So while Barack Obama is meeting with Republicans to get support for the stimulus package, John Boehner has already instructed his caucus not to vote for it.
A bright spot in all this is the report that Obama told the ‘Phants at a meeting to go pound sand on low income tax cuts.
They are claiming that it’s “Welfare”, though Ronald Reagan called it the “Earned Income Tax Credit,” and strongly supported it.
H/t Americablog for the pic.
Who I’ve never met, Dianne Feinstein*, it appears that even though Obama has issued an executive order banning torture, she is proceeding with legislation to make it the law of the land:
Senator Dianne Feinstein, Democrat of California and chairwoman of the committee, said that despite the executive orders she still planned to press for legislation mandating a single standard for military and C.I.A. interrogators. Such a law would be harder to reverse than Mr. Obama’s executive order, which he could alter or cancel at any time by issuing a new order.
Cool.
*Full disclosure, my great grandfather, Harry Goldman, and her grandfather, Sam Goldman were brothers.
Because, of course the Republicans are demanding less stimulus and more tax cut.
Seriously, peel off one Senator, and tell the rest of the Republicans to go Cheney themselves.
Not only do they have a political win if the plan fails, they have a philosophical win too, because Keynesian stimulus refutes everything that they believe in.
Therw were some minor changes, so the law allowing a greater statute of limitations on ongoing pay discrimination has to go back through the house, but it appears headed to Obama’s desk in a matter of days.
As Kevin Drum notes, “All 56 voting Democrats supported the bill, and five Republicans joined in. Which ones? Arlen Specter plus all four of the women in the GOP caucus. Imagine that.“
We now have word that mass transit got the shart in the bailout package because they need to cut a few hundred billion out to accommodate the dumb-ass tax cuts.
This pursuit of 80 votes by Obama is not a smart move. Remember, Social Security was passed with out a single Republican vote in either house of Congress.
The pursuit of bipartisan support will make the bill worse not better.
Dumb move. With mortgages sliced and diced amongst dozens, if not hundreds, of investors, you cannot renegotiate terms in many cases, which means more defaults and foreclosures.
He’s not opposed to allowing bankruptcy judges to rewrite mortgages, he just does not want it in the bailout package.
That’s because he’s still pursuing the asinine goal of getting 80 votes in the senate.
He won’t get 80 votes for a bill that works, because Republicans cannot afford fiscal stimulus to succeed.
Well, NY Attorney General Andrew Cuomo just caught most of the insurance industry using bogus numbers to determine usual and customary health care charges.
Screwing their customers.
Seriously, we need to go with a British style National Health Services system now. Anything that keeps health insurers in the loop will be an epic fail.
To the tune of $33 billion, and this time, Bush won’t be around to veto it.
Cool.
Every 2 years, both houses of Congress need to pass an organizing resolution, which specifies things like committee members for the various parties.
Because the Senate is a continuing body, only 1/3 are reelected at a time, and this organizing resolution is subject to filibuster, I was fully expecting the ‘Phants to do Harry Reid like a two dollar whore.
I’m pleasantly surprised that Reid got exactly what he wanted, with no filibuster.
The Democrats gets +3 on most committees, +4 on the Appropriations and Armed Services committees, +1 on the Intel Committee (decreed by statute), +2 on the Joint Economic Committee, and even membership on the Ethics Committee (which is standard).
The reason that this happened, I think, is that if they had continued to operate under the old organizing resolution, the Dems would have been at +5 on Appropriations, which would have made things rather tough for the ‘Phants.
As part of a stimulus package, Republicans are suggesting a 2 year suspension of Social Security Taxes.
Run the numbers, it’s all about bankrupting a system that should be solvent for the next 40 years.
So says Dean Baker, and I am surprised that the number is that low, with Bush and His Evil Minions™ running the NLRB.
It’s also illegal as hell.
Card check now.
Bush to Seek Rest of TARP Money At Obama’s Request
We live in strange times.
It appears to be a nearly party-line vote, and I would expect a filibuster in the Senate, because being pro-discrimination is about all that the ‘Phants have left.
Pelosi has the right idea.
She is arguing for immediate repeal of tax cuts for people making more than $¼ million a year.
I like this for 2 reasons:
The you only need two republicans, plus Uncle Joe Lieberman, to get this through the Senate, and you do not even need them on a budget bill, though there other 60 vote (actually 59 right now with 2 vacant seats) hoops to jump through.
The news that Citi is supporting cramdown legislation (with some conditions) is heartening.
However, it does raise some questions, most notably, “Why, after being bailed out by the US government, do they have a seat at the table at all,” and “Why are they supporting this at all?”
As to the first question, I put it down to the corruption that is Washington, DC business as usual.
As to the second, I am sure that part of this is a desire to be in on the process to shape it in the most advantageous way possible, but I think the real interest here is that Citi manages a lot of mortgages for the holders of mortgage backed securities, and as such, they carry much of the costs of a foreclosure process, but they carry none of the costs of s cram-down.
They will do their level best to ensure that whatever passes is so broken as to be useless.
Case in poiny, Mitch McConnell is suggesting that instead of revenue sharing grants to the states, that they be loans:
But back to my original point: This idea was tried once before, in the depths of the Depression. In 1932, Congress appropriated $300 million to the Reconstruction Finance Corporation to send to the states for unemployment relief. (Unemployment insurance did not exist until the Social Security Act of 1935 was passed). Unfortunately, Herbert Hoover’s RFC didn’t offer the funds to the states as grants but as loans. Already all-but-insolvent, many states didn’t take the offer. And the economy continued its plunge into the abyss.
This is Mitch McConnell’s idea of a policy worth reviving.
I would note that for a non trivial number of states, I think that it’s around 15, this loan would not allow them to prevent draconian cuts in services, because they are not permitted to take out loans for operating expenses, only for capital investments.
These folks are not concerned that a stimulus package will not work, they are concerned that it will work, because if government works, then they are fracked politically.
Well, it looks like cram-downs, the ability of bankruptcy judges to rewrite the terms and the principal in mortgages for primary residences is back on the table. (A copy of the article that does not require registration is here)
They can already do this for rental properties, and for the vacation homes of rich folks, but for your home, it has been prohibited by law since (IIRC), the late 1970s, because it was argued that the mortgage industry was heavily regulated, so cram-downs were unecessary….Yeah…I know.
The problem now is that many of the worst mortgages cannot be modified because they are held by dozens, if not hundreds, of people, any of whom could sue if they did not like the terms of a voluntary readjustment of a mortgage.
Additionally, this gives lenders a real incentive to negotiate in good faith, and allows the bankruptcy judges to move against the insane fees that are charged by some mortgage management companies.
I used to think that John Paul II’s jihad against the church working for the poor, going so far as to expel priests who were causing right wing despots grief, which pretty much repudiated 1800 years of church history was an anomaly.
JP2 clearly hated the Soviets, he hated communism, and it left him with an antipathy to anti-poverty action by the Roman Catholic Church.
I had kind of hoped that other folks who objected to the excesses of Communism, and those excesses are legion, had found perspective if they had remained in leadership positions.
Now, in the middle of the greatest economic crisis in 3 generations, we are seeing leaders who grew up in former communist nations trying to turn to Hoovernomics, because they have a visceral revulsion to anything that remotely looks like economic management by the state.
It doesn’t matter if the most successful model in fixing this has been the Swedish model, state capitalization and take over followed by sale when the conference is over, it’s just too pink for them.
In the first case, we have Czech President Vaclav Klaus, who appears to be trying his level best to destroy any coherent EU response to the economic crisis:
Klaus, an admirer of Milton Friedman and Margaret Thatcher, says “excessive state intervention” and “irresponsible increases of state expenditures” are behind the global financial crisis, according to an October commentary he wrote for Mlada Fronta Dnes newspaper.
Hoovernomics as driven by what are now archaic anti-Soviet and anti-Communists.
And let us not forget Angela Merkel, who is content to (mis)manage the largest economy in the EU, and also continues to go the Hoovernomics route:
With battle lines sharpening, the German government appears determined to resist calls to spend an additional €40 billion to fight its way out of the recession, according to officials attending a meeting in the Chancellery in the past week.
It appears that in the case of Merkel, there has been extensive lobbying from what amounts to the German Chamber of Commerce to lower taxes, but that is were she wanted to be in the first place, until other EU members dope slapped some sense into her.
I’m wondering how true this is of a generation that lived through a revolution.
If the US founding fathers were the exception, we were very, very lucky.
It looks like much of the stimulus package will be going to roads, as opposed to mass transit and rail.
If you are going to be spending the money, do something to fix our unsustainable SUV lifestyle too.
So Hank Paulson wants Congress to releasing the remaining $350 billion in TARP bailout funds for banks, but the White House is simultaneously saying that they may not formally request this until Bush is out of office.
I’m not sure what is going on, but until Hank Paulson and His Evil Minions™ are out of the office of the Secretary of the Treasury, Congress should not release another dollar.