Tuesday, February 24, 2009

State of the Presidency

Before I read or listen to any commentary (and stay up way too late doing so), let me get my own thoughts down untainted.

1. Obama rocked it. ROCKED it. It was a trophy winning oratory. I don't think he's a superhero or "the one" but I do think he's even smarter than we realize. I think that while we're all hyperventilating over one thing or another, he's a few chess moves ahead of us. Not a bad quality for a leader. Not bad at all.

2. For me, with one exception, he made the case. He make his priority agenda clear to anyone even half listening: energy, health care, and education. He connected each of them to the stability of our economy, the one thing that he knows is on everyone's mind. Everytime he asked the congress to bring him a bill, he gave them the respect they deserve and gave millions of Americans a gentle civics lesson. (The president can say "I want to do this" all he wants, but congress has to enact the laws. Something Bush's laundry list State of the Unions never seemed to acknowledge.) He didn't let us off the hook -- imploring us to be better parents, better neighbors, better citizens. He refrained from name calling or finger pointing, but rightly observed that he did not create the deficit we're saddled with. And he refrained from the kind of "you're with us or against us" rhetoric that leads to ... we all know what that leads to.

3. The one exception? TARP, or financial stabilization, or whatever they're calling it now. And this could be entirely due to my own ignorance on the subject. I would welcome any research that would help me understand it better. The reason I'm skeptical -- or rather, still skeptical even after Obama acknowledged that we're all skeptical -- is this idea that the banking crisis is about a lack of credit. That if we can get banks lending again, we'll be back on track. At the risk of sounding like the people who deny global warming whenever it snows ... I walked into a Best Buy on Sunday, and within 10 minutes was approved for $4600 in credit, and for 36 months with no interest at that. I wisely decided not to use all of it, just to purchase the TV I'd budgeted for, but there it was. Credit. No problem. Few questions asked. My FICO is good, but it's not perfect. So what's the story? Is the problem with the banks frozen credit, or is it solvency? If it's frozen credit, why are banks still spending money to advertise their home mortgage products?

4. Bobby Jindal: If this is the best they've got ... well it's nice to see the shoe on the other foot after all those years that progressives couldn't muster anything better than Mondale and Dukakis. Don't get me wrong, he seems like a nice enough guy. But he's lousy at reading cue cards, and even lousier at sounding like he means it. Even when telling his personal stories. By the way, can anyone find a single hospital in today's Louisiana that will allow someone to negotiate a payment plan for delivering a baby? Never mind, it's beside the point. The point is that his argument against health care reform -- "we believe medical decisions should be made by patients and doctors, not bureaucrats" -- was neither a refutation of anything Obama proposed nor a rational statement, given the fact that millions of Americans have their medical decisions made by insurance company bureaucrats everyday. The point is that the only thing he could call out to complain about in the stimulous bill was $300 million for adding fuel efficient cars to the government fleet -- never mind that it represents only .03% of the bill's spending, and less than 14% of the regular annual budget for car purchases, and that if, as he suggests, we'll soon be seeing $4 gas again, hybrids will save the government a bundle in fuel costs. Never mind all that. Americans can do anything, after all. Oh, wait. Obama already said that. And he said it much better, and with more conviction.

Tuesday, February 10, 2009

Perspective

Today I woke up to reports that Treasury Secretary Geithner had shouted down David Axelrod in a meeting last night, insisting that the plan for disbursing the next $350 billion (a figure that shouldn't seem as small as it suddenly does) of the TARP funds couldn't come with any strings attached. Or at least that's what it sounded like to me.

And I was pissed.

I was shouting in the car, calling for his resignation. I was seething throughout the day. I had time for a quick peek at HuffPo on my way out of the office, where I read Cenk Uygur's insightful column. I read the first few comments--never a good idea--and found myself in an echo chamber of my anger at Geithner. I needed to shut down my computer, but--inspired by fellow angry people--I went to Whitehouse.gov and fired off a diatribe against Geithner. I was going to print it here, but I don't want it end up forwarded throughout the right-wing blogosphere as their new manifesto.

Especially because now that it's past my bedtime, I've actually read what was released today (and Paul Krugman' s blog on the subject) and I'm just not as angry. Sure the plan's a little vague, but it's more than we ever got from Paulsen & co. And from what I can tell, the $500K pay cap still applies, along with other regulations on allowable dividends and mandates for transparency. Now, I'd still like to see us nationalize the banks, the auto industry, and the airlines, but I'm just one pinko commie radical howling at the moon. It might not be what I'd do, but it also might not be as bad as I thought.

Monday, February 9, 2009

Overstimulated

I'm trying to slog through the stimulus bill, and between the different versions, I've gotten through about 2/3 of it. Through page 122 or so, I've compared the first Senate version with the amended version. I wish I had more expertise, or even experience, in this area. I probably sound like an idiot to my lawyer friends. Still I have a few observations:

Economically, Krugman takes the words out of my mouth. Or puts them in my mouth, I suppose, since since he has a Nobel prize in economics and I can barely balance my checkbook. At any rate, everything he's written about this bill's weaknesses makes sense to me. Except that I don't think any amount of salesmanship on Obama's part could have gotten the bill we need through the senate. The bill we need probably would have imploded and festered like the last attempt at immigration reform. The November elections didn't fix all of the broken elements of our political system. Or even convince the small government idealogues that their theory has its flaws.

Speaking of those adorable republicans, I still can't find this "pork" the GOP is screaming about. It's not there, and those senators know it, but they throw the accusation out there to make it sound bad. It's a rallying cry for the kool-aid drinkers. They get away with it because most people flunked civics and don't know what "pork" really means. It doesn't mean "spending." It means some item in the bill that benefits just one representative's district or one senator's state. These projects, even without the factor of campaign donations, assure relection by constituents happy that their rep is bringing home the bacon, so to speak. It's objectionable because it's paid for federally but only benefits people in that state or district. Somebody tell me where that is in this bill. Seriously, where? I'm not a genius, so point it out to me.

Perhaps the HuffPo editors had a similar thought. I noticed that on their "help us read the Stimulus Bill" page--the page that motivated me to do this--they finally changed the question from "watch for anything that looks like pork or wasteful spending" to "Then again, this is not all about waste. If you identify items that lack enough funding to be effective, please identify those cases as well. The point of the bill, after all, is to inject money into the economy to put people back to work." I was glad to see that, but the problem is that very few of us know how much is sufficient. Including the senate, apparently. Even the people who are supposed to know something are scratching their heads. Like Bob Herbert and so many others, I believe Obama is one of the smartest, most confident people in this country. I can't think of anyone else better equipped to take on these challenges. But watching tonight's press conference, I think he's lacking for answers and he knows it.

Which brings me back to the bill itself. How were these appropriations--both the proposed figures and the revised ones--arrived at? Were the proposed amounts arbitrary? If so, then they probably deserve to be arbitrarily cut. But if they were based on real estimates of how much funding various agencies could put into use in the next year in a way that would save or create jobs--doesn't cutting them just leave the job half finished? The best way to waste money on a project is to underfund it. That's something a lot of us can probably understand from our jobs. When you have a budget that's just unrealistically small, your project tends to have problems, drag out longer, and often ends up more expensive than if you'd budgeted more in the first place. Of course, that's just great if your real goal is to be able to look back in four years and say, "See! Government can't do anything right!" I'm not saying, I'm just saying ...

One last ramble in this long ramble about a long ramble: I notice that the proposed additional funding for the Department of Defense was not cut at all in the revised bill. Not a penny. When just about everything else got at least a little slice taken off. Coincidence? Based on a careful analysis that shows those programs are more necessary or will put more people to work? Somehow, I don't think so. Show me said analysis and I'll back off. But my hunch is that it's because these cuts--all of them--are political, not practical, and no one wants to be accused of de-funding the troops. What about de-funding schools, nurses, firefighters, police officers? What about de-funding food stamps for the millions of unemployed? Why isn't that an accusation to fear?

It's going to be a long climb out of this hole. If reading the stimulus bill seems like a long slog, it's got nothing on what's shaping up to be the reality of the next few years.