Economics as Comedy

Here's Austan Goolsbee, Obama's economic advisor, getting down and dirty about economics...




And here is Yoram Bauman, a serious economic comedian:

Red Peril?

I was raised with the threat of the "Red Peril". But here is the new threat... the "pink peril" coming out of the East...

From a posting on the blogging site The Edge of the American West that shows that the Republicans are now painted into a corner as a regional party of the Deep South:

This chart, gratuitously stolen from Steve Benen at The Washington Monthly, suggests strongly that political discourse in the United States is going to get worse rather than better:


We have the perfect storm: an African-American President and an opposition party whose concerns, language, and obsessions is driven largely by the concerns, language, and obsessions of the American South. Those ideas–racial, cultural, martial–are what is going to drive the GOP until they escape their regional status. Jimmy Carter well knows this, and it is no coincidence that the current poster child for Republican obstructionism is South Carolina. We may date the finish of the Civil War to 1865, but the conflict has never really ended.

This is the heritage of Richard Nixon who sold his soul to the devil to win the Presidency. He did the deal that lured the Dixiecrats into the Republican fold. So now all that regional bigotry lives in the madhouse that is the Republican Party.

A Warning

This is something I don't want to think about but it is worrisome. Thomas Friedman is pointing out the odd parallel between the extreme right's rabid hatred of Rabin in Israel and the same now happening in the US. As he points out in his op-ed in the NY Times, Rabin was assassinated. Let's hope the crazies in the US don't do the same:

I was in Israel interviewing Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin just before he was assassinated in 1995. We had a beer in his office. He needed one. I remember the ugly mood in Israel then — a mood in which extreme right-wing settlers and politicians were doing all they could to delegitimize Rabin, who was committed to trading land for peace as part of the Oslo accords. They questioned his authority. They accused him of treason. They created pictures depicting him as a Nazi SS officer, and they shouted death threats at rallies. His political opponents winked at it all.

And in so doing they created a poisonous political environment that was interpreted by one right-wing Jewish nationalist as a license to kill Rabin — he must have heard, “God will be on your side” — and so he did.

Others have already remarked on this analogy, but I want to add my voice because the parallels to Israel then and America today turn my stomach: I have no problem with any of the substantive criticism of President Obama from the right or left. But something very dangerous is happening. Criticism from the far right has begun tipping over into delegitimation and creating the same kind of climate here that existed in Israel on the eve of the Rabin assassination.

What kind of madness is it that someone would create a poll on Facebook asking respondents, “Should Obama be killed?” The choices were: “No, Maybe, Yes, and Yes if he cuts my health care.” The Secret Service is now investigating. I hope they put the jerk in jail and throw away the key because this is exactly what was being done to Rabin.

When I saw the posters of Obama with the Hitler moustache I did a double take. It was so wierd. But Friedman lets me see that this kind of smear technique is used to lure the crazies out and give them the sense of empowerment that may lead one to carry out an attack.

The politics in the US leave me bewildered. It is so poisonous. It makes no sense.

I think Obama is flubbing his chance, but I'm sympathetic to Obama. I liked his message in the primary. I just think he isn't delivering the "change you can believe in" that he promised. In a democracy, if you don't like the guy, you vote him out. You don't become a self-appointed executioner.

Friedman's advice is sound:

Sometimes I wonder whether George H.W. Bush, president “41,” will be remembered as our last “legitimate” president. The right impeached Bill Clinton and hounded him from Day 1 with the bogus Whitewater “scandal.” George W. Bush was elected under a cloud because of the Florida voting mess, and his critics on the left never let him forget it.

And Mr. Obama is now having his legitimacy attacked by a concerted campaign from the right fringe. They are using everything from smears that he is a closet “socialist” to calling him a “liar” in the middle of a joint session of Congress to fabricating doubts about his birth in America and whether he is even a citizen. And these attacks are not just coming from the fringe. Now they come from Lou Dobbs on CNN and from members of the House of Representatives.

Again, hack away at the man’s policies and even his character all you want. I know politics is a tough business. But if we destroy the legitimacy of another president to lead or to pull the country together for what most Americans want most right now — nation-building at home — we are in serious trouble. We can’t go 24 years without a legitimate president — not without being swamped by the problems that we will end up postponing because we can’t address them rationally.

Go read the whole article.

Stagnant Wages

Here are a couple of tables from the CBO's report "Changes in the Distribution of Workers’ Annual Earnings Between 1979 and 2007".

The first graph shows that wages (expressed in constant 2007 dollars) were stagnant for most people through the Reagan, Bush, Clinton, and Bush eras, except for:

• A blip of growth under the Clinton years.


• The fact that women's wages, especially in the higher income ranges showed some growth over this whole period.


• The rich showed real growth while the bottom 80% were stagnant.

To press home that last point, here is a breakout of the top 10% and you can see, the richer you were, the better you did:


Remember, these are the glory years of the Reagan "revolution". This represents the wet dream of the radical right. The Republicans lowered taxes on the rich at the same time that the rich were running away with bigger incomes. So much for a "middle class" America...

PBS on Obama's War

This looks like it will be a good documentary on PBS:

Cost Cutting by US Corporations

From Focus: A Weekly Financial Digest from Bank of Montreal economic research (I've put in bold the key bit):

Cost cutting in the corporate sector has been rampant in recent quarters. Total labour compensation in the U.S. business sector was down 6.6% y/y in Q2, the steepest decline in the postwar era (Chart 2). However, payrolls aren’t the only thing that have been slashed as nonlabour payments have registered the steepest one-year decline since the early-1980s. This has helped to boost earnings in recent quarters, and sets the stage for a levered recovery once demand revives—this operating leverage will allow a bigger portion of revenues to flow directly to the bottom line.

So corporations will be profitable, but workers take it on the chin in terms of unemployment. That's not the fault of private companies. That's the fault of the Obama administration which lowballed its stimulus package and worked harder at pleasing Republicans than at trying to get the economy back on its feet.