Via memeorandum, this:
Sweet jeebus.
by John Cole| 81 Comments
This post is in: Domestic Politics
by John Cole| 68 Comments
This post is in: Politics, Republican Stupidity, Clown Shoes
According to the Huffington Post, many Republicans oppose placing limits on CEO pay:
Senate Minority Leader Jon Kyl (R-AZ) blamed the “tone deaf” bankers for creating the political environment that allowed Obama to call for a cap.
“Because of their excesses, very bad things begin to happen, like the United States government telling a company what it can pay its employees. That’s not a good thing in America,” Kyl told the Huffington Post.
“What executives have done is troubling, but it’s equally troubling to have government telling shareholders how much they can pay the executives,” said Sen. Mel Martinez (R-FL).
Sen. James Inhofe (R-OK) said that he is “one of the chief defenders of Obama on the Republican side,” but “as I was listening to him make those statements [about executive pay], I thought, is this still America? Do we really tell people how to run [a business], and who to pay and how much to pay?”
I really don’t understand what the problem for Republicans is here- the Democratic proposal is not to tell every company all over the United States what to pay their executives, it is a proposal designed to protect taxpayer dollars. Unless I am mistaken (and I may be wrong with some details, if so correct me), what they are stating is that IF you take bailout money, meaning if you have driven your company so far into the ground that you have to come, hat in hand, to the American public for a bailout, the most you can be paid is a half a million dollars that year.
There is nothing wrong with that, and given these companies have spent the last few months blowing TARP funds on all sorts of nonsense, to include bonuses to employees, junkets, and new offices, it makes complete and perfect sense to me. Given that just today we are learning these banks and CEO’s got $80 billion too much money, this makes this even more sense. Additionally, there is an easy way to not fall under these regulations: don’t take any bailout money.
In other words, no one is having their pay limited except for people running companies that are on the dole. As the article notes, we already do this with another class of citizens- welfare recipients. However, there is an even better example from recent months of Senators deciding they should dictate how much people are made. Here is John Kyl, worried today about government telling employees how much they can make, just a few weeks ago:
Here is Sen. Inhofe in a press release opposing the auto industry bailout:
For example, there are no provisions in the language that specifically direct the ‘car czar’ to take any specific restructuring actions, such as renegotiating union contracts or debt obligations.
And then there is this:
The chief executives of Detroit’s Big Three auto makers appearing before Congress today don’t make the kind of money that Wall Street bosses pull down, but they could still face tough questions about executive compensation.
The legislation under consideration by the Senate would require the government to bar bonuses for executives making more than $250,000. The bill in the House of Representatives has similar provisions for those companies receiving loans, demanding no bonuses to employees making more than $200,000, no “golden parachutes” payouts to fleeing executives and “no compensation plan that could encourage manipulation of reported earnings to enhance compensation.”
Spokesmen at Ford Motor Co. and General Motors Corp. said their companies are still reviewing the bills released Monday night but added that the auto makers are already taking steps themselves that would effectively institute similar kinds of caps.
In other words, they are perfectly content to dictate the wages of hundreds of thousands of auto workers who make 40-80k a year, but the notion of limiting Wall Street CEO’s to half a million dollars a year if (and only if) they take government money upsets them deeply. How clueless are these guys? Do they just think no one will notice?
Put aside the fact that they honestly have no idea what socialism is, but are they completely unable to see how this is playing in the public?
Obligatory Amazon link to The Corporation (irony is dead here).
by DougJ| 119 Comments
This post is in: Domestic Politics, Politics
I wish we’d hear more of this from actual people — as opposed to tv-trons — about the economy (from yet another WaPo chat):
Richmond, Va.: Just to keep it real, I’m a worker with a wife with cancer. I need to keep my job and my medical or lose everything. That’s the reality of the economy and our system and what needs to be addressed. Tax cuts only aren’t going to do it. It didn’t do it over the past 8 years, why they think it would do it now is beyond me.
Michael A. Fletcher: That is the argument Obama is making.
It really pisses me off that the discussion of the stimulus bill has devolved into some kind of a parlor game about who’s got better PR chops, whether it’s right to mess with Rush Limbaugh, and that Nancy Pelosi was wrong to make Republicans feel bad. I have no illusions that it will change things overnight, but I’ve yet to hear a single convincing argument that massive government spending isn’t our best bet right now.
It’s like Iraq all over again. For a long time, I thought that Iraq was about thousands of Americans dead or wounded, tens or hundreds of thousands Iraqis dead or wounded, 3.5 trillion flushed down the toilet, and absolutely no strategic gain of any kind. What I’ve learned is that it’s really about Fred Hiatt’s sense of justice and Peter Beinart’s self-esteem issues. Who knew?
This post is in: Domestic Politics, Politics
Interesting piece in Popular Mechanics that last night was briefly on Memeorandum and then disappeared into the ether about the value of shovel ready jobs and how they might actually make our current infrastructure problem worse:
The term arrived with all the muscle and blue-collar authority of a bulldozer: “shovel-ready.” As in, infrastructure projects that are ready or almost ready to begin, the antithesis of some dimly imagined earmark or budget-sucking bridge to nowhere. Then-president-elect Obama used the term on a December 7th visit to NBC’s Meet the Press, describing the kinds of projects that would be supported by the upcoming economic stimulus bill. Soon the phrase was being repeated by policy-makers only an almost daily basis. Now the bill is here, with one version passed by the House, and another being debated by the Senate. “Shovel-ready” isn’t language used in the bill, but the House’s version, at least, does have an enforceable short-term focus: Only projects that are able to start construction within 90 days of selection are eligible for funding from the $90 billion set aside for infrastructure.
The programs that would meet the bill’s 90-day restriction are, for the most part, an unappealing mix of projects that were either shelved after being fully designed and engineered, and have since become outmoded or irrelevant, or projects with limited scope and ambition. No one’s building a smart electric grid or revamping a water system on 90 days notice. The best example of a shovel-ready project, and what engineers believe could become the biggest recipient of the transportation-related portion of the bill’s funding, is road resurfacing—important maintenance work, but not a meaningful way to rein in a national infrastructure crisis. “In developing countries, there are roads that are so bad, they create congestion, because drivers are constantly forced to slow down,” says David Levinson, an associate professor in the University of Minnesota’s civil engineering department. “That’s not the case here. If the road’s a little bit rougher, drivers will feel it, but that’s not going to cause you to go any slower. So the economic benefit of those projects is pretty low.”
Read the whole thing.
One of my complaints about the stimulus bill is that there seems to be very little in it that iswhat I would call a “great public works.” From my ignorant perspective (and I mean that in every sense of the term- I need one of the economists mentioned in the story below, although I am smart enough to know what I don’t know), with the TARP bailout, we sort of just pissed make-believe money away to patch up financial holes. With the stimulus bill, I understand a good bit of money is going to help balance state budgets (If you look at this map, you will see that every state is allocated a sum of money to cover at least 10% of budget shortfalls, which could explain why Republican governors are more supportive of the current bill than the Republicans in congress), to provide unemployment benefits, medical benefits, and so on, but it would be nice that if for 900 billion we get something tangible and lasting. If I knew that the money was going to go to the reconstruction of bridges, high-speed rail, the power grid, or alternative and nuclear energy, I would be far more supportive.
Maybe some of that is in there, but the bill is named the “American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009,” and it would be nice if there was some comprehensive plan to provide something that will stimulate the economy in the short run but provide long-term benefits. There are tons of things I can think of above and beyond some road construction here and there. Why is this not happening?
by John Cole| 27 Comments
This post is in: Domestic Politics
600k jobs lost:
The country moved into its second year of uninterrupted job losses last month, with companies shedding another 598,000 jobs and the unemployment rate moving up to 7.6 percent, the Labor Department reported on Friday.
Economists had forecast a loss of 540,000 jobs and a unemployment rate of 7.5 percent.
Job losses were once again spread across both manufacturing and services industries, reinforcing the picture of an economy that is contracting at its fastest pace in decades.
Employers in the United States have shed jobs every month since January 2008, for an aggregate decline in payroll employment of 3.1 million.
Read the whole thing.
by John Cole| 46 Comments
This post is in: Politics
Pretty solid piece by Steven Pearlstein in DougJ’s punching bag, the Washington Post:
Actually, what’s striking is that supposedly intelligent people are horrified at the thought that, during a deep recession, government might try to help the economy by buying up-to-date equipment for the people who protect us from epidemics and infectious diseases, by hiring people to repair environmental damage on federal lands and by contracting with private companies to make federal buildings more energy-efficient.
What really irks so many Republicans, of course, is that all the stimulus money isn’t being used to cut individual and business taxes, their cure-all for economic ailments, even though all the credible evidence is that tax cuts are only about half as stimulative as direct government spending.
You really should read the whole thing. By the way, Sen. Coburn is mentioned a couple of times, and of course he is apoplectic about the stimulus bill. As far as I am concerned, though, Coburn gets a pass- he is one of a handful of conservatives who actually was in a froth the past eight years while the Bush team was doubling the national debt.
As a side note, I do agree with the GOP on one thing- I don’t understand the rush. I understand the overall urgency of the situation, but I just don’t think passing it today versus next week or two weeks from now really matters in the grand scheme of things. Just get the bill right.
by DougJ| 49 Comments
This post is in: Politics
This is an interesting explanation of what’s gone on with the stimulus debate:
The outcome is not surprising. Obama had roughly 90 people working at his headquarters on Internet outreach and new technology projects, observes Joe Trippi, a Democratic operative who broke new ground on modern campaigning during Howard Dean’s 2004 Democratic primary bid.
Even with closet-size spaces, the White House can accommodate only about 200 or so people for jobs ranging from national security to health care reform to Internet guru.
The Obama team “built this incredible campaign and now they have these ridiculously primitive tools. The communication tools they mastered don’t exist in the White House. It’s like they are in a cave,” said Trippi.
“Then there are the masters of the Stone Age, and they are doing a good job,” he added.
Certainly, the Republican attack tools here have been crude and old-fashioned — go on talk shows and lie, get the wingnut radio to rant about pork, etc. And, I think to some extent, the media has gone a long with it all because they’re comfortable with this, having come of age in a post-Nixonian political environment dominated by bogus culture wars and mind-numbingly stupid right-wing agitprop. I can imagine Richard Cohen writing column title “Luddites 1, hopey internet gurus 0” or something like that.
But the whole idea that firing up the old wingnut distortion machine still constitutes a useful political strategy is dubious at best. It seems to me that most media assumptions made about politics stem from what I call the Chris Matthews cranky uncle theory of politics, whereby elections are decided by people like Chris Matthews’ angry uncle, who likes Republicans for “cultural reasons” and because he hates “government waste”, but who also may vote Democrat because he thinks they might dole out more money to him when he becomes unemployed and maybe because he used to be in a union.
But McCain won the cranky white bastard demographic handily last time and still got shellacked. Obama won two-thirds of the under 30 vote and two-thirds of the Latino vote. If that keeps happening — and there’s no reason to think it won’t — Republicans will keep losing elections badly. There just aren’t enough cranky white bastards anymore.
Is there anything about the Republican strategy on the stimulus that will help them expand beyond the cranky white bastard demo? I’m not sure. And, no, Twittering their crazy neo-Hooverist rantings isn’t going to change anything.
Speaking of cranky white bastards, Broder is doing a Q&A at noon.