The Problems with Obama’s Infrastructure Request

Is it me, or is the paragraph written under “1. Policy” entirely about politics? How is the likelihood of Republicans voting against the measure en masse a problem with the policy and not with the politics?

What we can learn from this article:

1. Spending from govt cannot be justified to reduce skyhigh unemployment, but if the Dow falls 700 pts over a couple of days, then it’s fine to spend.

2. Blue Dogs want to focus on jobs, but won’t tolerate any legislation that might foster job-producing growth; instead they favor job cutting austerity.

Perfectly incoherent. And Jay reports this with the assurance of someone deeply familiar with the inside game in DC. I think we’re doomed.

My reaction exactly.

Since JNS appears incapable of writing about actual policy, I will do my best to fill in what she should have written:

1. Policy. It’s too small. It. Is. Way. Too. Freaking. Small.
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No, seriously. Go ask an economist. Any economist. Go ahead, I’ll wait.
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American infrastructure is antiquated, if not crumbling around us. Bridges collapsing. Roads turning to gravel. Trains are slow at the best of times, when they aren’t delayed or stopped due to power outages or broken signal systems.
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$50 Billion is a drop in the bucket compared to what America needs to spend just to keep from falling behind. And that’s before we are even talking about pulling ourselves out of a massive recession with no end in sight.
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Americans need to decide whether they want to be a first-world country in the 21st Century. Or simply a 3000-mile wide Cayman Island. If they want to be the former, they better start investing like they mean it.

Of even greater significance than the fact that Obama never seems to run out of our money, is the lack of results this investment will achieve,,,just like Obama’s other ventures into private industry.

In FDR’s day with the CCC (Civilian Conservation Corps), which Obama seems to be intent on copying,
infrastruce creation and repair efforts did put a lot of people to work,

However, in those days most of this work was done by large crews using hand tools and manual labor.

That’s not the case today. Most of this effort is performed by hightly trained operators of specialized heavy equipment. These kinds of operations are NOT labor intensive as they used to be.

Take a look at the next highway project you pass.

There will be back hoes, (not even around in FDRs day) bull dozers each doing the work of a hundred men with shovels, cranes that lift construction elements into place rapidly, with great precision, again with only one operator, not fifty men.

Oh, and there will be the usual group of three to four union workers having coffee, swapping jokes, and looking around at all the equipment working away, and wondering how much longer to the lunch break..

What we need are factories that employ thousands,
not a relative handful of machine operators.

Oh, and we don’t need the gimmick that says all the work that Obama has in mind will be by union members or at union wage parity.

Before Labor Unions:
No middle class
No paid vacations and sick leave
No medical coverage
No protections against child labor
No 40 hour weeks
No overtime
No safety rules
Limited ability to send kids to college
Little home ownership
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Joe and other posters here disparage unions. History is ignored. Since the decline of union membership began we have slowly begun to lose a middle class. Companies have found cheap labor overseas and now too many here think we have to become a third world nation in order to compete.

square1′s reasoning seems sound to me (in the context of the type of government/economy system we have. And I mean the parts of it that both most Republicans and most Democrats do not question the holiness of)

Shorter JNS

1. Policy = The GOP won’t like it.

2. Politics = Blue dog dems won’t like it.

3. Schedule = The Senate won’t like it.

Somebody please explain to Obama that corporate America is sitting with OVERCAPACITY, and as the recession continues, so does Capacity Contraction. Such is the state of business decisions during uncertainty in leadership and lack of confidence in that leadership.

This money is heading into the vote-purchase-cash-distribution bags.

What we need are factories that employ thousands

I see it differently. If one is going to propose such simplistic solutions as panaceas, my version would be that what we need are millions of farms that grow food with manual labor instead of chemicals and machines, using organic methods, feeding their regional inhabitants instead of transporting it around the globe using up fossil fuels and ozone-layer-killing refrigerants, and providing cellulose feedstock for industry to replace petroleum-derived carbon chains.
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In other words, we need LESS factories. not more. We need jobs that put people more back in touch with the earth, not with artificial living. We need an economy that puts people back in touch with one another, not with more virtual reality. We need personal relations, not an impersonal society. We need to be humans in interdependent community, not cogs in a system of machines, dependent on that system of machines for consumer goods.

Also, from the hilarious list of “Republican accomplishments” at GOP.com:

“1954: Republicans Established the Federal Highway System”

Those d@mn communists!

http://www.gop.com/index.php/issues/accomplishment/

Let me be clear. My union criticism was about some aspects of the way they operate. I fully appreciate, and am glad for, the rise of unions to slay the egregious and heartless use of humans that so many business owners engaged in before unions existed.
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I would NOT like to see a return to anything close to those conditions.
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But just like one can Love America and yet still criticize Her flaws and advocate for them to be fixed, one can do the same regarding unions. Love also include hard love. That means saying “no” to misbehavior and/or getting to big for one’s britches.

psssst.. Dont wake her up. I think JNS wrote this blog post in her sleep.

Y = C + I + G + (X-M)

mycophile: Unions only represent approximately 12% or the workers today. They are hardly too big for their britches. They have given concessions on many levels. The days of Hoffa and Beck are behind us.
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Why don’t we say no to those oligarchs running our country instead of the workers? I can love my country and still wish for a strong middle class.
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Let’s be hard on our politicians that encourage jobs to be sent to the Mariannas so they can have made in US labels and be sold a WalMart while using forced labor and using prostitution and abortion as tools to enslave people. Let’s be hard on the Abramhoffs, DeLays, and others that have promoted hell.
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Lets be hard on the Nikes and other corporations that promote cheap child labor. Lets be hard on corporations that shelter their profits to avoid what meager taxes they do pay. Lets be hard on the politicians that encourage this corporate behavior and the traditional press that ignores it.
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I think unions that are too powerful is the least of our problems.

apr2563~
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When you put it that way, who could argue otherwise? Not me.
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My direct experiences with unions was 41-43 years ago. What I experienced then may no longer be. Perhaps I lack the standing to opine as I have on the subject.
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I never lost my belief that the entities you mention (and many others, such as Monsanto, Dupont, Haliburton, Cargill, Weyerhauser, etc.) are, by far, those of far greater priority to reign in the excesses of, if not on moral, environmental, or health grounds, then at least on economic grounds. Even if unions were completely horrible institutions (which I do not believe), that would still be the case.

mycophile: I have great regard for your opinion. My father worked hard as a plumber and a union organizer. There were tough times when he was on strike. But, the benefits from that time are still felt by the working man and woman.
Dad’s union leader was Dave Beck who stole a lot of money from the member’s pension funds. Dad used to drive by Beck’s house to show us what his purloined pension bought. However, he still was a firm believer in the union movement. He knew it had to be cleaned up but was the best representative for workers.

I am glad to know a person such as you describe your father to be was in this world. Would that there were a super-majority of persons of such character today.

edismeiamhe,

Check out this movie about the construction of Hoover Dam, which sure looks like it was built with more than some picks & shovels:
http://www.archive.org/details/tmp_BoulderD_2
(Note: The big contractors running the job used all non-union labor, and many of the workers were injured or killed due to the lack of adequate safety procedures.)
BTW, the thousands of people who built it used their wages to buy stuff, and sent money back to their families, who bought stuff – like food.

You say, “What we need are factories that employ thousands, not a relative handful of machine operators.”
How many factories do you want to build, and what do you want them to manufacture? Aren’t the factories we have laying off workers because there aren’t enough customers who can buy the stuff they can produce?

Check out this short video about the construction of the Golden Gate bridge. Some workers died, there, too:

BTW, the thousands of people who built it used their wages to buy stuff, and sent money back to their families, who bought stuff – like food.

You mention the CCC as if it was the only New Deal works program. You don’t talk about the fact that it employed tens of thousands of youths who had no other way to earn wages, except doing productive CCC work building roads, fighting fires, replanting forests, creating flood control channels, etc.
BTW, the thousands of people who built it used their wages to buy stuff, and sent money back to their families, who bought stuff – like food.

You neglected to mention the Works Progress Administration (WPA). If you look around, you’ll see hundreds of still-surviving structures that those people built that took a lot more machinery than picks & shovels. Here is a site that lists, by State, some of the WPA projects. Sorry the article is so long at 30+ pages, but they did a lot of stuff:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Works_Progress_Administration_by_U.S._state
You can check out the projects listed for your State; maybe you went to school in one built by the WPA, or check out books from the public library that they built or rebuilt in your town.
BTW, the thousands of people who built it used their wages to buy stuff, and sent money back to their families, who bought stuff – like food.

How come you didn’t mention the Rural Electrification Administration, which brought electric power lines to the 90% of rural farms that didn’t have access to electric lights, and allowed farmers to mechanize many of their tasks – and let the kids read by better light than by kerosene lamps.
(Please explain how electricians use shovels to string and connect high tension wires together.)
BTW, the thousands of farmers who got electricity bought radios, electric milkers, etc. from local businesss, who used their profits to buy stuff – like food… and their children learned more in the schools that the WPA built, and the REA illuminated.

I’m curious: Since you seem to be against using government money to repair infracture, who would you suggest has the money and will to invest to rebuild the roads, freeways, bridges, etc. that are crumbling under and above you? You are aware, of course, that they were mostly planned 40-50 years ago under a (socialist?) Republican president, right? (We’ll disregard the fact that he got Republican congressional support for the building program by disguising a massive civil public works project as a military defense measure.)

herby: You are right on. So many people have no knowledge of history.
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My father worked for the WPA during the depression. He worked on the Grand Coulee Dam and highway projects across the Cascades and along the Olympic Peninsula. He helped extend a college campus in Central Washington. His identical twin brother was killed in an accident while working on a bridge. It was often dangerous work.
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The jobs my father was able to get, after losing his farm to the dust bowl, enabled his family to survive.
Also, my uncles widow was a nurse and was assisted with her children’s welfare with social security survivor benefits. The big, bad govenment helped my family and millions of others.

The 50B is just the “initial spending/first installment”, not the entire amount to be spent. This is getting lost in much of the reporting being done on this proposal.

As an example of jobs that can be created…China’s high speed rail construction, 93,000 miles worth, has created 6 million jobs.

davis: Jay states:”…the economy really does need another shot in the arm.”
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Apparently, by association, this makes the entire ‘graph about policy…;)

Here’s the problems with anything Obama proposes on the ecomony.
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Rham Fu*k You Emanuel
Larry Men are Smarter than Women Summers
Timothy AIG Geithner
Blue Dog Democrats (Thanks Rham)
Corporatist Democrats
Weak kneed Democratic Senate
Week kneed Democratic Congress
And finally Obama himself. Obama always starts a fight from the most compromised and weakest postion possible while constantly seeking the ever ellusive approval of the opposition party. Something he will never ever get.
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This plan is no different from any other plan that Obama has proposed. 50 billion won’t fix the infrastructure of Houston let alone have any impact on the rest of our crumbling empire. He should have propsed a trillion dollars.

I was just about to make the exact same comment.
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And sadly, this inability to discuss policy as opposed to politics was entirely predictable. Here’s what John Cole said yesterday:
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As good of an idea as it is, the merits of the plan will never be discussed. Ever. That just isn’t how our media rolls …. All Republicans will have to do is dismiss this as an “election year stunt,” and the ground has already been readied by the Politico and elsewhere by calling the WH desperate, and our media will go into full-on horse-race mode. Mitch McConnell just needs to go on David Gregory, purse his lips delicately, dismiss it, and the debate will essentially be over. There will be no discussion of the benefits of the added rail miles. No discussion of the ease of air travel with these improvements. The idea will simply be dismissed, and Republicans will pay no price whatsoever for killing yet another jobs bill.

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http://www.balloon-juice.com/2010/09/06/heres-what-will-happen/
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Rome is burning, and the media can’t tear their eyes off the scoreboard at the Coliseum.

Such is the state of business decisions during uncertainty in leadership

IOW, businesses know that if they hold out long enough, the price of labort will continue to decline. There’s no uncertainty about it. They know exactly what to expect and they’re doing their best to hjelp it happen.

Focusing on process is one way of avoiding the heavy lifting required to understand the actual issue itself. However, imagine what she would need to do to fill space if asked to analyze the conservative approach to high unemployment, assuming their lack of ideas is off the table as a topic of discussion.

American infrastructure is antiquated, if not crumbling around us. Bridges collapsing. Roads turning to gravel. Trains are slow at the best of times, when they aren’t delayed or stopped due to power outages or broken signal systems.
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This points to the fact that good policy can also be good politics. Obama pointed these issues out, but he never really hammered the point home.
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A simple 60-second TV clip, showing (1) the 2003 blackout of the northeast, (2) the collapsed bridge in Minneapolis, (3) steam pipes exploding in Manhattan, and other recent dramatic evidence of our crumbling infrastructure, and the idea sells itself.
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Much of this country was built in the New Deal. (Just in New York City, we got the Lincoln Tunnel, the Triborough Bridge, LaGuardia Airport, Bellevue Hospital’s psych ward, and miles and miles of road.) It’s long past time we do it again.

Actually, analyzing Republican ideas is easy because they only have three: (1) the magical tax cut fairy solves all economic problems, (2) the world will be at peace if we just bomb enough brown people, and (3) people at home who don’t look exactly like me are evil.
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So on unemployment, like all economic issues, they go to the only thing they know — tax cuts for the very rich. Sure, when they tried this approach in 2001 and 2003, the end result was an overall loss in jobs, and sure, Obama’s watch has seen more jobs created in eighteen months than Bush saw in eight years, and on and on, but remember — Republican ideas only make sense if you don’t think about them too hard. Or at all.
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Which brings us back to the starting point of this discussion — the media always frames things in a way that’s sympathetic to Republican politicians, because Republican politicians are so much easier to cover. They have simplistic approaches to the economy, to foreign affairs, and to domestic issues and the media appreciates how simple it is to follow and to fit into a convenient, dumbed-down narrative they can effortlessly spew out.
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Who cares if the approaches don’t work? That’s just policy, man. Politics is all that matters.

Absolutely right. The policy part is all politics except for the part that Jay gets wrong. She cites Crowley’s story as proof that we need more spending. So how is Obama asking for spending a “policy problem?” She could point out that $50 billion isn’t enough. That would be a problem. But she doesn’t.

This is one of those “controversies” that are, at root, actually pretty simple: the people who run this country are terrified of inflation. Knee-knocking, pants-wetting terrified. Inflation means that the huge hoard of cash they’re sitting on might be worth less in a few years than it is right now. OTOH, deflation is to be pursued with the ardor of a teenager in heat. Deflation means that that stash of cash will buy more in the months and years ahead, especially with no pesky middle class to muck up prices. And if the U.S. economy is set back 100 years (or a thousand) – well, there are plenty of other opportunities elsewhere for pillage and plunder elsewhere in the world.

edismeiamhe,
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The biggest difference between FDR’s first term and Obama’s first term is that there was a consensus: tell the right wing to STFU.
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(Nothing personal, your remarks are not out of line – they were totally reasonable – but, 100% identical remarks were being made in the 1930s about FDR, but, they were ignored completely to the point where Republican presidential candidates in 1936, 1940 and 1944 wanted to continue a more modest version of EXACTLY the same policies.)
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As far as labor intensive factories go… that is about as unreasonable as replacing cars with rickshaws to increase employment. (Two cars per family, three shifts per 24 hours and rickshaw puller – unemployment would disappear in no time flat.)

Ames,
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Let’s be reasonable.
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Investors of all kinds want the value of their holdings to increase in spending power through dividends + increased share value – inflation.
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Yes, deflation means that money under your mattress (literally what people did eighty years ago) will gain in spending power, but, during times of deflation, the value of investments is negative and dividends are 0%.
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So, the wealthy are on the same boat as the poor except for the fact that they will have to pay higher taxes in the future.
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(It is rare when I am critical of a liberal opinion, but, this just is not what a reasonable person holding their money in stocks, bonds, futures, real estate or anything other than cash would ever want to happen.)

Paul,
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Think it over.
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What is the number one thing all businesses want in infinite supply?
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Customers.
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Once they have customers, they hope that they are the one and only business which does so that they can have cheap land, labor and capital.
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Large numbers of people hired by somebody else for big bucks is a businesses dream since those big paychecks go right into sales for whatever the business is selling.
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It is, obviously, true that businesses handle these lost customers by squeezing more and more work out of fewer and fewer workers, but, that strategy is much riskier than a good economy with many, many customers.

First, as far as I am concerned, Blue Dog Democrats should just run as Republicans and stop pretending.
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All of the facts lead to the conclusion that we need both huge repairs to our infrastructure nationwide and we need to put people to work not yesterday, not last week but last year.
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Second, unionized laborers, earning somewhat more than their non-union counterpart do spend a slightly – slightly – lower percent of their paycheck than do under paid non-union workers, but, compare it to any strategy such as tax cuts for the wealthiest and it is still a bargain.
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Not letting unionized businesses do the work – if politically imaginable – would just lead to low wage hell for another generation to save a few percent on building back our infrastructure and rebuilding this economy.
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Third, the media failing to explain to people how these things create jobs is like failing to explain to a young child that firemen spray water not for fun, not to use up as much water as possible, but because water puts out fires. The fact that so many Americans seem to be totally unaware of the fact that government spending causes consumer spending which causes private sector jobs is pathetic and a failure of the media to educate people.

“But infrastructure investments –which is a nice way of saying stimulus money?”

Or a correct way of saying “repairing and improving our infrastructure”. Repairing and improving roads, bridges, sewers, power grid, etc… doesn’t automatically mean “Growing the government”. If the GOP wants to vote against it, that’s fine, but I’d strongly encourage the Dems to get out there and discuss things like the bridge that collapsed over the Mississippi river, the levees outside New Orleans, and the east coast brown out from a few years back. Obviously this stuff keeps people working (which isn’t a negative side effect) but nearly as important is the fact that we haven’t made major investments in our infrastructure in a very long time and it’s having negative consequences.

Solar Powered Dirigible Transportation Networks.

… that is all.

I don’t understand all the sneering about public sector jobs. There was a lot of that in Joe’s post as well. As others have mentioned (and herby002 expanded), we are still reaping the benefits of the WPA. The very best state guidebooks that were ever written were done under the WPA. If you don’t know them, go to the library and check them out. The Rivers of America series was fascinating and the basic series, the American Guide series is terrific and many have been updated.

The stimulus has provided a lot of badly needed local road construction in PA – far more than the one traffic light mentioned sneeringly in Joe’s article – and has helped toward renewing our crumbling infrastructure. That sort of thing is all the government can do — would the Republicans prefer that the money be given to corporations with requirements to hire? They fuss about the auto industry, but we would really be in a mess if those companies had been allowed to go under.

Ivy,
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You’re a person who knows their history. (I believe you said you were a woman, but, unfortunately, with handles I am only guessing – why I didn’t say “a woman who knows her history).
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What Economists discovered after World War II super mega spending (not an official term “super mega” in economics) was not that WPA, CCC and other groups were over spent on, but, in reality, in order to have really brought the economy back at a fast growth rate back to 1929 levels was underfunded.
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For infrastructure alone, The American Society of Civil Engineers believe we need far, far more than anything the president is talking about:
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2009 Grades
Aviation D
Bridges C
Dams D
Drinking Water D-
Energy D+
Hazardous Waste D
Inland Waterways D-
Levees D-
Public Parks and Recreation C-
Rail C-
Roads D-
Schools D
Solid Waste C+
Transit D
Wastewater D-

America’s Infrastructure GPA: D
Estimated 5 Year Investment Need: $2.2 Trillion
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http://www.infrastructurereportcard.org/
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Sure the ASCE has an agenda, but, with $50 Billion being controversial when the ASCE claims we need $2.2 Trillion is like putting a bandaid on a bullet wound.

Slacktivist (aka Fred Clark) has been running a series of articles on what needs building and fixing: sewers, power lines, bridges, water systems. This is the best time to rebuild the nation. The interest on new debt is as low as it is ever going to be, while the unemployment is high enough that the cost will be far lower than is normal. This is the *best time* to do it.

To steal from Slacktivist, to argue that we can’t afford it is to claim America can’t afford to be what it used to be. More important, it’s to claim that proper management is running the car and never changing the oil.

apr2563

The prime reason that jobs went overseas, was not greed on the part of management, but survival. The fcausal factor for the job drain was that the Unions, over time, had increased labor costs in the United States to the point that many firms had to move overseas to obtain more reasonable labor rates and labor relationships.

The Unions paid a high price for trying to muscle not only Business owners, but the rank and file itself

Consider that in 1945 at the end of World War II, Union membership was 30% of those employed, However,
due to union practices, by 2008 Union membership had declined drastically to only12.4%.

Unions, who cry crocodile tears over U. S. firms relocating overseas, have, in reality, only themselves to blame.

The problem isn’t policy or politics, it is a total lack of inspiration!
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The Dem act like: “Ah do I have to.”

12.4% membership and we’re supposed to imagine that Companies have no choice but to operate in China. Let’s get real shall we? The reason companies offshored their manufacturing is because it looked great on paper. They could reduce labor costs and hence improve profitability. What they failed to realize is that as they were doing so, they were also eroding their Customer base.

We now have a situation where manufacturing jobs no longer exist and Construction jobs were all based on an unsustainable rate of demand. And the people who ghot richest in the process add exactly zero value to the overall economy. And no one’s buying manufactured goods because they don’t have jobs.

Thanks for taking the time to comment! I suppose I’m grasping at straws here, but I’m otherwise at a loss to puzzle out the upside for continuing things as they are now. Consolidation of power? The Right has more power today than at any time since the McCarthy era. Destruction of Unions as a political force? As noted above, that’s pretty much Mission Accomplished. Destruction of the Left? What Left? Fostering a more benign big business climate? With the gutting of meaningful regulation over the last decade and a half, how much better can it get? What can they possibly hope to gain by nuking what’s let of the middle class and deliberately sabotaging any chance of recovery?

edismeiamhe,
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The fall of the Bretton Woods agreement is what cost us jobs most dramatically.
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I wrote a paper on this topic and it got me an A.
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The Bretton Woods agreement kept a balance of trade by restricting foreign ownership of businesses or investing in foreign markets.
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Starting in 1971, after the end of the Bretton Woods agreement restricting foreign investment into the US and other countries which signed, the US dollar became unsustainably strong.
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That is, the buying power of $1 was greater than $1 worth of foreign goods.
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The reason for this was that there was a high demand abroad for US dollars to buy US stocks, bonds and to directly invest in the US (buying land, opening businesses, etc).
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So, after 1971 when exporters sold to Americans, the US dollars obtained were, instead of being used for purchasing imports from the US were used by investors to purchase American businesses.
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The US has the second lowest trade union membership of the industrialized world just over half as many as Japan and only slightly more than France’s 9% the next lowest country and a small fraction of Sweden’s 82%.
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http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/lab_tra_uni_mem-labor-trade-union-membership
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“Unions, who cry crocodile tears over U. S. firms relocating overseas…”
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Crocodile tears?
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Try to be somewhat reasonable here. Guess who, also, loses their jobs when union jobs go overseas? Employees of the labor union get laid off, too.
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“…have, in reality, only themselves to blame.”
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There is no strong correlation between union membership and trade deficit it is a matter of poorly managed international fiscal policy.

What would Bush do?

He and Rove doubled-down on “the crazy” instead of running from them as Democrats are trying to do with this historic congressional session.

Caught running torture chambers and concentration camps, they didn’t prevaricate: they argued that torture and human rights abuses were essential to national security. Caught with skyrocketing deficits, they didn’t change course, they argued for permanent, deficit-busting tax cuts.

Make the Republicans vote against stimulus. Make them vote against health care. Give them another chance to derail financial reform. It’s great politics, because it highlights the total dearth of policy from that side of the aisle.

Well, humans are amazingly good at self deception.
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I can send you a link to a vaguely related Radio Lab program on NPR about deception and self deception, but, that is almost completely OT.
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Fox, AM radio wingnuts and other sources of misinformation feed the self deception of conservatives like never before.
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With no support from Economists (supply side economics never made it in the Universities, it was created by conservative think tanks in the late 1970s and was, even by the think tanks, abandon by the early 1990s) conservatives wish to hear that cutting taxes lower and removing even more regulation will cure everything.
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I think this right wing resistance to everything government belongs in the psychology department under the category of “Denial” or “Self Deception” than in Economics or Political Science.
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It’s like the Global Warming deniers – also conservatives – or those who who do not believe in evolution – also conservative.
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I have no idea why the Republicans are ready to dive our country deeper and deeper into recession just so that the tax due on money nobody is able to earn is low.
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The theory of Supply Side Economics has been pushing up daises for a couple of decades now:
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supply-side_economics#Research_since_2000
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I guess for some people letting go of ideas is like breaking up with a girlfriend or the brief moment of denial one experiences when they hear of the death of a loved on, but prolonged for decades instead of seconds.

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“Focusing on process is one way of avoiding the heavy lifting required to understand the actual issue itself.”
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It’s also how you keep treating Republicans as a serious political entity. If they regularly talked about policy, before long it would become painfully obvious that there’s no there there (see kevin @1.5). The only “heavy lifting” would come from learning and explaining Democratic policy, say the stimulative effects of marginal income tax cuts for people making a quarter million dollars a year vs. the tax fairy where all tax cuts pay for themselves.
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I had the misfortune over the weekend to stumble over Ali Velshi, “CNN’s chief business correspondent and host of Your $$$$$,” talking about the benefits of stimulus with professional corporatist liar Stephen Moore – and not a single economist on the four-person panel (nor any actual, you know, economic facts) – and he closed the segment by literally throwing up his hands and admitting, “I just don’t know.” This is the f@cking financial guy at CNN. What a horror show.

“The prime reason that jobs went overseas, was not greed on the part of management, but survival.”

That would be in direct contrast to my own personal experience (where my old job is now in India – non-union job, btw). Every indicator we had when we were laid off (profitability, customer-loyalty & satisfaction, workforce-competence, long-term growth potential, etc.) indicated an exceptionally strong department within our company – with one possible exception: It’s cheaper to pay someone in India 12k per year than it is to pay someone in the US 120k per year.

No to mention that China is in effect conducting a trade war with the US by effectively subsidizing everything produced there.
I believe that Paul Krugman at one point calculated that Chinese currency manipulation is the equivalent of a 25% export subsidy on goods sent to the US.
This is what they call “free trade” apparently.

gunny: I admire President Obama a great deal for his personal accomplishments. However, I agree with your critique. Too often he throws a policy out for consumption, steps back, waits for Congress to try to implement and take the hits, then at the last minute, after compromise has almost destroyed the policy, jumps in to affirm.
I don’t know if this is his or his advisors proclivity, but it is no way to govern.

Ivy, I have come to the conclusion that Joe is an elitist snob. He disparages both public and private unions. He seems to think public service is less worthy than private.
Years ago journalism was considered a trade not a profession. Journalists didn’t go to ivy league schools. Many did not go to college. Murrow went to a public college in Washington state, not Columbia.
Today’s journalists are less likely to spend time doing grunt work at a local newspaper. They build their reputations on the sensational and most want to be part of the infamous village, the New York axis, or the Wall Street echo chamber.
My nephew is the editor of a small town weekly. He not only the editor but a reporter and photographer. His paper is subscription and is distributed to a large county with small population. His publisher is a far right man who writes opinion pieces for the paper. My nephew finds the courage to write from the opposite perspective. He brings balance to a very conservative area. He has had the job for years and I think he more of a journalist than Joe Klein and his fellow pundits.

Tell that to the workers in the Mariannas and other places where our ethical US businesses take advantage of forced labor, child labor, and slave labor.

Ben F&#ing Nelson should be in a category of his own.
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Coming to the size part, I think Obama strategists are reacting to the polls about Stimulus and HCR. Remember how people liked components of the HCR/Stimulus, but not the HCR/Stimulus as a whole.
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Seems sum of parts is greater than the whole – So I am hoping there is more to come.

Ivy_B

I’m a Pennsylvania native. I used to walk to school, in a semi-rural area, on a road that led me through a “less-developed” area. The road was black-topped, for the first time, in the late 1930s by the WPA; before that nobody cared because it was the “negro” area of town. Beside that road were hand-laid stone walls that the WPA workers built to contain the creek (aka “crick”) in case of floods. It saved lots of homes from inundation over the years.

“Not letting unionized businesses do the work – if politically imaginable – would just lead to low wage hell for another generation to save a few percent on building back our infrastructure and rebuilding this economy.”

That’s what they want: a race to the bottom. If you watched any of the Senate hearings about the auto industry bailout, you saw numerous Senators whose states have foreign, non-union assembly plants state that they would never vote for the bill unless the US companies and unions first bring their wages & benefits packages down to the ones offered by Toyota, Honda, Hyundai, Mercedes, etc. Guess who was contributing $$ to those Senators? (Hint: See previous sentence.)
Even after GM and Chrysler agreed to corporate reoorganizations, and the UAW gave up huge present and future contractual benefits, the Senators voted NO on the bills.
Who would be so selfish as to refuse to try to save tens of thousands of US jobs, and maybe drive US cities to the brink of bankruptcy? (Hint: Republicans.)
Who would intentially try to drive down wages and benefits of a whole class of “sorta middle-class” union workers so as to remove the incentive for their foreign plant owners/donors to “sorta match the sorta middle-class” US competitors’ labor costs? (Hint: Republicans.)

Perhaps the [modern?] Republican Party should follow Rush’s lead and change its mottto from ‘NO’ to… ‘Greed Is Good.’

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