All Life Is Problem Solving

Dean Baker had an interesting post in HuffPo on August 2nd on the Alan Blinder/Mark Zandi study. It’s the best take on it I’ve seen thus far. He says: “. . . A new study by Princeton University Professor Alan Blinder and Mark Zandi, the chief economist at Moody’s Analytics, examined the impact of the […]

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Every once in a while, Richard Kirsch, does a “happy dance” article celebrating his own Health Care for America Now campaign for health care reform, whose outcome of course was the wonderful bill legislated by the Congress last Spring. Kirsch, who is now a Senior Fellow at The Roosevelt Institute, posted his latest happy dance […]

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Heather Boushey, Chief Economist at the Center for American Progress Action Fund, writes about the economy failing to go over the cliff and the deficit. She says: In their report, How We Ended the Great Recession, Economists Alan Blinder and Mark Zandi estimates the effects of the financial and fiscal policies enacted since the crisis […]

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Paul Krugman got a lot of attention among leftward tweeters today for following Glenn Greenwald down the road of writing about the de-evolution of the United States into a de-developed nation, because of the irresponsible preference of its ruling elite for lower taxes rather than infrastructure and essential services, and also because of impact of […]

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On Friday, Glenn Greenwald did a piece called “What Collapsing Empire Looks Like,” in which he contrasted the cutbacks in essential domestic spending throughout the country with the “no problem” funding of Homeland Security and our two wars. Among other things, he said: Does anyone doubt that once a society ceases to be able to […]

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The Washington Post editorial page has been one of the primary MSM outlets for aggressive deficit terrorism. There is an axis of deficit terrorism in Washington DC today. It runs from Hooverite Republicans such as Judd Gregg and Mike Spence, to Blue Dog Democrats like Evan Bayh and Kent Conrad, to media organizations like CNN, […]

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Bob Herbert, in his column on June 7th said: There is no plan that I can see to get us out of this fix. Drastic cuts in government spending would only compound the crisis. State and local governments, for example, are shedding workers as we speak. And by July 26th he still hadn’t come up […]

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After reviewing the terrible state of our economy and the need to reconstruct it so that people can find work and a vibrant middle class can be rebuilt, Bob Borosage suggests that Congress go back to first principles. he briefly reviews the post- WWII history of employment legislation and says: That debate was revisited in […]

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Jason Rosenbaum, who runs the Seminal Blog at FireDogLake gives us an object lesson in what passes for “pragmatism” in Washington today. It is a pragmatism without a sense of limits. And we have seen it from the President, his closest advisers, and the “official” progressives resident in Washington and New York “think tanks” and […]

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The debates between the deficit doves and the deficit owls continued at New Deal 2.0 (ND20) today. Jeff Madrick, a dove, gives us a post entitled: “Stimulate Now: On Inflation and Deficits.” In this post, I’ll evaluate Jeff’s views paragraph by paragraph. Jeff says: ”Some have suggested that if a country nears the point that […]

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