| Nate Silver crunches the numbers, and postulates that we're in for a long recession. Still, economic statistics are more complex than baseball or polling data. Is Silver looking at the right data?
Senate compromise stimulus bill survives past a filibuster...
Krugman on the Senate version of the stimulus bill: "Now the centrists have shaved off $86 billion in spending - much of it among the most effective and most needed parts of the plan. In particular, aid to state governments, which are in desperate straits, is both fast - because it prevents spending cuts rather than having to start up new projects - and effective, because it would in fact be spent; plus state and local governments are cutting back on essentials, so the social value of this spending would be high. But in the name of mighty centrism, $40 billion of that aid has been cut out.
"My first cut says that the changes to the Senate bill will ensure that we have at least 600,000 fewer Americans employed over the next two years."
Tim Fernholz:"The decision to cutting $40 billion in state aid, another $20 billion in school construction, $2 billion for rural broandband access in favor of $30 billion in tax rebates for people who buy homes and cars is a travesty; the former option is more stimulative to the overall economy and targets needed investments, while the latter has a small stimluative value, is regressive and would be a step towards puffing the housing bubble up again."
Kevin Drum: "State aid was cut? That's crazy. Even many of the conservatives I read agree that preventing huge state cutbacks is one of the quickest and most efficient forms of fiscal stimulus. And most of the rest of the spending on this list is infrastructure spending, exactly the thing that conservatives were complaining there was too little of.
"Granted, neither laws nor sausages bear close scrutiny, but trading this stuff for a bunch of idiotic car and homebuying subsidies strikes me as unusually mindless, even by U.S. Senate standards. This is not exactly centrism's finest hour."
And if you think this stimulus bill is expensive, check out the price tag for the administration's next bank bailout bill. Ugh.
Obama paints Congressional Republicans as being outside the mainstream. Which is true, if you believe Gallup's recent polling results...
During Obama's first press conference he calls on...a blogger! And given the tough question Stein tossed at him, it may be the last time, too...
Nate Silver's Senate rankings make it clear the GOP is in for another rough election in 2010...
This is a colossal waste of time and money. That sheriff should be run out of office. |
