need to cut spending AND increase taxes. And Americans have some very specific ideas about which spending cuts and whose taxes should be cut or raised.
In Jan 2011, a 60 Minutes/Vanity Fair poll found
Sixty-one percent of Americans polled would rather see taxes for the wealthy increased as a first step to tackling the deficit.
In April 2011, a Marist/McClatchy poll found
WASHINGTON — Alarmed by rising national debt and increasingly downbeat about their country's course, Americans are clear about how they want to attack the government's runway budget deficits: raise taxes on the wealthy and keep hands off of Medicare and Medicaid....
On tackling the deficit, voters by a margin of 2-to-1 support raising taxes on incomes above $250,000, with 64 percent in favor and 33 percent opposed.
Independents supported higher taxes on the wealthy by 63-34 percent; Democrats by 83-15 percent; and Republicans opposed by 43-54 percent.
Support for higher taxes rose by 5 percentage points after Obama called for that as one element of his deficit-reduction strategy last week. Opposition dropped by 6 points. The poll was conducted before and after the speech...
Also in April 2011, a CBS News/New York Times poll found
Seventy-two percent of Americans said in the poll that they support increasing federal taxes starting in 2013 for households earning $250,000 a year or more in order to lower the deficit.
Again in April 2011, a Washington Post/ABC poll found
Most Americans oppose the big spending cuts that many in Washington see as necessary to bring down the budget deficit, a new poll suggests, but they do support one idea for deficit reduction that President Barack Obama has pushed for years — raising taxes on the rich...
Of those surveyed, 72 percent said they support tax increases on people with incomes of more than $250,000, including 54 percent who strongly support them. Twenty-seven percent are opposed, including 17 percent strongly...
go play with some dirt, Bea:
"WASHINGTON — A new USA TODAY/Gallup Poll finds that House Republicans, who took a political risk in passing a controversial budget blueprint last week, have survived so far with some key advantages intact as Congress moves toward the debate on raising the debt ceiling, passing the 2012 budget and enacting a long-term deficit plan.
Americans surveyed put more trust in Republicans than Democrats to handle the federal budget and the economy.
Pessimistic about the economy and the nation’s course, they overwhelmingly blame too much spending for soaring federal deficits and want to rely more on spending cuts than tax hikes to get it under control.
Republicans have held their political base intact. When it comes to a plan to curb the deficit, Americans have qualms about Democrats:
•Nearly three-fourths of those surveyed, 71%, worry that the Democrats’ plan “won’t go far enough to fix the problem”; 62% fear they might use the deficit as an excuse to raise taxes.
•By more than 3-to-1, those surveyed say the deficit stems from too much spending, rather than too little tax revenue.
When it comes to solving the deficit problem, about half of Americans, 48%, want to do it entirely or mostly with spending cuts. Some 37% support an equal mix of spending cuts and tax increases; 11% prefer mostly tax hikes.
Republicans hold a 12-percentage-point edge over Democrats as the party better able to handle the budget, and a 5-point edge on the economy in general."
"Both increased spending AND decreased revenues are causes of the deficit, which won't get fixed unless we fix both deficit-producing causes like we did under Clinton's watch."
Clinton was lucky enough to be president right after Al Gore invented the internet and the speculative bubble that pushed revenue growth could not have been stopped under any circumstance. It mirrors what happened when electricty was first commercialized.
Nothing like that is happening today.
The deficit was cut less by tax increases than the end of welfare, the cuts in military spending made by the demise of the Soviet Union and the agreement in Congress to not raise the deficit.
This is all very similar to Paul Ryan's plan.
All of Bea's polls show that people favor higher taxes if someone else pays them.
Wow, what a revelation!
Most people think, however, that they are currently paying too much.
With Clinton's tax increase, everyone's taxes went up.
That's not feasible today, as even Bea's big hero, B. Hussein Obama, doesn't favor taxes on those under 250K.
Unfortunately for the Keynesians, even taxing all the income of the wealthy wouldn't raise much money.
btw, a group in Congress is making substantial progress pushing a bill to lower the corporate tax rate to 5%, as studies show businesses would return to the U.S. from overseas and increase our revenue base. That would eliminate a lot of the double taxation that owners of corporations are unfairly subject to.
As for me, I think we should sharply raise the taxes of people who own small businesses making about 100K per annum.
It's only fair.
The WaPo has an informative article on the left side above the fold on the front page this morning:
Running in the red: How the U.S., on the road to surplus, detoured to massive debt
"The nation’s unnerving descent into debt began a decade ago with a choice, not a crisis.
In January 2001, with the budget balanced and clear sailing ahead, the Congressional Budget Office forecast ever-larger annual surpluses indefinitely. The outlook was so rosy, the CBO said, that Washington would have enough money by the end of the decade to pay off everything it owed.
Voices of caution were swept aside in the rush to take advantage of the apparent bounty. Political leaders chose to cut taxes, jack up spending and, for the first time in U.S. history, wage two wars solely with borrowed funds. “In the end, the floodgates opened,” said former senator Pete Domenici (R-N.M.), who chaired the Senate Budget Committee when the first tax-cut bill hit Capitol Hill in early 2001.
Now, instead of tending a nest egg of more than $2 trillion, the federal government expects to owe more than $10 trillion to outside investors by the end of this year. The national debt is larger, as a percentage of the economy, than at any time in U.S. history except for the period shortly after World War II.
Polls show that a large majority of Americans blame wasteful or unnecessary federal programs for the nation’s budget problems. But routine increases in defense and domestic spending account for only about 15 percent of the financial deterioration, according to a new analysis of CBO data.
The biggest culprit, by far, has been an erosion of tax revenue triggered largely by two recessions and multiple rounds of tax cuts. Together, the economy and the tax bills enacted under former president George W. Bush, and to a lesser extent by President Obama, wiped out $6.3 trillion in anticipated revenue. That’s nearly half of the $12.7 trillion swing from projected surpluses to real debt. Federal tax collections now stand at their lowest level as a percentage of the economy in 60 years...."
Sure, I'll clean up your dirt, again.
First, your poll is an outlier. Time will tell if the trend revealed by the five polls I posted continues or if your outlier means something else is happening.
Second, if you're going to cut and paste without having the decency to provide the link to the USA Today article you are stealing from, the least you could do is indicate when you skip over paragraphs like the following paragraphs you skipped in your "play in the dirt" comment above:
"...The poll also shows the perils ahead for the GOP in moving from general principles to specific actions. Two-thirds of Americans worry the Republican plan for reducing the budget deficit would cut Medicare and Social Security too much.
Ryan and other Republican House members already have faced hostile questions at town-hall-style meetings in their home districts from seniors and others about the GOP proposal to turn the nation’s health care program for the elderly into what would essentially be a voucher system. The GOP budget blueprint would overhaul Medicare, turn Medicaid into block grants for the states and trim trillions of dollars in spending on discretionary programs. It would lower tax rates for top earners and corporations.
“The bad news for the Democrats is that even after the Ryan budget comes out and has been attacked for a little while, the Republicans have an advantage,” says Joseph White, a political scientist at Case Western Reserve University who studies budget politics and policy...
When it comes to a plan to curb the deficit, Americans have qualms about both parties:...
•Nearly two-thirds, 64%, fear the Republicans’ deficit plan will take away needed protections for the poor and the disadvantaged and will “protect the rich at the expense of everyone else.”...
Meanwhile, the country is deeply discouraged about the future. A majority of Americans say today’s youth aren’t likely to have a better life than their parents, a judgment at odds with the traditional American dream — the first time since the question initially was asked nearly three decades ago that a majority has held that view.
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