You can read their account of what is going on, as filtered through Brooks. Excerpt:
…they argue…the Obama administration will not usher in an era of big
government. Federal spending over the last generation has been about 20
percent of G.D.P. This year, it has surged to about 27 percent. But
they aim to bring spending down to 22 percent of G.D.P. in a few years.
And most of the increase, they insist, is caused by the aging of the
population and the rise of mandatory entitlement spending. It’s not
caused by big increases in the welfare state.
The White House
has produced a chart showing nondefense discretionary spending as a
share of G.D.P. That’s spending for education, welfare and all the
stuff that Democrats love. Since 1985, this spending has hovered around
3.7 percent of G.D.P. This year, it’s about 4.6 percent. The White
House claims that it is going to reduce this spending to 3.1 percent by
2019, lower than at any time in any recent Republican administration. I
was invited to hang this chart on my wall and judge them by how well
they meet these targets. (I have.)
Well if “entitlements” are not “welfare state” spending and all of the Dems health spending falls under nondefense discretionary spending, then we can all go sing Kumbaya together. I am not ready to strum my guitar.
“The White House has produced a chart showing nondefense discretionary spending as a share of G.D.P. ”
Does anyone have a link to this chart?
I was invited to hang this chart on my wall and judge them by how well they meet these targets.
And it’s right next to his niece’s drawing of Unicorn City on the Planet Bubble Gum.
What BS
Why is the level of health care spending in this country bad? What is the correct level? How do you ration the care if we claim that the pricing system doesn’t work? Can you cut payments to health care providers and have no negative impacts on the system?
Hillary care was about increasing the number of people covered by health insurance without being able to design a system that worked as well as the system she wanted to destroy.
Obama wants to just slash and burn the health care system, just pay less for everything because he thinks that up to the day he was elected the health care system was run by greedy idiots.
The Obamatons have a very dark view of America and capitalism. They are Social Democrats who view capitalism as fundamentally flawed. They have no interest in efficiency, their goal is equitable outcomes. If the outcome is something that they consider unfair, they want to overhaul the system.
Obama is now talking about he is pragmatic. He is not. His goal is an outcome that he determines is equitable and consistent with the goals of the interest groups in his party.
Just look at on of his biggest shams. The notion that in ten years the budget will balance, because the next President will be happy to make the required spending cuts after his administration has gone on a spending spree.
At times they are just a copy of the Bush policies. Bush doubled federal spending: Obama wants to throw even more money at it. (Want to reform wasteful spending, look at the billions that are wasted in education.) health care spending etc.
And as far as tax cuts, did Bush want to give tax breaks to the rich or did he simply want to leave resources in private hands because he rightly viewed that as the best way to grow the economy. Obamatons view the incomes of the wealthy not as the rewards of hard work and sacrifice but as the fruit of the exploitation of others. Excuse me if I find a government that promise more and more government spending to some groups and then says don’t worry, we will give the bill to someone else, as a very scary government – More like Cuba then America.
And I must comment that candidate Obama trashed McCain for wanting to tax health care benefits, and now they want to do it.
Now they want to raise energy taxes. The cap and trade system so far talked about will just be a source of political spoils and stealth taxes. Giving such power to Pelosi, Franks, Maxine and Waxman is scary.
To claim that Obama is hawkish on spending is a joke right?
BTW
Obama who inherited a recession and his determined to turn it into the Greatest Depression by being anti-business is going to reform the entire American economy with the help of a few interns in the basement of the White House.
He has failed to correct the financial crisis in this country. That should be the focus of the government. Instead the Obamatons are running around with grand plans for a workers paradise, while the unresolved financial crisis is destroying the economy.
If they lack the skill and ability to correct the problems in the financial sector why should I believe that their grand plans for health care, energy, education, defense or anything else is just more gibberish from left wing nuts?
What, pray tell, is an “Obamaton”?
I agree with Phil’s answer (above) that:
“Its a damn fool.”
Beyond this general description it is someone who believes that a bankruptcy occurs in the US every 30 seconds as a result of health care bills. This was a talking point of Obama’s yesterday and Christine Romer was challenged on it. She backed off the number, which apparently is so completely distant from reality as to be laughable (if it weren’t so evil that it was ever floated by Team Obama at all). But she did not back off the notion that the idea had merit. The point, she explained, was that there are cases where health care costs precipitate bankruptcy. Apparently Ms. Romer (who as most no doubt know is the Chair of Presidents Council of Economic Advisors)does not understand the important point that a thing can be statistically significant and economically insignificant (this is Deidre McCloskey’s point; see for example her article with Ziliak in the 2004 issue of Econ Journal Watch pp. 331-58). Everyone makes mistakes, but if Ms. Romer continues to try to trade on this one (or if she is truly ignorant) she will do the economics profession writ large a big disservice by remaining on the Council and spewing the kind of nonsense that gets economists stereotyped with the direct intellectual descendants those who tried to count the number of angels dancing on the head of a pin.
What’s that you say, Dan? “He has failed to correct the financial crisis in this country.” . . .in 46 days. . .
Quelle surprise!
Someone should “Rush” to the rescue of our economy! Get it? “Rush”. Heh. Between his oxycontin fiasco and his divorces Porky’s been on the radio saving the economy and the world from those evil lefties since the late eighties–and he seems to be on a roll (yummy on a roll, his third wife says)lately. He and Joe the Plumber–with all his foreign policy experience– will make a very “attractive” Republican ticket in 2012.
I read Krugman. But I suspect some of his motives here.He wasn’t among the chosen to be an presidential advisor.How do you think that makes a Nobel Prize winner feel? And there are all those little turf wars constantly going on between one school of economic thought and another.But I don’t disagree with his idea that we should have taken a much more decisive approach to the problem. That’s where the Republican party is creating a huge roadblock. Krugman has said we need to put more money behind this, and Republicans almost to a man, have said otherwise. And he doesn’t disagree with nationalization.
“You don’t think his anti-market policies, along with left wing nuts like Pelosi, Franks, and Maxine, have had an impact.” Like I said, it’s been 46 days. . . You calculate the days of mismanagement at the highest corporate, financial and governmental levels that have led to the crisis and tell me you expect to see results in the headlines, in the job figures, and in your portfolio “now”! You expect to see GM resurrected from its mis-managed self-immolation “now”? You expect the banking sector to take a hop skip and a jump back to their pre-plunge NYSE levels? From all I’ve seen since I’ve been investing what little I have in the market the market’s like a bi-polar crackhead in its reactions:A butterfly flaps its wings in Morocco and the Dow plummets 200 pts.
I agree. Noone, except perhaps a huge chunk of the remnants of the Republican party and the average whackjob ,”gives a sh** about Rush Limbaugh”.
So, adding an entitlement and creating new bureaucracies and spending more is fine when Republicans do it, but it’s all a horrible evil when Democrats do it? Care to explain that one?
At least Obama comes from a party whose Presidents HAVE worked to balance their budgets in office in the last 50 years. Or am I wrong to not wanna pay for GOP patronage for the next 30 years?
David Brooks goes to a dinner with Obama and now we are seeing the result.
Quid pro quo, right?
I honestly think the press is incapable of covering anything without getting swept up in events and parroting the conventional wisdom. They dropped the ball on the Iraq war, and the same is happening with Stimupalooza. I can’t wait to read all the post-mortems (probably not on paper the way the newspapers are going) and see the wringing of hands.
And yet another voice of the negative impact of the Obama policies – someone I am sure as no connection to the evil Rush Limbaugh
http://www.realclearmarkets.com/articles/2009/03/policy_matters_now_profit_from_3.html
athelas wrote: “Tyler, what do you think of the implicit axing of nuclear power by the Obama administration?”
Ah, yes, the virtues of central planners deciding what will be the cheapest form of energy. Why France is the ideal of nuclear power advocates, what with its nationalize power industry run by government technocrats.
Reagan continued the sweeping deregulation of Carter and a new regime took hold in the US that took the central planning role of the various PUCs who determined which power plants to build and made sure the free market was restricted so their chosen technology was profitable. The cost overruns of nuclear power drove the consumers to call for a free market choice in which power generation technology is used to make their power, driven by prices that include all costs.
Nuclear materials are defined as the existential threat to America and Israel so they must be feared if in the wrong hands, and those wrong hands lurk in your neighborhood, so NIMBY to those terrorist WMDs. Yeah, the wackos talk about the risk to the planet of nuclear waste, but they also complain of dead birds from wind generators, window panes, dead fish from all water cooled power plants, CO2 in the air. Anyone want to argue that we can have spent fuel stored and transported without fear all over the world, or even just in the US?
I would note that Vermont Yankee, up for licence extension, is suffering a lot of major equipment failures caused by lack of maintenance – its current licence doesn’t expire for years so it isn’t like the work isn’t being done because its soon to be shutdown. The collapse of a cooling tower forced a cutback in power output.
But maybe Obama can solve the nuclear waste problem by selling it to North Korea, Syria, Iran, and Pakistan’s AQ Kahn, and offset the cost of green jobs in the US.
mulp, man, even if the tax cuts drove the economy, they were an incredibly irresponsible measure: when the economy’s growing robustly, you raise taxes to start paying down debt.
And if tax hikes are the worst thing that can happen to an economy (oh, the *crushing* burden of the Bush/Clinton tax hikes on the economy!), then how did we manage to grow our economy before Reagan, when the tax rates were incredibly high? For that matter, how do European economies maintain moderate growth with government taking in 35-50% GDP?
mulp: I believe you mean Khan. Not a lot of Kahns in the Pakistani administration.
DanC: Nouriel Roubini is usually strangely absent from Conservative discussions of the current crisis:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/17/magazine/17pessimist-t.html
Unlike other ‘economists’ and pretend economists, Roubini predicted in Aug. 2006!a “once-in-a-lifetime housing bust, an oil shock, sharply declining consumer confidence, and ultimately, a recession.” I’ll give Krugman (who, notoriously doesn’t play well with Greg Mankiew) credit in that he may have predicted the housing problem in Sept ’06. And we should credit Nassim Nicholas Taleb for his general warning about Black Swans. Turns out most of the Western world’s economic community played the role of the turkey in his metaphor about the farmer and the turkey. . .
Bush, no genius, economic or otherwise, was denying a recession in April of ’08. In Sept. ’08 Paulson was telling Congressional leaders the world economic sky was falling. Now we hear reports that the (here comes the ‘R’ word again-recession) may indeed have begun 18 MONTHS ago.
With the exception of Roubini, who, by the way is for a timely and controlled nationalization of banks, and Krugman, the rest of the economic world was caught unaware–blinded by some imagined light I would presume.
So I’m not really sure how and by whom conclusions, negative or positive, are being reached about the results of Obama’s 46 days in the White House. Or how a stimulus plan that was signed 18 DAYS ago (That’s 13 business days for you entrepreneurs out there.)can be predicted to be a failure or a success by anyone who was apparently incapable of predicting the problem the plan is designed to address (That would be virtually the entire economic community, including academics, poseurs, etal, would it not? And almost everyone else, including you and me–unless you were posting pre-2008 about the impending collapse.)
“To spend is to tax” – Milton Friedman
I had forgotten about this Friedman nugget. I think this phrase shows his lack of understanding of the money creation process as well as anything.
Federal spending is going to be much higher than they or anyone anticipates. This depression we are in is much, much more serious than a simple recession.
By the summer of this year, people are going to realize how badly things have been messed up. The consensus on peak unemployment will be reached by June and then the really bad news starts.
“So answer my earlier question. What intellectual elites are hiding in the basement of the White House.?”
Summers, Romer, leftovers Bernanke and Geithner . . .
Makes my point: You (well, not you, necessarily)could replace them with just about any other economist and come up with a plan that you would b***h about because, unlike you, they don’t know it all.
Believe I’ve answered your Krugman dilemma already. From several directions. And if Obama put him in there, you’d criticize Krugman.
http://www.monkeybusinessblog.com/mbb_weblog/2009/01/paul-krugman-call-for-massive-stimulus-package-now-or-we-face-great-depression-ii.html
Would you be on board for what follows PK suggests?
“* Stuffing the banks with capital to allow them to start taking prudent risk,
* Spending money to alleviate the effects of unemployment (expanding unemployment insurance and doing something to aid workers losing their health care benefits. Maybe assist workers who are in danger of losing their homes due to job loss too),
* Allowing housing to return to it’s natural, pre “free credit” price levels (this $500 billion mortgage backed security program the Fed is embarking on will do nothing but lose us lots of money once rates begin to snap higher),
* Assisting citizens losing their homes due to foreclosure with a fat check to rent their house back for at least a year.”
I would.
guy: Depends on whether you’d call $4.70 gas an oil shock I guess.
Oh, danC, don’t give up. Your judgment ( “songar
You are a waste of time”) mean so much to me, even though you “don’t think [you] know it all.” Just answer a few questions for me before you go:
1/”Summers is second rate.” And to make that statement meaningful, you’d likely have to be first rate. Are you?
2/On the issue that got me posting here in the first place, and your answer depends on the quality of your judgment—I know “[you]don’t think [you] know it all”, but you know. . .—:How can you or Krugman or anyone else, considering the wildly divergent opinions within the economic community on this subject possibly justify criticizing this administration for “fail[ing] to correct the financial crisis in this country” in 47 days?!
3/Roubini seems the only one with real boots-on-the-ground success with predicting this crisis with at least a little specificity (beyond identifying a housing bubble, say) in a public forum. His audience of economists at the time , according to one report, tittered at his suggestions. Now he’s supporting nationalization of banks and says the recession will last into 2010. I know you say you “don’t think [you] know it all”, so I value your opinion on this subject: Do you support nationalization of banks? Will the recession last until 2010? And one thing I should have asked earlier: Where did you stand on the Paulson bailout?
PS: /” . . .even the biggest supporters of the administration are tired of the BS.” I would think the biggest supporters would be within the Obama Administration, so I doubt the truth of your statement.
BTW
I remember Mayor Daley of Chicago saying that all these people plead with him to help with this and that (dis and dat). And most of the ideas have some merit, but he deals in a world of limited resources. So he must often say no and concentrate his efforts on what he decides are the most pressing needs.
President Obama seems to lack the ability or the desire to tell Democratic special interests that the health of the economy should be the primary task and pushing for political advantage to reward interest groups is secondary.
Thanks for your response to #1. You made several additional judgments there about Larry Summers, though you still haven’t answered my question: “And to make that statement meaningful, you’d likely have to be first rate. Are you?”
I was amused, to say the least to note the title of the first Becker-Posner article you provided: “Why the Warnings Were Ignored:Too Many False Alarms” Who made the judgment that the alarms were false? And when was the judgment made, before or after the fact? Should we ignore all warnings because some or even most previous warnings have proven false? It’s somemwhat reminiscent of the failure to heed the warning of an imminent attack on US soil by Al-Queda before 9-11.
I gleaned the following from one of the comments in the second Becker-Posner piece: “Wealthy people do not ‘pursue more on detriment of society’.” When I finished rolling on the floor with stomach cramps from laughing, I realized this is just one more rash generalization, exceptions to which can be seenpopping up all around us on a fairly regular basis. I do agree with Posner: “. . .we need fundamental change rather than merely incremental regulatory reform.” At least he backs up his after-the-fact-crisis-solution-suggestions with some rational thinking.
Read Taleb for some insight about how little economists/scientists can really tell us about the future and risk . Try this tidbit:
http://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/imbeciles.htm
The biggest mistake you can make with a person suffering from dementia is too let them suck into a debate where they never understand the issue anyways.
bye bye
“….refuse to admit that the Bush tax cuts in 2001, 2003, 2006, and 2008 has spurred great economic growth and increased employment steadily and rapidly from the low employment Clinton years….”
What planet have you been living on. Your right, Bush tax cuts kept us from falling into an economic melt down! LOL
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