The voters have made it very clear that they want leadership. I suggest that the majority party in the Senate change its rules. Set as 55 the number needed to cut off discussion of any bill. Keep at 60 the number needed to raise the national debt. With 55 the majority can pass any legislation they feel is necessary. In order to prevent the rise in the national debt, be certain to introduce only "revenue neutral" bills--in other words, pay for every stimulus bill with a tax on the very group the GOP is trying to exempt from taxation. There will be a lot of screaming about class warfare, but, let's face it, that war has been waged by the GOP for almost 100 years now.

The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of
patriots and tyrants. ....Thomas Jefferson

" with most of the money allocated to spending rather than tax cuts." Some spin here....40% DID go to tax cuts...last figure I heard. "Most" may be true, but 40%going to tax cuts is substantial.

Though the intent of having leaders serve in our interest on K street, while we go about our day on M street, was good for a time, it is obviously no longer good at all. The time has come to realize that power given is power entrusted. Once that trust is broken, power must be taken back.

Paul's article continues to enforce that the power should stay entrusted on K and our hope is still there. I do not agree with him at all. The power will serve us again if we serve ourselves, the government has failed, and we are failing to rise up.

This is our last hope for our nation before it gets thrown under the bus of other rising world powers.

Summum bonum!

There is a broader view of things that should begin to seem evident here. I have not waded through the contents of this spending package, nor do I have the expertise to understand the language used within it. I am very tempted to pass it off as crap from the usual source, our government, but that would seem to put me in the Reagan camp. I add that I believe that, given the right circumstance, our government can produce efficient and timely legislation and can accomplish great things.

Having damned with faint praise I would go on to the gist of my post; this administration is simply not up to the task at hand. The three, and counting, administration employees excusing themselves from their appointments, and the one who got through despite a rather glaring wart on his resume (Geithner) , are illustrative of the point I am delaying; namely that Obama has not the experience necessary to run our nation.

His staff is old school at best, and thus the thrust of their accomplishments will be "in the box" thinking and trite and stale solutions. Their inability to properly engage in the vetting process, thus planting egg squarely on the face of a new administration, is only one example of this lack of expertise. Another seems to be the pitiful way Obama has tried to reach out to the unreachable, the GOP, a party dedicated only to the election of a majority of its members in the next election. They will gleefully talk the talk and submarine anything of import , sabotage anything with a glimmer of a chance to make the administration look good.

Obama's relationship with his own party seems dicey at best as they appear , at times, to be going in differing directions. Our President's efforts to go on the road, speaking directly to the American people is to be lauded, with the exception that he isnt saying a damn thing useful. The legislation just passed will, more than likely, cause our billions to disappear in the same fashion as did the TARP funding.

In short, I would offer that we the people screwed the pooch in our mass hypnotic voting for a man , honorable as he may be, capable of charming the birds out of the trees as he seems to be, with experience limited to an incomplete term in the Senate and a philosophy that is nothing more than a rehashing of what has come before. Barack Hussein Obama, as an individual, is a startling , almost revolutionary ,choice for the highest office in this land. Obama the politician is as wedded to the financial community, as committed to the military solution to our foreign policy, as involved in the status quo of Washington incompetence as are any of them.

At a time when this nation most needed rescuing Obama brought no capability for such to the table.

"Most people would sooner die than think, in fact they do so." Bertrand Russell

"The Congressional Budget Office, not usually given to hyperbole, predicts that over the next three years there will be a $2.9 trillion gap between what the economy could produce and what it will actually produce"

The planet will heave a great sigh of relief when the US economy shuts down. This economy churns at a level four times higher than is sustainable. It severely damages the biosphere, US society, and societies worldwide. As just one example, higher education in the USA has become a racket, with tuition that strongly influences career choices (Brits are protesting tuition this week, threatening to shut down cities). Books are a racket too, with inflated prices and planned obsolescence that rivals computers in volume of unnecessary buck churning. Enlightenment has never been so expensive. And that's just academia. Other sectors are even worst. Remember the Godzilla Pentagon gets a scary chunk of all mammon exchange in the "good ol USA". USans, could you please give it a rest for a few years?

The value of production can't be measured in mammon units as Mr. Krugman likes to pretend. Higher value means lower prices, fewer work hours, for a given standard of living. USans are angry today. If they want to channel their anger productively, they will shift their exchange/association away from elite rackets and toward the small enterprises of their local economies, where they will get more bang for the buck, more free time to spend with their families. Mr. Krugman prefers USans spend more time at work in slavery to the empire steamroller. Notice that he always discusses "jobs", and never refers to small local independent enterprises.

And the rhetorical response of conservatives to the stimulus plan ... has bordered on the deranged.

-------------------

It borders on the deranged for you Mr. Krugman, because you're a man of intellect and reason.

The people who listen to right-wing hate radio are not.

They lap up the foolish comments by McCain and Arnold King without even thinking for a second that both men are knowingly playing them for fools.

Add in Rush's rhetoric which plucks the racist strings of their heart and now you understand why calls were coming in 100-1 against Obama's proposal to their representatives.

Most people are not politically educated or savvy.

That goes double for the Republican base.

Obama's naive bi-partisan approach was easily used against him largely with the power of total dominance on AM radio.

-----------------------

Whoever controls the media controls the country. Period.

Don't lie to us, Arnold Kling. You voted for it. I know your type. You thought the US boss class would only murder and steal in other countries. Now you and your daughter are going to pay for your complicity in US war criminal evil.

It was thought that bailing out the US auto industry would save US jobs, but it seems that GM has been using its bailout funding to build plants in Brazil and elsewhere. Meaning that their employees have been paying taxes to accelerate their own disemployment. It turns out to have been worse than useless to lobby on behalf of a taxpayer bailout of the US auto industry, since there was no explicit provision in the terms of the bailout to save US jobs.

Similarly, the present "stimulus package" can be expected to further subsidize and accelerate the export of US industry. There is nothing in this bill or any other to prevent it. There is nothing in the bill which restrains or reduces labor cost arbitrage, nothing which prevents US jobs from being sent overseas, and therefore nothing which restores lost US economic capability to the benefit of US workers in any way. Any benefit to the US middle class can only be temporary, and therefore illusory.

"Money naturally flows uphill. This is why, for nearly all of history, civilization has been characterized as a small, wealthy ruling class dominating a mostly impoverished general population. The rich get richer, the poor get poorer, and that is the historical model.

"The last fifty years of middle-class prosperity is therefore seen to have been a mere aberration of history. The Logic of Empire clearly prescribes crushing debt as the normal tool to impoverish and control subject peoples, so this aberration has now been corrected by inducing the middle class to trade its prosperity for debts it can never repay.

"This crushing debt enables civilization to gradually return to the historical model by systematically bleeding the middle class of the wealth it has managed to divert, for a little while, from its normal upward path."

"..........$800 billion, while it sounds like a lot of money, isn't nearly enough to bridge that chasm."

They'll be back for more - with greater tax give-aways.

Really, who can live on a miniscule $500,000. salary if you have to pay taxes on it?

When I gave food to the poor, they called me a saint. When I asked Why the poor were hungry, they called me a communist.

- Dom Helder Camara, Archbishop of Recife, Brazil.

Merchants have no country. The mere spot they stand on does not constitute so strong an attachment as that from which they draw their gains. I hope we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of our monied corporations which dare already to challenge our government to a trial by strength, and bid defiance to the laws of our country."

- Thomas Jefferson

Labor is prior to, and independent of, capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration.

- Abraham Lincoln

As nightfall does not come at once, neither does oppression. In both instances, there is a twilight when everything remains seemingly unchanged. And it is in such twilight that we all must be most aware of change in the air--however slight--lest we become unwitting victims of the darkness.

- William O. Douglas

We can have a democratic society or we can have the concentration of great wealth in the hands of the few. We cannot have both.

- Louis Brandeis

We have come to be one of the worst ruled, one of the most completely controlled and dominated Governments in the world - no longer a Government of free opinion, no longer a Government by conviction and vote of the majority, but a Government by the opinion and duress of small groups of dominant men.

- Woodrow Wilson

There are two ideas of government. There are those who believe that, if you will only legislate to make the well-to-do prosperous, their prosperity will leak through on those below. The DEMOCRATIC idea, however, has been that if you legislate to make the masses prosperous, their prosperity will find its way up through every class which rests upon them.

- William Jennings Bryan

The communism of combined wealth and capital, the outgrown of overweening cupidity and selfishness which assiduously undermines the justice and integrity of free institutions, is not less dangerous than the communism of oppressed poverty and toil which, exasperated by injustice and discontent, attacks with wide disorder the citadel of misrule.

- Grover Cleveland

It is to be regretted that the rich and powerful too often bend the acts of government to their own selfish purposes.

- Andrew Jackson

Civil government, so far as it is instituted for the security of property, is in reality instituted for the defense of the rich against the poor, or of those who have some property against those who have none at all.

- Adam Smith

I see in the near future a crisis approaching that unnerves me and causes me to tremble for the safety of my country. . . . corporations have been enthroned and an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money power of the country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the people until all wealth is aggregated in a few hands and the Republic is destroyed."

- Abraham Lincoln

Mr. Obama's program is bogus. It is a bailout of the bad risks of the financial elite. They made the mess; they should pay for it. This is the rules of a free economy.

Stockholders, bond holders, executives of the affected companies should pay with loss of equity. Simple. Why should the same bozos who made this mess administer the bailout? This is folly; but this is part of the bailout and stimulus.

Stimulus, yes. But, not for the mortgage holder or the mortgagee. You put you house or business up and collateral. If you can't meet the terms of the contract, you must forfeit your house or business. Simple. The losers are the ones who made the bad risks, not the whole economy. This group are not losers under this bill, they are now the "looters."

This bailout and stimulus is theft.

Call it what it is.

One of the things that Republicans and "centrists" cut was funding for schools. Ideologically, they don't think the Federal government should be helping schools.

I'd like to see the Democrats put forth a new spending/stimulus bill that contains ONLY funding for fixing up schools. No other "pork" projects, no funding for sex ed, nothing remotely controversial.

Make the Republicans filibuster a bill to fix up schools.

Plato explained a couple of millennia ago why democracy was a poor form of government which led to tyranny. The essence of his view is that the society will always be divided into two classes, with politicians promising to protect the poor from the rich or the rich from the poor.

This seems perfectly reflected in the comments on the stimulus.

An adversarial process isn't likely to achieve much progress. Those who oppose the stimulus package come from every element of the political spectrum. Krugman, who has no real expertise (his Nobel Prize was for mathematically modeling something cribbed from Adam Smith, not for advising government on its spending), thinks it is too little.

The Democrats, believing the general idea that if no one is willing to buy anything and the economy is in danger of collapse (unemployment, poverty, etc. rising), then the solution is for government to spend, spend, spend (Krugman agrees, adding, spend, spend, spend more). Borrowing to do this is no problem, or more exactly, it is a lesser problem than letting people lose their jobs and homes and lives.

The Republicans, thinking it actually makes a difference how you spend the money you borrow, have sincere doubts about the whole concept of spending your way out of an economic collapse. They like tax cuts, because it lets people decide what to do with their money. Unfortunately, tax cuts (with certain exceptions like credits for increased spending) don't get people to spend much, and so are not a response to the problem we currently face.

I'm no Republican (no Democrat either), but I started studying the causes of the Great Depression half a century ago when I wrote a 30-page paper on the subject. I was mentored in the early Reagan years (when we reached 10.6% unemployment) by Benjamin Victor Cohen, the architect of the New Deal. I am quite sure the stimulus is no solution to the current crisis. This approach, followed by both Hoover and FDR, solved the crisis of the 1930s only by averting a revolution in the US (take a look at Stalin and Hitler for alternative solutions) -- in the end it led to World War II.

If we want to have a strong country, it should begin by our listening to each other. The politicians are doing the best they can to avert a disaster, and, of course, they are taking care of their friends, colleagues, contributors, and constituents first to the extent they are able. They don't understand much about what is happening (neither do the economists and neither do most comment writers), so give them some understanding if they feather their own nests.

As for President Obama, he is still out in the country campaigning to be president. It's what he does best. He didn't propose the stimulus because he wants to preside, not to lead. Unfortunately, the blind need someone who is not blind to lead them. So far, we are headed into a ditch -- and it isn't just the Republicans who are saying so.

It may be that the economic collapse has to become much worse before anyone begins to search for a real solution. Let's hope that it comes before World War III.

Regarding the bailout of the financial sector, as long as the terms don't include complete removal of upper management the best that we can expect is taxpayer money being diverted to investments that have nothing to do with strengthening the U.S. economy or even worse another credit fueled bubble which takes this country deeper into deficit plaqued ruin.
Yes Paul, that sick feeling in the pit of your stomach is appropriate.

Has anybody figured out the compound interest until the Second Coming?

To repeat, as the real calculations show, in recessionary times, tax breaks DO NOT stimulate much GDP growth and push paying for appropriate measures to stimulate the economy on to the future. The relaxation of the alternate minimum tax for middle income households represents 9% of the entire package, all tax breaks up to 40%.

I think Krugman is in part responsible for this outcome. He foolishly concluded at the outset that tax cuts were politically necessary. He gave in at the outset without so much as a token of resistance. An analogy might be what would have happened had Lincoln had abandoned Fort Sumnter at the beginning, demonstrating weak resolve on principle and allowing the rebels the advantage of choosing another point of attack, or Darwin had published his theories of natural selection without organizing his observations.

But Krugman is alot like everyone else. Being "nice" to Bush, standing on the principle of "civility" rather than truth for the past eight years (or sixteen) years has disabled alot of people even to the point that they no longer even think about what they once stood for.

As the results of the "neo-conservative", libertarian experiment with "Jeffersonian" limits on the role of government have show, the government ACTUALLY spends the public's money MUCH MORE efficiently, substantially and in the interests of long term growth than do private investors, who just finished flushing trillions of dollars right down the toilet.

At this point in the game it might be nice if some economist would try to extract normal, seasonal downturns in the economy from the "triumphal" march of our Doomsday-like recession.

People should understand that once our idiot press gets hold of "a story" its very likely to "milk-it" for all its not worth.

First every concievable attempt was made to DENY we were headed into a recession with all the usual gin-uped statistics from Bureau of Labor and Commerce Department, despite the warnings of the CBO and a host of 'backroom" regulators and even some socially responsible investors in the private sector (George Soros comes to mind): to "boost confidence" and to distribute toxic assets to the last suckers in line.

Might it not be that it now serves the purpose to exaggerate and prolong the recession to keep the bags of bailout promises coming, and to protect the States from the consequences of their own, long-standing lack of vision or real concern for social and economic equity and justice.

Excellent points fredricwilliams.

I thought Obama was consulting Krugman regarding the economy. If this is correct, he doesn't appear to be listening.
The sooner we see the back of Geither, the better.