"Economic Facts Get In The Way"

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(Tom Toles, via gocomics.com)

Eugene Robinson writes:

Uh-oh. Now that the economy is doing well, what are Republicans — especially those running for president — going to complain about? And what are Democrats willing to celebrate? 

Last week’s announcement that the economy grew at a rate of 5 percent in the third quarter of this year — following 4.6 percent second-quarter growth — was the clearest and least debatable indication to date that sustained recovery is no longer a promise, it’s a fact.  [snip] 

For years, a central tenet of the Republican argument has been that on economic issues, Obama is either incompetent or a socialist. It should have been clear from the beginning that he is neither, given that he rescued an economy on the brink of tipping into depression — and in a way that was friendly to Wall Street’s interests. But the GOP rarely lets the facts get in the way of a good story, so attacks on Obama’s economic stewardship have persisted.

And as long as the "mainstream media" and timid, fearful Democrats let the Republicans get away with it, the low-information majority of Americans will continue to let these vandals wreck what's left of American democracy and prosperity.

The Stimulus Success Story

The New York Times has a tough-to-beat editorial on the economic stimulus package passed by Democrats five years ago to stem the effects of the Republican recession that started in 2008.  Pardon us for the lengthy excerpt, but it is well worth it to get a full picture:

Of all the myths and falsehoods that Republicans have spread about President Obama, the most pernicious and long-lasting is that the $832 billion stimulus package did not work. Since 2009, Republican lawmakers have inextricably linked the words “failed” and “stimulus,” and last week, five years after passage of the Recovery Act, they dusted off their old playbook again. 

“The ‘stimulus’ has turned out to be a classic case of big promises and big spending with little results,” wrote Speaker John Boehner. “Five years and hundreds of billions of dollars later, millions of families are still asking, ‘where are the jobs?’” 

The stimulus could have done more good had it been bigger and more carefully constructed. But put simply, it prevented a second recession that could have turned into a depression. It created or saved an average of 1.6 million jobs a year for four years. (There are the jobs, Mr. Boehner.) It raised the nation’s economic output by 2 to 3 percent from 2009 to 2011. It prevented a significant increase in poverty — without it, 5.3 million additional people would have become poor in 2010. 

And yet Republicans were successful in discrediting the very idea that federal spending can boost the economy and raise employment. They made the argument that the stimulus was a failure not just to ensure that Mr. Obama would get no credit for the recovery that did occur, but to justify their obstruction of all further attempts at stimulus. 

So the American Jobs Act was killed, and so was the infrastructure bank and any number of other spending proposals that might have helped the country. The president’s plan to spend another $56 billion on job training, education and energy efficiency, to be unveiled in his budget next month, will almost certainly suffer a similar fate. 

This may be the singular tragedy of the Obama administration. Five years later, it is clear to all fair-minded economists that the stimulus did work, and that it did enormous good for the economy and for tens of millions of people. But because it fell short of its goals, and was roundly ridiculed by Republicans and inadequately defended by Democrats, who should have trumpeted its success, the president’s stimulus plan is now widely considered a stumble.  (our emphasis)

The editorial rightly puts some of the blame on cowering Democratic officeholders, many of whom went into a defensive crouch at the first volley from the right.  But, there's another culprit that bears a lot of the blame in making sure the lies propagated by Republicans gained currency:  the "mainstream media."  Had the media been doing its job (and not standing by as casual, fact-averse observers = cough = ChuckTodd = cough = ), "Mr. Tangerine Man" Boehner would not be able to get away with the transparent hypocrisy of asking "where are the jobs?"  But they didn't, and to the extent the stimulus is still being reported as a "he said, she said" controversy even today, they won't.

"The Party of (Nutty) Ideas"

The once great Washington Post's Kaplan Daily's Eugene Robinson talks about "the party of (nutty) ideas" (and we all know which one that is):

If we get past the shutdown threat, the next opportunity for mayhem will be a GOP threat — yet again — to grievously wound the economy by refusing to raise the statutory debt ceiling. Maybe we’ll make it past this crisis, too. But chances that Republicans will actually let Congress do anything constructive seem dimmer than ever.

Obama can use his executive powers, but those only go so far. Next year, voters will have to decide whether elected officials who do not believe in government should perhaps find another line of work.

Of course, we think it's the duty of every American to help these crackpots people who obviously aren't good at their current jobs find employment elsewhere.  We understand they're looking for canvassers for Obamacare.

BONUS:  Nuts I tells ya'!

BONUS II:   Color them nuts!

BONUS III:  Health nuts!

BONUS IV:  We'll let Professor Krugman sum it up ... again:

But neither you nor I should forget that the madness of the GOP is the central issue of our time.

Monday Read: Republican Band of Anarchists

From Jonathan Chait in the New York Magazine:

"The Republican Party has spent 30 years careering ever more deeply into ideological extremism, but one of the novel developments of the Obama years is its embrace of procedural extremism. The Republican fringe has evolved from being politically shrewd proponents of radical policy changes to a gang of saboteurs who would rather stop government from functioning at all. In this sense, their historical precedents are not so much the Gingrich revolutionaries, or even their tea-party selves of a few years ago; the movement is more like the radical left of the sixties, had it occupied a position of power in Congress. And so the terms we traditionally use to scold bad Congresses—partisanship, obstruction, gridlock—don’t come close to describing this situation. The hard right’s extremism has bent back upon itself, leaving an inscrutable void of paranoia and formless rage and twisting the Republican Party into a band of anarchists."

Chait's article is well worth reading, although it will be familiar territory to readers of this blog who by now will have read account after account of the mindless rage fueling the hard right's losing struggle with the realities of 21st century America.  But, hey, let's get it all on the record.

Naturally, Weeper of the House John "Mr. Tangerine Man" Boehner is proud of this procedural extremism and of his caucus' race to the past:

House Speaker John Boehner says Congress "ought to be judged on how many laws we repeal."

The Ohio Republican makes the comments on an interview aired Sunday on CBS "Face the Nation." He was responding to a question about how little Congress is doing these days.

Boehner says Congress "should not be judged by how many new laws we create."  (our emphasis)

Yeah, you keep working on that Obamacare repeal (39 votes so far)!

With raising the debt ceiling later this year looming as the next Republican target for hostage-taking sabotaging government and the economy (the sequestration being the most recent job-killing blunt instrument employed), expect an increasingly desperate Republican Party to pull out all the stops in its anarchistic war on America's future.

Cartoon of the Day -- Economic Sabotage Edition

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With nearly 3 years of record corporate profits perhaps coming to an end, we hear Big Business mumbling about the "uncertainty in the economy" driving the decision not to hire. Yeah. We think the driver is more likely what Jim Morin is addressing: Obama-loathing Rethuglicans populating the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, National Association of Manufacturers, Club for Growth, and other right-wing plutocrats' clubs. They'll forgo a quarter or two of non-record profits in order to sink the Obama Administration and open the door to an even greater Gilded Age of income-inequality than the one we've been living in so far.

(Jim Morin, Miami Herald)

Bad Jobs Numbers? Here's Looking at You, Rethuglicans!

Jeff Spross at Think Progress has this list of the ways the Rethuglicans in Congress have sabotaged job-creation efforts:

"1. Filibustering the American Jobs Act. Last October, Senate Republicans killed a jobs bill proposed by President Obama that would have pumped $447 billion into the economy. Multiple economic analysts predicted the bill would add around two million jobs and hailed it as defense against a double-dip recession. The Congressional Budget Office also scored it as a net deficit reducer over ten years, and the American public supported the bill.

"2. Stonewalling monetary stimulus. The Federal Reserve can do enormous good for a depressed economy through more aggressive monetary stimulus, and by tolerating a temporarily higher level of inflation. But with everything from Ron Paul’s anti-inflationary crusade to Rick Perry threatening to lynch Chairman Ben Bernanke, Republicans have browbeaten the Fed into not going down this path. Most damagingly, the GOP repeatedly held up President Obama’s nominations to the Federal Reserve Board during the critical months of the recession, leaving the board without the institutional clout it needed to help the economy.

"3. Threatening a debt default. Even though the country didn’t actually hit its debt ceiling last summer, the Republican threat to default on the United States’ outstanding obligations was sufficient to spook financial markets and do real damage to the economy.

"4. Cutting discretionary spending in the debt ceiling deal. The deal the GOP extracted as the price for avoiding default imposed around $900 billion in cuts over ten years. It included $30.5 billion in discretionary cuts in 2012 alone, costing the country 0.3 percent in economic growth and 323,000 jobs, according to estimates from the Economic Policy Institute. Starting in 2013, the deal will trigger another $1.2 trillion in cuts over ten years.

"5. Cutting discretionary spending in the budget deal. While not as cataclysmic as the debt ceiling brinksmanship, Republicans also threatened a shutdown of the government in early 2011 if cuts were not made to that year’s budget. The deal they struck with the White House cut $38 billion from food stamps, health, education, law enforcement, and low-income programs among others, while sparing defense almost entirely."

With the Rethugs, it's always "Party First!"

Bipartisanship? DREAM On!

We've noted for some time how it's part of Rethuglican DNA to oppose any measures on the economy, energy, immigration, etc., that would redound positively to President Obama. Basically, they're in it to sabotage the government's ability to serve the people in the hopes (somewhat successful to date) of convincing low-information voters that "it's all Obama's fault," and it's time to give the keys back to the social and economic Darwinists who got us into the mess we're in.

Ezra Klein has an article in today's Kaplan Daily demonstrating how the Rethuglican/ New Confederate Party won't take "yes" for an answer, if it involves partnering with the Obama Administration or Democrats.

"As Democrats learned during the DREAM Act’s first decade in existence, proposing policies that Republicans have previously proposed doesn’t work. Since 2009, Democrats have sought to find middle ground with a health-care plan based around an individual mandate (which Republican Sen. John Chafee first introduced into the Senate in the 1990s), a cap-and-trade plan to reduce carbon emissions (which Republican Senator John McCain introduced into the Senate in 2003), and tax-cut based stimulus plans (which President George W. Bush signed in 2008). No go.

"Backing policies that Republicans currently support hasn’t proven much more effective. When Obama put his weight behind legislation to create a bipartisan deficit-reduction commission, a number of the Republicans who supported that bill, including Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell, flipped to oppose it.

"Obama then created the Simpson-Bowles commission through an executive order. After it finished, Republicans lashed Obama for being cool in his initial reaction to the Simpson-Bowles deficit-reduction plan (which Republicans also didn’t support). So, when the Senate’s bipartisan Gang of Six proposed their version of the Simpson-Bowles plan, Obama gave an enthusiastic press conference calling the plan “good news” and signaling that he would sign it. A 'Senate Republican leadership aide' promptly e-mailed Politico’s Mike Allen to say, 'Background guidance: The president killed any chance of its success by 1) Embracing it. 2) Hailing the fact that it increases taxes. 3) Saying it mirrors his own plan.'

"As for simply acting on his own, that’s what the president tried to do with Rubio’s DREAM-lite, and Republicans quickly attacked him for making bipartisan cooperation on the issue harder, and now Rubio might not release his legislation at all.

"To recap: When Democrats endorse ideas Republican pioneered, that doesn’t lead to bipartisanship. When they endorse ideas Republicans currently support, that doesn’t lead to bipartisanship. And when they act on their own, that’s too partisan."

It's easy to explain if you put it all in the context of Rethuglican Senate Minority Leader and turtle-impersonator Mitch "Missy" McConnell, who said long ago the Rethugs number one priority was to defeat President Obama. We think that's called "Party Over Country."

Today's Cartoon: Rethuglicans Sabotaging Economy

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(Mike Luckovich, via gocomics.com)

Today's Read: Rethuglicans Sabotaging Economy

From Dick Polman in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette:

"The Republicans' 2012 election strategy is perversely brilliant: Sabotage President Barack Obama's job-creation efforts, then blame him for the wreckage. This strategy was in action the other day, when Mitt Romney assailed Mr. Obama on the stump. Mr. Romney said that 'with America in crisis, with 23 million people out of work or stopped looking for work, he hasn't put forth a plan to get us working again.'

"Mr. Romney conveniently omitted the fact that Mr. Obama put forth such a jobs plan last autumn. The American Jobs Act would have put as many as 2 million construction workers, cops, teachers and firefighters back to work -- so said economic forecasters -- if only congressional Republicans hadn't dynamited it.

"Yes, sabotage was required. Republicans knew their prospects for beating Mr. Obama would be damaged if they signed on to a plan that got more Americans working again. They're far too invested in economic misery to let that happen. As Senate GOP leader Mitch McConnell candidly remarked in 2010, 'The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president.'"

Attention all low-information voters! Attention all low-information voters!

Plurality Thinks Rethuglicans Sabotaging Economy

From Public Policy Polling:

Q: Do you think the Republicans are intentionally stalling efforts to jumpstart the economy to ensure that Barack Obama is not reelected or not?

Yes: 49 (47)
No: 40 (41)
Unsure: 11 (12)


It's good to know you can't fool all of the people all of the time. Time for the Democrats to come out and say what nearly a majority is thinking anyway: the Rethugs are sabotaging the recovery for political gain.

Rethugs Favor Tax Increase on Middle Class

Rethugs hate the idea of tax increases on the "job creators" (i.e., the rich), but they're all for letting the payroll tax cut, benefiting low-and-middle income Americans, expire. Why?