Wednesday, April 24, 2024
Monday, July 31, 2023
Wednesday, July 5, 2023
Biden, Democrats
Robert Reich
The best way for Biden and the Democrats to counteract Trump’s “strength or weakness” is by taking aim at the real bullies of America — the C-suite oligarchs, Wall Street plutocrats, billionaire monopolists who have been riding roughshod over the vast majority of Americans.
End their big-monied corruption of our democracy. Stop their monopolizing of the economy. Prevent them from using their economic power to raise prices. Call a halt to their firing workers without notice, shipping jobs abroad, and busting unions.
“Bidenomics” could create hundreds of thousands of good manufacturing jobs. That’s good, but not sufficient.
The most powerful force in American politics today is anti-establishment fury at a rigged economic system.
To counter Trump’s fake battle with cultural elites whom he accuses of undermining America’s moral core, Biden should mount a real battle against economic elites who have shafted America’s middle and working classes.
Thursday, May 25, 2023
Biden and the Debt ceiling demands
Biden must resist Republican debt ceiling demands. Here’s what he needs to do instead
US economy out of touch with lives of most Americans. Biden must resist GOP debt plan that would make things worse
By Sen. Bernie Sanders
We are at a pivotal moment in American history. In the coming days, decisions will be made with respect to our federal budget and the national debt that could impact the lives of virtually every American in our country for decades to come.
In my view, the debate we are having on the debt ceiling is about our national priorities. It is about what we value as a nation and whose side we are on.
At a time of unprecedented wealth and income inequality, when the top 1% has never had it so good and when three people on top own more wealth than the bottom half of our society, do we finally demand that the billionaire class start paying their fair share of taxes? Or do we shower the wealthy and well-connected with trillions of dollars in new tax breaks?
At a time when corporations are making enormous profits by jacking up the price of health care, prescription drugs, gasoline and groceries, do we finally end the huge loopholes that exist in our rigged tax code that allow large corporations to avoid paying their fair share of taxes?
Or do we eliminate the corporate minimum tax passed last year that prevents giant profitable corporations from paying nothing in federal income taxes after making billions in profits?
At a time when we pay, by far, the highest prices in the world for prescription drugs do we finally take on the greed of the pharmaceutical industry and substantially reduce the price of what Medicare and the American people pay for life-saving medicine?
Or do we continue to allow the pharmaceutical industry to bankrupt Medicare and cancer patients by charging outrageously high prices at the pharmacy counter?
At a time when the United States spends more on the military — $877 billion — than the next 10 nations combined, do we finally begin to eliminate the enormous waste, fraud and cost over-runs that exist at the Department of Defense?
Do we address the information revealed in a recent "60 Minutes" investigation that documented the billions in price gouging that defense contractors steal from taxpayers? Or do we continue to appropriate more money for the Pentagon than our generals have requested?
Sadly, the Republicans have made their priorities abundantly clear throughout the budget negotiations.
If Congress does not agree to impose massive cuts on the needs of working people, the elderly, the children, the sick and the poor — they will allow, for the first time in our history, the U.S. to default on the national debt.
This action will have a devastating impact on our economy, destroy millions of jobs and cause interest rates on mortgages and auto loans to skyrocket.
The hypocrisy of Republicans in Washington is truly breathtaking. Over and over again, we hear from the Republican leadership about how deeply concerned they are about the large deficit and national debt that we have.
Really? If that's the case, why have they been pushing for the complete repeal of the estate tax which benefits a handful of multi-billionaire families and would increase the federal deficit by $1.8 trillion?
Why are they pushing for an extension of the Trump tax breaks that disproportionately benefit the wealthy and large corporations and would increase the federal deficit by $3.5 trillion?
Why do they want huge increases in defense spending that would increase the national debt by hundreds of billions of dollars?
While defaulting on our nation's debt would be a disaster so would enacting the budget Republicans passed in the House in April. Here are just some of the estimated impacts of what is included in their budget to cut non-defense discretionary spending by at least 22% next year:
- Deep and sweeping budget cuts that would push 790,000 Americans out of their jobs and push our economy toward a recession.
- Up to 21 million Americans could lose Medicaid, ripping away the health care they need.
- 80,000 jobs would be cut at the Department of Veterans Affairs alone and millions of veterans would be forced to wait much longer for the care and benefits they need.
- 1.2 million women, infants and children would not receive the nutrition they need to stay healthy through the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children (WIC) program.
- Nutrition services, such as Meals on Wheels, would be cut for more than 1 million low-income seniors.
- 640,000 families would lose access to rental assistance and more than 430,000 low-income families would be evicted from their homes.
- 200,000 children would be thrown off Head Start and 180,000 kids would lose access to childcare.
- 2 million Americans would lose access to health care services through Community Health Centers.
In other words, while the top 1% owns more wealth than the bottom 90% of our population, and when 60% of our workers are living paycheck to paycheck, the Republican budget would cause massive suffering for the most vulnerable people in our country.
The willingness of Republicans to hold the world's economy hostage to their Draconian and cruel demands has made it extremely difficult to enact a bipartisan budget deal at this time.
So where do we go from here?
In my view, there is only one option. President Biden has the authority and the responsibility under the 14th Amendment of the Constitution to avoid a default.
The language in that amendment is quite clear. It says, "The validity of the public debt of the United States ... shall not be questioned." This is a constitutional guarantee that the U.S. will always pay all its debts, period.
This is not a radical idea. Making sure that the United States continues to pay its bills regardless of whether the statutory increase in the debt ceiling is raised or not is an idea that has been supported by Republicans and Democrats.
Back in 2016, then-President Donald Trump was correct when he said: "This is the United States government. First of all, you never have to default because you print the money."
Using the 14th Amendment would allow the United States to continue to pay its bills on-time and without delay, prevent an economic catastrophe, and prevent huge cuts to health care, education, childcare, affordable housing, nutrition assistance and the needs of our veterans.
It must be exercised.
Now is not the time to cave in to GOP hostage takers on the debt ceiling. Now is the time for President Biden to use the 14th Amendment to protect working families and prevent an economic catastrophe.
Add your name if you agree:
Wednesday, February 8, 2023
Biden Forges a New Democratic Paradigm
Wednesday, February 23, 2022
Some Things Must Change. “The fundamental question at the bottom of all politics”
Some Things Must Change.
“The fundamental question at the bottom of all politics”: a conversation with David Sirota
By Anand Giridharadas Feb.21.2022.
Anand Giridharadas is the author of Winners Take All: the Elite Charade of Changing the World. 2018,
Today I have for you a thought-provoking interview with David Sirota. David is a man of diverse talents and projects. He has been a muckraking journalist, a speechwriter for Senator Bernie Sanders, a progressive pugilist on TV and Twitter, a very successful dabbler in film (as with “Don’t Look Up,” the recent blockbuster he co-wrote with Adam McKay), and the creator of a newsletter called The Daily Poster, which quickly established itself in official Washington as a fount of scoops at the nexus of money and power, illustrating the nitty-gritty reasons why so many political dreams die.
David had a lot to say about this political moment of crisis and stasis, and some practical advice for President Biden. But before we get to that, I want to make sure you’re covered on all fronts.
ANAND: In Washington, your newsletter, The Daily Poster, has become a real fixture. And something perhaps unexpected that happened, given the very different politics that you have as a progressive and Joe Biden has had historically, is that a lot of the case you’re making isn’t against Joe Biden’s agenda. It’s in favor of that agenda, but pushing back against the dilution of that agenda and the lack of will to fight to rescue that agenda.
DAVID: I think that there’s a difference between the stated goals of the Biden administration and what they’re willing to fight for. It reminds me of the old saying from Paul Wellstone: “If we don’t fight hard enough for the things we stand for, at some point we have to recognize that we don’t really stand for them.”
I certainly think what the Biden administration has put forward rhetorically is — I wouldn’t call it idealism, I wouldn’t call it unrealistic, but it is certainly a relatively robust set of proposals.
The problem is, in my view, it hasn’t been really willing to muster much of a fight at all for those priorities. The White House has an enormous amount of power that it doesn’t appear to be using at all, except maybe to try to pressure the progressive caucus, for instance, to fall in line and vote for whatever piece of paper they can wave around as a “deal.”
I do think Joe Biden fetishizes the idea of getting a deal, no matter what is in the deal. The danger of that is that, whereas people in Washington fetishize deals, the average American is much more interested in what is actually in the deal, whether the actual details of the deal do something to improve their lives.
The role I try to play is following the corruption, the trail of money that tends to explain the gap between rhetoric and the reality. It explains the gap between telling the public you want something and then not actually fighting to do those things, because fighting to actually do those things would require you to have a confrontation with the donor class and with donor-sponsored members of your own party.
And this is where the Biden administration is mirroring the Obama administration: the absolute aversion to having any kind of conflict between the president and the conservative, corporate side of the Democratic Party. Just an absolute refusal to have that fight, which I would argue is absolutely the most necessary thing to have an appetite to do in order to actually get things passed.
Look, I don’t want to idealize FDR too much, but FDR had that battle with the right wing of his party. He ran primaries against members of his own party who weren’t supporting the New Deal. LBJ had those battles with the right wing of his party regarding the passage of Medicare.
History bears out that if you’re not willing to have a battle with the right wing of your party as a Democrat, then you’re not necessarily going to secure transformative legislation. You can go out and say you’re for transformative legislation, but you’re not really going to end up actually delivering because, as the old adage goes, power concedes nothing without a demand.
ANAND: If you are a geriatric millennial like me, you have never actually seen a president do the thing you’re describing. So I understand those FDR and LBJ references, but can you describe what the kind of fight you would want to see from Joe Biden would look like? Given the stalling of his agenda, what might a revival of it look like?
DAVID: Before I get into what Biden could do — not to idealize this, I’m not saying this exactly is what you want to do — but Donald Trump showed what having a battle with his party could be as a president. I mean, he constantly went after members of the Republican Party when he perceived them as getting out of line. Now, I don’t agree with his tactics. I obviously don’t agree with his ideology and the policies he was pushing, but that’s a very recent example of a Republican president willing to essentially go to war with members of his own party. Sometimes it was successful for him; other times it wasn’t.
So what does it look like for Joe Biden? Let’s take the Build Back Better Act. You can go to various states and various districts where you have recalcitrant corporate Democrats threatening to take down the bill. You can go, and you can campaign there for that agenda, and, either in an explicit way or at least a muted way, say that you expect and you demand the votes of those members of Congress whose districts or states that you’re in. And you can ask the public, the Democrats who turn out at your rallies, to contact their House members and Senators and tell them that they need their Democratic legislators’ support of that agenda. You can activate your social media network, your email list and the like, to do the same.
Tuesday, June 1, 2021
The Radical Modesty of Biden’s Budget
The Radical Modesty of Biden’s Budget
May 31, 2021
Paul Krugman
Many reports about the Biden administration’s budget proposal, released Friday, convey the sense that it’s huge. President Biden, scream some of the headlines, wants to spend SIX TRILLION DOLLARS next year. (Sorry, can’t help doing my best Dr. Evil imitation.) It takes some digging to learn that the baseline — the amount the administration estimates we’d spend next fiscal year without new policies — is $5.7 trillion.
PAUL KRUGMAN:
In fact, one of the most striking things about Biden’s budget initiative — arguably about his whole administration — is its relative modesty in terms of both money spent and claims about what that spending would accomplish. He is neither proposing nor promising a revolution, just policies that would make Americans’ lives significantly better.
And I, for one, find this hugely refreshing after Former Guy’s achievement-free bombast.
Now, the Biden plan is by no means trivial. The budget proposes spending 24.5 percent of G.D.P. over the next decade, up from a baseline of 22.7 percent. That increase, mainly driven by increased expenditures for infrastructure and families, is bigger than it looks because so much of the baseline is devoted to the military, Medicare and Social Security. But it’s not socialism, either. It would still leave the United States with a smaller government than most other wealthy countries’.
Still, the extra spending would make a huge difference to some economic sectors, notably renewable energy, and vastly improve some American lives, especially those of lower-income families with children.
Notably, however, the administration is not claiming that these policies would dramatically accelerate economic growth. Former Guy’s economists predicted that their policies would produce sustained G.D.P. growth of 3 percent a year, which would have been extraordinary in an economy whose working-age population is barely growing. Biden’s economists are projecting growth of less than 2 percent after the economy has bounced back from the pandemic.
Why this modesty? Part of it may be political strategy: Biden likes to underpromise and overdeliver, the way he did with vaccinations. The administration’s economists are actually quite optimistic, for example, about the possibility that child care and other family policies would expand labor force participation and that investing in children would yield big economic returns in the long run.
But they also know history. Governments can do a lot to fight short-term recessions (or make them worse), but the fact is that it’s very hard for policy to make a big difference to the economy’s long-term growth rate.
This is something the right has never understood. (It’s difficult to get people to understand something when their salaries depend on their not understanding it.)
Conservatives are constantly pushing the claim that tax cuts, in particular, will supercharge growth; they love to cite the supposed economic triumph of Ronald Reagan. But Reagan presided over only a couple of years of very rapid growth, as the economy recovered from a severe recession. Over the course of the 1980s, the economy grew only 0.015 percentage points faster — basically a rounding error — than it did in the troubled 1970s.
And looking more broadly across history at both the national and the state levels shows predictions that tax cuts will produce economic miracles have never panned out — not once. Neither, by the way, have predictions that tax hikes, like the increased levies on corporations and the wealthy that Biden is proposing, will leadto disaster.
So it makes sense for the Biden administration to avoid making big claims about economic growth. But does this mean that its plans are no big deal? Not at all.
You see, while government policies rarely have major effects on the economy’s overall growth rate, they can have huge effects on the quality of people’s lives. Governments can, for example, ensure that their citizens have access to affordable health care; they can drastically reduce the number of children whose lives are scarred by poverty. The Biden plan would take big steps on these and other fronts.
And this is the sense in which the Biden plan, despite its relatively moderate price tag, represents a radical departure from past economic policy.
For the past four decades, U.S. economic debate has been dominated by an ideology fundamentally opposed to spending money to help ordinary citizens: We can’t borrow more, lest we provoke a debt crisis. We can’t raise taxes on those able to pay, lest we destroy their incentive to create wealth.
The Biden budget, however, reveals an administration free from these fears. The budget doesn’t propose huge deficit spending, but it does point out that the burden of federal debt, properly measured, is minimal. And administration officials have made it clear that they don’t buy into low-tax propaganda.
You could say that the most important thing about this budget isn’t so much the dollars it would deliver as the dogma it dismisses. And if Biden’s presidency is seen as a success, this ideological liberation will have huge consequences.
Read more from Paul Krugman
Thursday, April 29, 2021
Wednesday, April 28, 2021
Wednesday, March 31, 2021
Recovery spending should meet social needs.
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Wednesday, March 10, 2021
Elected Officials Move to Tap Fiscal Power
Move Over, Nerds. It’s the Politicians’ Economy Now.
NYT. March 10,2021
Analysis. Neil Irwin.
American political leaders have learned a few things in the last 12 years, since the nation last tried to claw its way out of an economic hole.
Among them: People like having money. Congress has the power to give it to them. In an economic crisis, budget deficits don’t have to be scary. And it is better for both the economy and the democratic legitimacy of a rescue effort when elected leaders choose to help people by spending money, versus when pointy-headed technocrats help by obscure interventions in financial markets.
Lawmakers rarely phrase things so bluntly, but those are the implications of a pivot in American economic policy over the last year, culminating with the Biden administration’s $1.9 trillion pandemic relief bill. It is set to pass the House within days and be signed by President Biden soon after. And while this vote will fall along partisan lines, stimulus bills with similar goals passed with bipartisan support last year.
Leaders of both parties have become more willing to use their power to extract the nation from economic crisis, taking the primary role for managing the ups and downs of the economy that they ceded for much of the last four decades, most notably in the period after the 2008 global financial crisis.
It is an implicit rejection of an era in which the Federal Reserve was the main actor in trying to stabilize the nation’s economy. Now, elected officials are embracing the government’s ability to borrow and spend — the “great fiscal power of the United States” as Fed Chair Jerome Powell has called it — as the primary tool to fight a crisis.
“That’s really been the story of this recovery,” Mr. Powell said at a recent hearing. “Fiscal policy has really stepped up.”
Keep up with the new Washington — get live updates on politics.
The new relief bill is similarly a rejection of the concerns of centrist economists, including the former Treasury secretary Larry Summers and the former I.M.F. chief economist Olivier Blanchard, that its size and structure invite inflation or other problems. Democratic lawmakers have concluded that the favorable politics of this plan outweigh such risks.
If sustained, this assertion of control over economic management by elected leaders would be as momentous a change as the one that followed the Paul Volcker Fed in the 1980s.
“This is an enduring regime shift,” said Paul McCulley, who teaches at Georgetown’s McDonough School of Business. “Having the tools of economic stabilization work a whole lot more through the fiscal channel and a whole lot less through the monetary channel is a profound, pro-democracy policy mix.”
Continue reading the main story
It is in distinct contrast with the experience after the 2008 financial crisis.
There was a large 2009 fiscal stimulus action, but a mix of legislative politics and deficit concerns by some officials in President Barack Obama’s inner circle restrained its size. Many of its components were relatively invisible to the average voter. And when the economy remained weak into 2010 and beyond, Republicans and many Democrats focused on deficit reduction. “Stimulus” became a dirty word in Washington.
The Fed stepped in, undertaking quantitative easing (essentially, buying bonds with newly created money) and other untested strategies in an effort to keep the expansion going.
But central bankers’ tools are limited. They can adjust interest rates and push money into the financial system in hope of making credit easier to obtain. That can spur more investment and spending, which in turn can generate more jobs and higher wages.
Sound circuitous? It is — the economics equivalent of a triple bank shot in billiards.
In the 2010s, the strategy sort of worked. There was no dip back into recession, and the expansion was the longest on record, until the pandemic ended it. But it took years and years for the economy to return to health, and it was a deeply unequal recovery in which owners of financial assets saw the biggest gains. That the effort was led by unelected central bankers reduced its democratic legitimacy, by appearing as if it were merely an effort by elitist institutions to protect the rich and powerful at the expense of everyone else.
“You can do it and it can be successful, but the income and wealth inequality consequences of it will stink to high heaven,” Professor McCulley said. “You can do it that way, but it is anathema to democratic inclusion.”
By contrast, fiscal authorities can spend money directly, funneling it where it is needed, without expectation of being paid back. The United States has done exactly that over the last year on a scale with no parallel since World War II.
The new $1.9 trillion package includes, among other provisions, $1,400 payments to most Americans, a new child care tax credit that will put $300 per month in the bank accounts of most parents of a young child, help for those facing eviction or foreclosure, and billions of dollars in grants for small businesses. Public opinion polling finds it considerably more popular than other major domestic policy legislation in recent years.
“For all the failures and weaknesses of American democracy over recent months, this is a dramatic demonstration of democracy’s power to act,” said Adam Tooze, a Columbia University economic historian who has written extensively of the aftermath of the financial crisis. “When it comes to delivering popular policies at the right moment, working on the basis of established constitutional norms, they’re doing that, which is infinitely to be preferred to an economic policy that depends on well-meaning enlightened technocrats.”
Some lawmakers, especially on the left, have raised the notion that relying on congressional action to support the economy improves democratic legitimacy.
Frequently Asked Questions About the New Stimulus Package
How big are the stimulus payments in the bill, and who is eligible?
The stimulus payments would be $1,400 for most recipients. Those who are eligible would also receive an identical payment for each of their children. To qualify for the full $1,400, a single person would need an adjusted gross income of $75,000 or below. For heads of household, adjusted gross income would need to be $112,500 or below, and for married couples filing jointly that number would need to be $150,000 or below. To be eligible for a payment, a person must have a Social Security number. Read more.
“This legislation has everything to do with restoring the confidence of the American people in democracy and in their government, and if we can’t respond to the pain of working families today, we don’t deserve to be here,” said Senator Bernie Sanders of the Biden bill, known as the American Rescue Plan Act.
Republicans unanimously opposed the Biden legislation, but it has not been quite the scorched-earth opposition to deficit-widening action seen during the Obama administration.
As evidenced by previous rounds of pandemic relief, there has been enough common ground between Democrats and Republicans to reach bipartisan agreements of relatively large scale, including the $2 trillion CARES Act enacted last March.
“A relief package like this one might not have been everything both parties wanted, but a compromise deal that provides help to Americans is better than no deal at all,” said Tom Cole, Republican of Oklahoma, at the outset of the House debate on a $900 billion bipartisan bill in late December.
All in all, Congress and the Trump and Biden administrations have authorized about $6 trillion in pandemic relief spending over the last year, about 28 percent of 2019 G.D.P. (Less than that will ultimately be spent, because the economy’s improvement has left some programs with more money allocated than they needed.)
The bipartisan agreement around many of the components of the pandemic aid legislation suggests a future model for how the United States government responds to economic crises. For example, in the past the federal government has extended the duration that jobless people are eligible for unemployment insurance payments during recessions, but has not expanded the size of those payments.
The CARES Act, by contrast, increased unemployment checks by $600 a week, aiming to replace the income lost by those forced out of work. Subsequent legislation has included smaller increases. Economists generally say that this has been a well-targeted policy that has helped temporarily jobless people to keep paying their bills — and has softened the collapse of demand in the economy.
“We’re at a watershed moment where this type of tool will be used in future recessions,” said Constance Hunter, chief economist of the global accounting firm KPMG. “What we did here is different and unique, and we are going to learn whether it was effective at providing a bridge to the other side of the pandemic.”
There are risks in the Biden administration’s approach, of course. If the concerns described by Mr. Summers and Mr. Blanchard about the size of the new relief bill materialize, and the result is excessive inflation or some type of crisis, Democrats will pay a price for their actions.
But that’s the thing about democracy: It has much clearer mechanisms for holding elected officials accountable for their economic policy decisions than it does for scrutinizing appointed experts for their interest rate policies. If Americans don’t like the results, they have a straightforward way to make it known: at the ballot box in November 2022 and November 2024.
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What’s in the Stimulus Bill? A Guide to Where the $1.9 Trillion Is Going
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/09/upshot/politicians-not-central-bankers-economy-policy.html?\
A Stunning Step Forward
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Monday, March 8, 2021
More on the American Rescue Plan
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