Under SB 1611, prosecutors will be required to turn over evidence to defendants accused of crimes and to keep a record of the evidence they disclose. The landmark 1963 U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Brady v. Maryland already requires prosecutors to give defendants information that is “material either to guilt or to punishment.” The Morton Act requires disclosure of evidence regardless of its materiality to guilt or punishment. It is the first significant reform to Texas discovery laws since 1965.
Let’s hope it helps anyone else from having to suffer through what Michael Morton, and so many other Texans who were innocent of the crime they were convicted of, had to suffer through.
The Texas House of Representatives just voted to approve a 5-pack of bills that would make significant changes in the way beer is sold across the state.
There was audible applause from the gallery, where Scott Metzger, Rick Donley and other interested parties were watching the proceedings.
If approved on third reading — either later today or Monday — and signed into law by Gov. Rick Perry, Texans could soon buy and drink a beer at their local brewery and purchase brewpub beers at the store.
The package of bills is considered the most significant legislation affecting the beer industry since 1993, when the state authorized brewpubs that could make and sell their own beer on site.
Long overdue. Let’s hope they make it to Perry and he signs them.
Looks like Texas Attorney General Gregg Abbott is trying out his gubernatorial voice, Abbott to GOP lawmakers: “Don’t pack your bags”. A bit presumptuous, maybe this is the first real sign that Perry won’t run again. Here’s a little on the timing.
If Perry does call a special session, he’s likely hoping it will be swift and sure because the maps are already in place. While there is certain to be a minority push for better representation, the truth is everyone in the Legislature got there last November running in those districts.
With a filing deadline for offices coming in early December, the Legislature would have to get the maps to the court by late August to give adequate time for review, Li said. That’s cutting it pretty close.
More likely in June. But there’s also another deadline looming: Perry is expected to become a grandfather for the first time around June 20. Bets are he won’t want to be dealing with a special session when he’s got something more special going on.
After thinking about it some more, here’s the problem for ABC:
If a reporter for your network tells the public he has “exclusively” obtained evidence he has not in fact obtained, causing other reporters for the network to repeat that untruth, and part of his report turns out to be wrong, in a way that a.) is politically consequential and b.) would have been avoided if the evidence was actually in the reporter’s possession… what is the proper penalty?
ABC’s current position: The reporter has to say that he regrets the misreport, and apologize for not being clearer, while benefitting from the confusion he created across multiple reports by sometimes being accurate (that he had summaries of emails read to him) and sometimes misleading us with the claim that he had “obtained” the originals. (Link.) Also see Josh Marshall’sanalysis at Talking Points Memo. #
Can that stand? We will see this week, I guess.
It also might be some of that ‘ol conservative media bias, This was written in 2011, A Right-Wing Mole at ABC News. Let’s face it, if a purported liberal would have done something like this (see Dan Rather) they would be fired. Here’s more about conservative media bias, Charlie Cook, Karl Rove’s consigliere.
I’m all for “reform” and “streamlining” but in my personal experience in the corporate world that inevitably just meant making one person do the job of three. Or four. For the same money. They call this “enhanced productivity” and on paper it looks really great. But for anyone who’s on the job, most often it’s clear that morale tanks and the work suffers.
Naturally the spending jihad during these decades of conservative political dominance meant that government would go the same way.
Yes, cutting back on government in the wrong places can cause serious problems. (see also banking regulation).
There is so much to be said about the shit storm that’s currently engulfing President Obama’s second term. It’s becoming a kind of a self-fulfilling prophecy of recent Presidents, (since Nixon?). That the second term becomes a scandal-plagued time when nothing gets done. And that a president only has the first part of his second term to really get anything done. But the reality is that in our current political structure it’s a feature, not a bug.
For those who bankroll our politicians the status quo is just fine. We have a political system that’s beholden to the corporations and the wealthy – a plutocracy. And in a plutocracy the people’s needs get pushed to the side and to keep them there we get “scandal” and the status quo. In other words if Obama, or any President going back to Nixon, was busy doing the people’s business, they wouldn’t need to be worrying the media, outside groups, and terrorism.
If Obama would have come into office and started using his power to save people’s homes, investigate the bankers, and threw some of their asses in jail, there never would have been a tea party. But since the bankers bankrolled his campaign he was unable to do that. And now we are where we are. That’s a very, very simple explanation of why we are where we are but we really don’t get much in depth discussion of why we are where we are nowadays. See what I mean, here and here. (BTW I really like the name Tiger Beat on the Potomac).
If a president get’s into deep shit, and I don’t think Obama is in any serious trouble (yet), the only thing that can save him is the people and/or a really strong economy. So, Mr. President, get busy taking care of the people and right the economy, and you’re second term will be a tremendous success.
I like everything about this study, even the parts I don’t particularly agree with. The study is from U.S PIRG, A New Direction. This is from the Executive Summary.
The Driving Boom—a six decade-long period of steady increases in per-capita driving in the United States—is over.
Americans drive fewer total miles today than we did eight years ago, and fewer per person than we did at the end of Bill Clinton’s first term. The unique combination of conditions that fueled the Driving Boom—from cheap gas prices to the rapid expansion of the workforce during the Baby Boom generation—no longer exists. Meanwhile, a new generation—the Millennials—is demanding a new American Dream less dependent on driving.
Transportation policy in the United States, however, remains stuck in the past. Official forecasts of future vehicle travel continue to assume steady increases in driving, despite the experience of the past decade. Those forecasts are used to justify spending vast sums on new and expanded highways, even as existing roads and bridges are neglected. Elements of a more balanced transportation system—from transit systems to bike lanes—lack crucial investment as powerful interests battle to maintain their piece of a shrinking transportation funding pie.
The time has come for America to hit the “reset” button on transportation policy—replacing the policy infrastructure of the Driving Boom years with a more efficient, flexible and nimble system that is better able to meet the transportation needs of the 21st century.
Here’s an excerpt from the study on page 38 regarding PPP’s, in the section “Increased Risk for Public-Private Partnerships”
As gasoline tax revenues have dried up, federal and state transportation officials have sometimes looked toward publicprivate partnerships (PPPs) as a potential alternative. There are many possible ways for government to partner with the private sector, including traditional forms of financing and procurement that raise private money through the municipal bond market and hire private contractors to provide materials and labor. But most of the attention given to PPPs involves the potential for a private entity to agree to build and/or maintain a highway for a given period of time in exchange for revenue—in many cases, from vehicle tolls.
Uncertainty regarding VMT trends reduces the attractiveness of toll revenue as a payout to private investors. Fewer investors will be willing to invest the massive amounts of capital required to build and maintain a toll road if the number of paying customers is not likely to rise over time. In 2005 and 2006, foreign toll road operators financed by large financial companies made large bets on future traffic volume by purchasing a 99-year lease in Chicago and a 75-year lease in Indiana for major toll roads. In
each of these deals and many smaller ones, the private investors acted as concessionaires, collecting tolls for their own bottom line. Many people thought these toll concessions were the wave of the future.
Several toll concessions have produced less revenue than expected. Some have needed to be bailed out by the government. Others—such as a brand-new billion-dollar toll road in Texas that sought to attract traffic by posting the nation’s fastest speed limit, 85 miles per hour—have faced the threat of a credit downgrade as a result of flagging traffic. These shortfalls in privately collected tolls do not necessarily mean that the government received a “good deal,” since more expensive private capital costs and other potential compensation must also be covered.
[...]
Changing vehicle travel trends pose risks not just for private investors but for taxpayers as well—regardless of how the risks are distributed at the outset of a PPP arrangement.
Toll roads, in and of themselves, were never the problem. The problem has always been with how our elected leaders decided to go about paying for, are in reality, financing them.
The main problem I see is that there really is no place in our state or in our country right now where we can have a sane and honest debate on a topic like this. But this study certainly makes it seem like continuing to spend our transportion dollars just on highways is shortsighted and ignorant. In light of this study, it’s definitely time to re-think transportation.
Here’s the reason this, President Barack Obama’s permission structure, is so disheartening for so many Democrats and those on the left. He appears to be bending over backward and willing to sacrifice longstanding Democratic principals to cut a deal, instead of fighting for those longstanding Democratic principals. But, and it’s taken me a long time to get to this place, that’s really what Obama believes is best for our country. He’s willing to sacrifice Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, Head Start, and on and on…for a deal with the GOP.
And what has happened is that too many of us haven’t tried hard enough to force him in a different direction. There’s been an incredible amount of writing on how Obama has not done what the left or Democrats wanted or thought he would do as President. But one that I remember (not sure from where) was that Obama was sort of a blank canvas and that many Democrats projected their views onto Obama. Too many of us, myself included, just assumed he would do what we thought a Democratic president (FDR, LBJ) would, given the opportunity he had. Well, he didn’t.
Because of his great oration during the 2008 campaign it was thought that he could rally the people to his side. But Obama has never talked to the people enough and tried to rally their support. If he has it was when he was in a bind, he never really tried from the start. Whether it would have worked, may be up for discussion, but it should have been tried. But it was likely the only way he could have beat back the GOP obstructionsim, to take it on from the start of his Presidency.
To embrace what Rick Perlstein calls the Rules of Liberal Political Success. It could have been so easy. Bush left the economy in ruins and our foreign policy in a shambles. Obama got the Nobel Peace Prize on credit, and he’s done little to live up to that since then, (see drones and Gitmo). The people were ready, they just weren’t engaged.
While Obama was right to urge graduates over the weekend to greater citizenship his definition was striking for it’s lack of passion. (Maybe why Stevenson never won the Presidency?)
I think about how we might perpetuate this notion of citizenship in a way that another politician from my home state of Illinois, Adlai Stevenson, once described patriotism not as “short, frenzied outbursts of emotion, but the tranquil and steady dedication of a lifetime.” That’s what patriotism is. That’s what citizenship is. (Applause.)
And the quotes President Woodrow Wilson on change.
But participation, your civic duty, is more than just voting. You don’t have to run for office yourself — but I hope many of you do, at all levels, because our democracy needs you. And I promise you, it will give you a tough skin. I know a little bit about this. (Laughter.) President Wilson once said, “If you want to make enemies, try to change something.”
While Obama made enemies on health care, and continuing the bank bailouts that Bush started, it could have turned out different. Obama’s overriding principal is compromise, that’s how he starts his negotiations with the GOP, by laying out a compromise. His healthcare plan was, and he started by alienating much of his base by taking single-payer off the table from the start. And to fully investigate and reform Wall Street, was a huge missed opportunity. Which are just a couple of things that infuriate many Democrats and the left.
But the president also needs to ask himself why even his supporters are growing impatient. His whole budget strategy, after all, is directed almost entirely toward gently coaxing Republicans his way, without any concern as to whether what he is doing is demobilizing the very people he needs on his side now.
When, in pursuit of tax reform, he explicitly offered a compromise to change the index that determines Social Security benefits as part of his budget, he did so against the advice of many of his most loyal backers in Congress. That includes Democrats who would be willing to vote for that cut to Social Security benefits as part of a serious budget deal. But they insist that such a major step toward the Republicans should be taken only in return for concrete concessions from them on the need for more revenue.
If Obama wants to underscore that his problem is Republican obstruction, he should tell those GOP senators he likes to dine with that they need to come up with revenue very soon or else he’ll withdraw that “chained CPI” offer he claims not to like much anyway. Put up or shut up is a cliche, but a useful one.
Similarly, it’s worth asking why so many of Obama’s initiatives have dropped out of public view. Obama has called for raising the minimum wage to $9 an hour. Many Democrats in Congress think, correctly, that it should be set at $10. Would it be so hard for Obama to come out fighting for the minimum-wage increase — and for other steps to bolster the incomes of those stuck at the bottom of the economy? Why not expose that none of this is happening because of GOP opposition?
Obama wants to provide universal pre-K education. That ought to be a bipartisan idea. Many Republican governors have embraced the concept in their states. Shouldn’t the president be pushing harder to get it on the media’s radar by way of forcing a debate in Congress?
The president believes we need to spend more on our infrastructure to boost job creation now and to make us competitive for the long run. He’s right. But he needs to make clear it is something that’s genuinely important to him.
It’s true that Obama spoke about both his investment agenda and preschool plans at last week’s much-maligned news conference. And the White House announced on Sunday that he would embark on a series of “middle class jobs and opportunity tours.” These should be shaped by a consistent, driving theme: that the stakes in this debate are larger than the day-to-day drone of partisan invective suggests.
Remember the Mark Twain line that Wagner’s music was better than it sounded? Obama’s program has more to do with growth and opportunity than he usually lets on. If he wants to rally us, he might want to change that.
While movements are what have really changed things throughout history, the hope was that a movement tied to a dynamic leader were going to bring transformational change. While I’ve done much to critique Obama in this post there’s also critiquing of us, the citizenship, in here too. We’ve been far too passive, standing by, and letting our government do little if anything in these past 5 years.
It’s also not to be taken as Obama-bashing. It’s about the realization of who Obama is (a compromiser first) and is not (the next great liberal Democratic president). Along with the realization that the Democratic Party decided to embrace oligarchy 30 years ago, And Tip was no bargain, either. And the only thing that can change that is a movement of the people
This is a Democratic “pollster” who can’t give us any data. Instead, he talks about his “feelings”. Peggy Noonan had some of those before last November’s elections too. They were worth as much as this joker’s.
Because, of course, there is no data that would find that Democrats want entitlement cuts, or give a rat’s ass about any grand bargain. Voters might want a budget agreement, but one that gets rid of this bullshit sequester. And that shit about making “Medicare and Social Security sustainable”? I wish our own people would quit using Pete Peterson language to undermine our social net. Raise the cap on payroll taxes and be done with it.
Instead, a pollster who happens to be a principal at one of the biggest Democratic polling firms in the nation, Benenson Strategy Group, is going around telling people (and his candidate clients?) about his bullshit “feelings”.
Would it surprise you to find out that he was Harold Ford’s pollster? How about the fact that he was Blanche Lincoln’s pollster? Would it surprise you that Joel Benenson, Brodnitz’s partner, was Obama’s pollster in 2008?
And then we wonder why Beltway Democrats are so out of touch, when even their own pollsters have to resort to “feelings” to try and sell their bullshit austerity agenda. Oy vey.
State and federal investigations eventually will uncover the extent to which West Fertilizer Co. followed the law regarding the large amounts of highly volatile ammonium nitrate stored on its property. But regardless of what authorities knew, West residents remained clueless — by design — about the extreme dangers they were living next to until an April 17 explosion killed 15 and devastated a 35-block area.
A little-known section of Texas law allows agencies to withhold information they regard as confidential concerning the handling, storage and transportation of extremely hazardous chemicals. Not only can state agencies claim the right under the law to ensure that the public remains in the dark, they can assert the right to not even explain why they won’t release data.
All of the original justifications for budget cuts have gone away. The sequester is hurting the economy and keeping unemployment high. But instead Republicans plan to double down on cuts. Apparently their real game is to force high unemployment and desperation for 99% of us to further enrich the 1%.
The Republican justification for cutting was “soaring deficits.” But with recovery and tax increases the deficits are falling dramatically, already down by half. Even so Republicans continue to say we need cuts, even though cuts hurt the economy and cause continued high unemployment.
These sorts of facts in the U.S., and related ones from other economies, are threatening to upend the entire austerity movement, as Irwin observes. But while that debate proceeds and evolves elsewhere, Fox News continues to offer conservatives a venue to avoid reconciling ideology and fact.
A new survey of IT decision makers by SAP and Harris Interactive reithat the rise of machine to machine (M2M)communications – more commonly referred to as the “Internet of Things” – is on the cusp of transforming our homes, our cities and how business is conducted.
How, you ask?
By leveraging Big Data and real-time analytics to improve parking and traffic flow, which could reduce pollution and traffic accidents as well.
By managing all the gadgets in our homes, from lights, computers and smartphones down to our coffeemaker and garage door. Wake up, the coffee is brewing, the house is heated, the car already knows the best route to work and the news we need is showing on the screen of our choice – prioritized, obviously.
Connected cars, roads and smartphones will guide us to the nearest open parking spot – and bill us automatically.
This Internet of Things will also let businesses increase “efficiency, productivity and collaboration,” as it delivers real-time data and insight when and where it’s most needed, including to a widely dispersed, highly mobile workforce.
Buried within the survey results are such nuggets as:
Mobile devices will outnumber humans this year.
90% of consumer-connected devices will have access to some personal cloud in 2013.
66% of IT professionals surveyed believe business and consumer technology will converge within 3-5 years – great news for consumer tech leaders like Apple, Samsung and Google.
At least 4 billion terabytes of data will be generated this year alone.
The trend toward BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) has clear and present business repercussions: 75% of the surveyed IT professionals believe that employees’ personal use of mobile devices impacts how the business itself uses the cloud.
65% think the Internet of Things’ biggest challent in managing and analyzing the resulting real-time data.
The bottom line is that our drone policy is creating more problems for us then it is fixing. And that being the case, why in the world do we keep doing it?
Economic debates rarely end with a T.K.O. But the great policy debate of recent years between Keynesians, who advocate sustaining and, indeed, increasing government spending in a depression, and austerians, who demand immediate spending cuts, comes close — at least in the world of ideas. At this point, the austerian position has imploded; not only have its predictions about the real world failed completely, but the academic research invoked to support that position has turned out to be riddled with errors, omissions and dubious statistics.
{…]
What, after all, do people want from economic policy? The answer, it turns out, is that it depends on which people you ask — a point documented in a recent research paper by the political scientists Benjamin Page, Larry Bartels and Jason Seawright. The paper compares the policy preferences of ordinary Americans with those of the very wealthy, and the results are eye-opening.
Thus, the average American is somewhat worried about budget deficits, which is no surprise given the constant barrage of deficit scare stories in the news media, but the wealthy, by a large majority, regard deficits as the most important problem we face. And how should the budget deficit be brought down? The wealthy favor cutting federal spending on health care and Social Security — that is, “entitlements” — while the public at large actually wants to see spending on those programs rise.
You get the idea: The austerity agenda looks a lot like a simple expression of upper-class preferences, wrapped in a facade of academic rigor. What the top 1 percent wants becomes what economic science says we must do.
Does a continuing depression actually serve the interests of the wealthy? That’s doubtful, since a booming economy is generally good for almost everyone. What is true, however, is that the years since we turned to austerity have been dismal for workers but not at all bad for the wealthy, who have benefited from surging profits and stock prices even as long-term unemployment festers. The 1 percent may not actually want a weak economy, but they’re doing well enough to indulge their prejudices.
And this makes one wonder how much difference the intellectual collapse of the austerian position will actually make. To the extent that we have policy of the 1 percent, by the 1 percent, for the 1 percent, won’t we just see new justifications for the same old policies?
I hope not; I’d like to believe that ideas and evidence matter, at least a bit. Otherwise, what am I doing with my life? But I guess we’ll see just how much cynicism is justified.
What, after all, do people want from economic policy? The answer, it turns out, is that it depends on which people you ask — a point documented in a recent research paper by the political scientists Benjamin Page, Larry Bartels and Jason Seawright. The paper compares the policy preferences of ordinary Americans with those of the very wealthy, and the results are eye-opening.
Thus, the average American is somewhat worried about budget deficits, which is no surprise given the constant barrage of deficit scare stories in the news media, but the wealthy, by a large majority, regard deficits as the most important problem we face. And how should the budget deficit be brought down? The wealthy favor cutting federal spending on health care and Social Security — that is, “entitlements” — while the public at large actually wants to see spending on those programs rise.
You get the idea: The austerity agenda looks a lot like a simple expression of upper-class preferences, wrapped in a facade of academic rigor. What the top 1 percent wants becomes what economic science says we must do.
Does a continuing depression actually serve the interests of the wealthy? That’s doubtful, since a booming economy is generally good for almost everyone. What is true, however, is that the years since we turned to austerity have been dismal for workers but not at all bad for the wealthy, who have benefited from surging profits and stock prices even as long-term unemployment festers. The 1 percent may not actually want a weak economy, but they’re doing well enough to indulge their prejudices.
And this makes one wonder how much difference the intellectual collapse of the austerian position will actually make. To the extent that we have policy of the 1 percent, by the 1 percent, for the 1 percent, won’t we just see new justifications for the same old policies?
I hope not; I’d like to believe that ideas and evidence matter, at least a bit. Otherwise, what am I doing with my life? But I guess we’ll see just how much cynicism is justified.
In other words, this is a fig leaf. Reinhart and Rogoff’s work is a cover for political actors who do not want to take steps to boost the economy and lower the unemployment rate and who want to cut programs like Social Security and Medicare. It is not part of a honest policy debate.
So now we all agree and we can all be friends. But the fact is that this isn’t just some sad case of conservative politicians running around mischaracterizing a sober-minded study and then liberals overreacting in response. Ken Rogoff was writing op-eds drawing strong policy conclusions from this paper. He was delivering congressional testimony drawing strong policy conclusions from this paper. And it’s not as if he’s some political naif who stumbled down from the ivory tower into a partisan controversy he could never have predicted. He was research director at the International Monetary Fund and he knows how the game is played. He’s signed up as a paid speaker for the Washington Speakers Bureau. His “fees vary based on event location” but they promise that in exchange for your money “Kenneth Rogoff reaches beyond the theoretical and delivers quantitative proof from his frequently cited research and best-selling book to explain why our financial history continues to repeat itself-and just where the US and global economies are heading.”
But of course their is no quantitative proof. In a sense there never was, but the University of Massachusetts counter-paper helped exposed how little quantitative proof was there. Now under attack Reinhart & Rogoff are retreating to much softer, much milder, much more defensible claims. And good for them. But that shows how much credit their critics deserve.
In a sane political world everyone would realize that austerity is keeping us in a depression and that we have much, much bigger economic problems.
We should do things that are smart policies that target the long-term unemployed. Amy Taub of Demos has done convincing work on why ending credit checks as part of the job interview process would be a good idea. Extending unemployment insurance is also important. But the idea that we should change course away from boosting the general economy strikes me as a bad idea. The long-term unemployed experience the worst impact of a generally weak economy. But its that weak economy that is doing the damage. If unemployment was actually brought down, which we could do with more expansonary policy, then employers couldn’t afford to be so choosy.
We can fix the unemployment crisis we’ve done it before. And the beauty is, if we put people back to work, that will fix the deficit and many of our other economic problems. And the chained CPI scheme for Social Security should be scrapped, Why Obama’s Stealth Social Security Cut Is Bigger Than It Seems. Keynes was right, it’s time to put people back to work.
Even though many prominent economists have been saying it’s bunk for years, we now know a prominent study, used to justify austerity is bunk. Reinhart and Rogoff Are Wrong about Austerity.
In 2010, two Harvard economists published an academic paper that spoke to the world’s biggest policy question: should we cut public spending to control the deficit or use the state to rekindle economic growth? Growth in a Time of Debt by Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff has served as an important intellectual bulwark in support of austerity policies in the US and Europe. It has been cited by politicians ranging from Paul Ryan, the US congressman, to George Osborne, the UK chancellor. But we have shown that several critical findings advanced in this paper are wrong. So do we need to rethink austerity economics more broadly?
Their research is best known for its result that, across a broad range of countries and periods, economic growth declines dramatically when a country’s level of public debt exceeds 90 per cent of gross domestic product. In their work with a sample of 20 advanced economies in the postwar period, they report that average annual GDP growth ranges between about 3 per cent and 4 per cent when the ratio of public debt to GDP is below 90 per cent. But it collapses to -0.1 per cent when the ratio rises above a 90 per cent threshold.
In a new working paper, co-authored with Thomas Herndon, we found that these results were based on data errors and unsupportable statistical techniques.
[...]
We are not suggesting that governments should borrow and spend profligately. But judicious deficit spending remains the single most effective tool we have to fight against mass unemployment caused by severe recessions. Recent research by Prof Reinhart and Prof Rogoff, along with all related arguments by austerity proponents, does nothing to contradict this fundamental point.
This is big news because this is what many of the so-called VSP’s (very serious people) have been using for years to justify austerity policies. Another way to say this is that Keynes is still right. Here’s Paul Krugman’s take, The Excel Depression.
Ms. Reinhart and Mr. Rogoff had credibility thanks to a widely admired earlier book on the history of financial crises, and their timing was impeccable. The paper came out just after Greece went into crisis and played right into the desire of many officials to “pivot” from stimulus to austerity. As a result, the paper instantly became famous; it was, and is, surely the most influential economic analysis of recent years.
In fact, Reinhart-Rogoff quickly achieved almost sacred status among self-proclaimed guardians of fiscal responsibility; their tipping-point claim was treated not as a disputed hypothesis but as unquestioned fact. For example, a Washington Post editorial earlier this year warned against any relaxation on the deficit front, because we are “dangerously near the 90 percent mark that economists regard as a threat to sustainable economic growth.” Notice the phrasing: “economists,” not “some economists,” let alone “some economists, vigorously disputed by other economists with equally good credentials,” which was the reality.
For the truth is that Reinhart-Rogoff faced substantial criticism from the start, and the controversy grew over time. As soon as the paper was released, many economists pointed out that a negative correlation between debt and economic performance need not mean that high debt causes low growth. It could just as easily be the other way around, with poor economic performance leading to high debt. Indeed, that’s obviously the case for Japan, which went deep into debt only after its growth collapsed in the early 1990s.
Like other things in the recent past – ahem..Irag…ahem – this study fit well in to the VSP’s pre-determined outcome. So it became the de facto study to prove austerity works. Now that it’s been debunked let’s hope austerity policies will die with it.
Because we have a much, much bigger problem then debt and deficits – Jobs. The Jobless Trap.
But while debt fears were and are misguided, there’s a real danger we’ve ignored: the corrosive effect, social and economic, of persistent high unemployment. And even as the case for debt hysteria is collapsing, our worst fears about the damage from long-term unemployment are being confirmed.
[...]
So we are indeed creating a permanent class of jobless Americans.
And let’s be clear: this is a policy decision. The main reason our economic recovery has been so weak is that, spooked by fear-mongering over debt, we’ve been doing exactly what basic macroeconomics says you shouldn’t do — cutting government spending in the face of a depressed economy.
It’s hard to overstate how self-destructive this policy is. Indeed, the shadow of long-term unemployment means that austerity policies are counterproductive even in purely fiscal terms. Workers, after all, are taxpayers too; if our debt obsession exiles millions of Americans from productive employment, it will cut into future revenues and raise future deficits.
Our exaggerated fear of debt is, in short, creating a slow-motion catastrophe. It’s ruining many lives, and at the same time making us poorer and weaker in every way. And the longer we persist in this folly, the greater the damage will be.
It’s long past time we got to work creating jobs in this country, see Back To Full Employment.
Hey, just because virtually everyone who has been arguing the case for deficit reduction for years has been shown to be a crank, a charlatan or shockingly bad at arithmetic is no reason to question your beliefs. Of course austerity is sane! It just must be! Clearly the problem isn’t that austerity is the wrong prescription, it’s that now only bloggers will be making the case and they won’t dominate the debate like the long, long line of discredited analysts and economists who history has proven to be asses. It’s tough times for austerians.
I had a friend of mine, a few years after Bush was elected in 2000, who was fairly apolitical told me once that he usually winds up voting for the Democrat. I asked him why? And he said, “because they are usually for the little guy, like me”. That’s what is so wrong with Obama’s budget, it screws the little people, aka poor, working and middle class Americans.
The Democratic brand, going back to the New Deal, is about helping those in need and creating a vast middle class. And that’s exactly what Obama’s budget won’t do. This from Rick Perlstein explains it pretty well.
What should the Democrats’ consistent, long-term message consist of? I will avoid prescribing what it should be, other than to note that for reasons of history and structure it must tend to the work of economic equality. There are really two reasons to stay away from details. First, they would distract from the real point of this essay, which is not about programs but about structure. Second, there are lots of possibilities for programs, and it would be misleading to focus on some favored set. It could be universal single-payer health care. It could be free college education or universal pre-kindergarten or both. It could be a program to make the government the employer of last resort, putting the underemployed to work rebuilding infrastructure. It is not the work of a day, a month, or even a year to settle on what the course should be. I argue here only that there must be a course.
Why must these programs tend to the work of economic equality? One reason is structural (or “path-dependent,” as the social scientists say): the modern Democratic Party’s strongest store of cultural identity, of value built over time—its “brand identity,” as the marketers put it—is in its work to producing economic equality. Abandoning it makes as much sense as McDonald’s deciding to drop the hamburgers and remake itself into a chain of pancake joints.
Another reason is more simple—numbskull simple. Any marketing executive will tell you that you can’t build a brand out of stuff the people say they don’t want. And what do Americans say they want? According to the pollsters, exactly what the Democratic Party was once famous for giving them: economic populism.
Liberals often have a difficult time making sense of these [anti-tax] movements – don’t taxes support good things? – because they don’t see how little the American state directly provides to its citizens, relative to their economic circumstances. Since the early 1970s, with a few brief exceptions, workers’ wages have stagnated. What has the state offered in response? Public transport is virtually non-existent. Even with Obama’s reforms, the state does not provide healthcare or insurance to most people. Outside wealthy communities, state schools often fail to deliver a real education. In such circumstances, is it any wonder ordinary citizens want their taxes cut? That at least is change they can believe in.
This isn’t going well, and Democrats are in charge. 2014.
That’s what our folks in Washington need to understand. That is going to be the overwhelming assessment we get from the public unless we turn this shit around and at least appear to be fighting for the average person. Because in 2014, nobody is going to give a shit that we didn’t change the Senate rules or failed to reform campaign finance or that chess moves are being planned out for 20 years from now. All they’re going to know is this shit isn’t going well and Democrats are in charge.
So, to the White House and the Senate leadership: You all are about to get creamed. Again. I know the GOP will obstruct everything. Good. Use that as your springboard. Just dismiss this foolishness of trying to craft a bipartisan legislative agenda and go for the full on political combat. So just get rid of the filibuster, stop fucking around trying to balance the budget, and just start doing shit for regular people who are broke.
1) It’s not a benefit cut, nor a tax increase
2) It’s a more accurate measure of inflation
3) We can enact Chained-CPI still protect veterans and the most vulnerable
4) It will help achieve a deal with the GOP
5) It won’t hurt Democrats in 2014
1. Of course it’s a benefit cut.
2. Of course it’s a tax hike.
3. And it’s a tax hike for everybody but the wealthy.
4. You could save much more money in other, better ways.
5. The White House’s proposed “bump” disproves its own argument.
6. It’s political suicide for Democrats.
7. The Social Security cut doesn’t reduce the deficit.
8. That tax hike on everybody except the wealthy will help a little. But …
9. The deficit’s already shrinking rapidly.
10. It doesn’t matter if “the GOP asked you to” do this.
