Guy reminds me of a Neville Chamberlin. Unfortunately, Mr. Obama lacks a Churchill, a special someone whose rhetoric could really highlight and underline the president's valor and skills.

What? He has Earl Bluemnauer.

You should maybe listen to more than the sound bite

I heard the whole thing. He's a wimp.

I'd like to hear the guesstimates of the number of trillions in debt we can go before implosion occurs. We're at 14 trillion now. Can we go to 25? Where is the breaking point?
Compared to doing nothing, this deal here will add 900 billion to the debt. I know it's taxes and unemployment, but as the result of this deal, the debt will grow a lot more - especially when you add the interest. Basically, we just dropped another trillion dollars like we were taking some old clothes to Goodwill. How many imaginary trillions do we have left?
The Republicans say it is a principled decision but it's interesting how many noble things they do involve helping rich people, especially since the wealth gap is so extraordinary.
A cynic might suggest the wealthy have simply purchased Congress, and this righteous resistance to taxing the rich, is not really to help America at all. The GOP has just sold out the country rather than defy their investors.
That would mean we are doomed as a nation. We had one chance to self-correct after the Bush/Cheney years and it seems to be lost. Is anyone ready to make the call? Are we seeing the final days of America?

Why not repeal the extension of deposit insurance guarantees that exceed $100,000 for any real live person, regardless of how many institutions over which their savings might be distributed?

Let me hear a "capitalist" insist that capitalism (and/or banking) will collapse without a government guarantee of profit. If it doesn't "pencil out" (in advance) then no one will do anything risky. This sort of non-sense is for and from Crony Capitalists.

Take away this deposit guarantee for rich folks to park their money free from risk (other than inflation) and they will have to actually act like a capitalist and seek out opportunities. Let them face the risk of loss all on their own. This private risk must be a price that is always paid, as a precondition to getting any private gain, even for interest collected by bankers that derives from their special relationship with the super-special private Federal Reserve.

We can call the lifting of the guarantee -- drum roll here -- stimulus.

No one from either wing of the Crony Capitalist Party will give this any more thought than that of a political nut.

No, the rule has always been socialism for the rich, capitalism for the poor. The rich love capitalism, so long as they can be on the inflicting side; for themselves and their loved ones, socialism is and always has been the order of the day.

President Doormat strikes again. Obama is a center-right politician (his voting record was to the right of Clinton)... but some of this stuff is just nuts.

For example, he is now pushing for ESA delisting of wolves/bears... no one knows why (science doesn't justify it).

He's just a callous caver trying to triangulate (a la Carter, not Clinton).

NEXT!

This country is clearly divided. Rather than coming together to make the difficult decisions, they continue to govern in two opposite directions, smothering us in debt.

Trying to be optomistic I guess we can hope that all those benefiting from tax cuts will be able to get more folks back to work, and the unemployed have yet another life line to get them by until those new jobs become available.

Clearly, the economics ignorance of our government is one of the chief attractions of this blog.

This post should keep the right-wing Obama haters away--well, some of them.

This latest cave really bums me out.

The best CNN interview yesterday was with Bernie Sanders--he called out the Pres on this spew. We need 20 more like him.

Unless you think macro-economics is governed by the tooth fairy, it's never been a good idea for tax rates to rise now. Increasing the rates for high brackets probably would do little harm, but that was never possible in isolation. The compromise reached is imperfect as stimulus, but it's hard to imagine that more can be done. Republicans won't say so, but they want big deficits to put pressure on spending. Any respectable economist will confirm that tax increases or spending cuts now will hamper growth and delay recovery. This compromise turns the Republicans' implicit wish for deficits to good use. Democrats' opposition to it is counter-productive and likely to harm their constituents severely if it succeeds.

Looks like the bond vigilantes may be starting to rear their ugly heads. Ten-year treasuries yields are up 70 basis points in the last month, including a sharp increase since the "compromise" was announced. If this trend is more than a head feint it's going to be game over for all the politicians and their silly one-for-you, one-for-me tax our kids into eternity games.

Did some reading last summer on the history of grandpa's union--Progressive Mine Workers.
This sell-out reminds me of how the miners (mostly in Illinois) had to bail from the United Mine Workers because Lewis stripped the locals of their autonomy and began to concede to the owners.
I sure didn't think history was going to repeat itself so quickly.

Words like Idealism (a somewhat vague term here because what definition are we going to use?) and Pragmatism are bandied about in these and other discussions. The one word that really applies to the situation is:

Chimera

John Fairplay, to whom or what do you quibble, precisely?

When the Fed buys a trillion dollars worth of junk mortgages (and other lesser collateralized debt) from their affiliate banks so that they don't have to price them at their real value and thereby be declared unsound do these debts (oops, I mean assets) magically transform into something of real value? Or does it merely mean that the Fed itself is unsound too? (The only difference is the Fed's super special status.) This complete nonsense is all rationalized as being cheaper than having the general public cover for deposit insurance losses far beyond the insurance premiums. This explains, in part, why the Crony Capitalist Party sought to cover virtually all deposits in banks. They were saving the world from financial apocalypse, including Mr. Obama.

I seem to have missed this recent bit, where a temporary (and huge World saving) increase was made permanent. I guess I need to keep up on current events, my mistake.

Congress retroactively raises FDIC deposit insurance limits, aiding IndyMac account holders

Lawmakers completing an overhaul of financial regulations also agree to permanently increase coverage for individual accounts to $250,000.

June 16, 2010\ by Jim Puzzanghera and E. Scott Reckard, Los Angeles Times

Reporting from Washington and Orange County -- Lawmakers completing a sweeping overhaul of financial regulations have given 8,700 former account holders at failed IndyMac Bank a surprise gift, retroactively increasing government-backed deposit insurance limits that would allow them to recover some of their lost money.

The move came Tuesday as House and Senate negotiators agreed to permanently increase to $250,000 the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. coverage for individual accounts and to make it retroactive to Jan. 1, 2008.

LA-Times

The rationale for this nonsense can perhaps be a political backroom deal to eventually also cover all public employee pension losses from the private savings of persons who obtained their income from public employment. It too, the private savings from whatever source and regardless of the character of the investment trustee, needs to face the evil of private capitalist risk.

This messes up asset prices, and laborer's relative position because they face sticky wages, etc. Frankenstein companies become the norm, not the exception, because all the oxygen for free ranging entrepreneurial activity has been sucked out of the system by Big Government meddlers. We elect the most effective meddlers and then consume the bulk of our energy racing to get to the front of the line for some meddling love. It is dysfunctional, and leads to inefficiencies and wasted human potential.

What is a fitting name for when the proletariat are being exploited by the political class (not by any "capitalists," for they are as real as Unicorns)?

Your Christmas present is likely to be an offer of more debt.

Some folks confuse a few talking points, skillfully spoon fed to them, as if it represents critical thinking. Accepting it at face value offers the potential of comfortable bliss.

The day Obama was elected, many of us experienced a delicious, "unbearable lightness of being"-style euphoria.

Finally! Past having a president that couldn't speak the language! Who surrounded himself with scary idiots like Ashcroft (who revealed everything about himself we needed to know when 1)he wanted to cover up the naked boobs on the Grecian statue, and 2)wanted to prosecute doctors for helping people to die with a modicum of decency in our hippie autonomous region, Oregon). Past having a president who would select a dangerous incompetent like Rumsfeld to handle two wars; a president who started an ill-conceived wargame and then, if that were not bad enough, proceeded to repeat the mistake of Vietnam, which was to try to conduct two ground wars in Asia without enough troops.

And here we are. I have to say, I liked being able to listen to Obama today. I stopped all AV channels for the last 4 years of Bush, because I couldn't stomach even listening to him.

Nonetheless, Obama has alienated so many swaths of the American tapestry that I can hardly stomach the notion of four more years of his BS. Supporting the ludicrous, jaw-dropping, effort to erect a mosque on ground zero. (And to everyone who wants to whine that it's 2 blocks away, we now know the organizers have applied for 5 million dollars in development funds from the 9/11 redevelopment fund, how stunningly crazy is THAT?). Suing Arizona while not having anything to say about a critical national problem, which is our open border? Suing to stop letting gays in the military when we've had enough, already, of being total idiots, firing able, patriotic people because of what goes on behind their closed doors? When even the military top brass has clearly had enough of all that nonsense?

And then all the sucking up to the religion of peace, going along with a doctrine of denial like so many mentally colonized liberals. They're not as bad as mentally colonized right-wingers, but they are almost as bad.

Oh, and on health care, Obama got us the most ridiculously convoluted 1900-page incomprehensible mess of a bill instead of the two simple things we needed.

1)The obvious answer to an efficient and quality healthcare system to offer a single payer system WITH

2)LOTS of cost controls, so we can afford (1).
Like means-testing people from cradle to grave. (Quit entitling everyone to everything when they are rich enough to pay for it themselves.)
Like tort reform. (If people quit suing doctors, doctors will quit ordering so many tests to insulate themselves from lawsuits.)
Like quitting torturing elderly patients with a bunch of invasive procedures after they can no longer speak for themselves. (No, your vegetative grandmother does not need an endoscopy, just because you think she deserves every test in the book, probably to assuage your guilt over not spending much time with her)
Like expanding hospice care. Our current system is disgracefully inadequate.

Obama's bill, as far as I can tell, does not a thing to control costs. Ridiculous.
It means every single trivial cold or hypochondriac's notion will bring patients in the office because they can get in for free. With the looming shortage of providers, the whole system will become a zoo and the people who actually need care will be less likely to get it.

Everyone says we'll be like Canada, horror of horrors! Guess what, Canada fixed a lot of their kinks and I recently read that people are pretty happy with their system now.

The best CNN interview yesterday was with Bernie Sanders--he called out the Pres on this spew. We need 20 more like him.

Capital idea, Ollie!

I am gonna get Wyden some Bernie Sanders Lessons for xmas ! You too Merk !

Bill McDonald - Your data on "rich" is bizarre. Rich isn't like having brown eyes. People move in and out of being "rich" all the time. Daily in fact. Actual census data for income (not household income which isn't a measure of anything other than the number of people per household decreasing) shows an increase in personal income since 1936 above any other developed nation.

That's right, more people are "rich" now than ever. Moreover, more people are out of poverty than ever before. You are reading too much into the "fair" and "unfair" of capitalism and constructing an argument that somehow socialism fixes that fairness through the redistribution, or rather taking of wealth from one group and moving it to another group.

They have a word for that, it's called theft, we just have a legal set of words for it - called taxes and eminent domain. of course in Portland Metro, they call it "Open Spaces".

If you've EVER sold a house you were rich. In fact, if you ever sold a house for more than 250k, you were VERY rich that year according to the IRS and US Census. I suggest you listen to the speech "Capitalism, an Obituary" by Ayn Rand, circa 1960.