An update to the moderators page .

This Yglesias post is interesting to say the least (any emphasis is his):

As every good conservative knows, France is bad and universal health care is bad. This the sneering condescension in this Dennis Boyles post at the Corner must secretly make sense:

A couple of things you can learn if you’re in France:

First, the meaning of “universal.” It doesn’t mean what you think if you’re a poor person in France, where “universal” health care is arguably better than elsewhere in the EU. It means about 75 percent. Le Parisien reports this morning that, as in the U.S., the more money you have the better care you get. Shocking. The paper backed up a recent study with a small-scale sting of their own and discovered that if you rely on France’s medical insurance alone, 25 percent of French doctors will refuse to treat you. That’s how you say ObamaCare in French.

For one thing, Obama’s proposed reforms—unfortunately—wouldn’t actually make American health care much like French health care. That said, the moral of the story is that in France no matter how poor you are, or what pre-existing conditions you have, or what happened to your job amidst the latest recession, or whatever else if you get sick 75 percent of doctors will treat you and the government will pick up the tab.

 in China!

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601068&sid=aXwMekKnYD6I

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/17/business/global/17gdp.html?hp

 The Chinese Stimulus was larger than the US, and focused on infrastructure. There was also some protectionism on trade, to ensure that the money used would target jobs that stayed in China.

 The Chinese Plan also focused on aggressive bank lending. The 'experts' are somewhat surprised since exports in China are down. The growth rate for the Chinese economy was set at an ambitious 8 percent, with the foresight to understand that unemployment and joblessness could create potential social unrest.

 No matter how one feels about China, we are a global economy now, and the Chinese economic growth will help lift the global economy generally.

 Thank heavens the Republicans here in the US stymied and obstructed the infrastructure piece of the US stimulus, and cut some of the delivery funding for projects, with that good old fashioned GOP = "No We Can't" Can Not Do spirit.

   gripes and whines that the stimulus is just not working. He said that it could just be *stopped* now, before (insert horrendous disaster analogy and scary big government talk here.) 

 Calling his bluff, ex-Republican Roy LaHood, and others  in the Obama administration wrote to key Arizona officials and said they would be happy to honor Senator Kyl's wishes and discontinue the stimulus funds to Arizona. 

  The stimulus has been very effective in creating job opportunities throughout the country. However, if you prefer to forfeit the money we are making available to your state, as Senator Kyl suggests, please let me know.

http://www.azcentral.com/members/Blog/azdc/57749

 Senator McCain was quick to respond that he supported every single word that Senator Kyl uttered, but was very seriously disturbed by the Obama administrations 'threats'.

This diary from Leon over at RedState outlines the bizzare forms of racism liberals practice.

Suffering from this phenomenon Boxer evidently believes even though this is a matter of Cap & Trade, because this this man is black, she can put him in "his place" by curiously quoting the likes of the NAACP, etc...

I have long maintained that the Democratic Party in America views minorities in a fundamentally racist way, and that this racism is clearly expressed in the policies they support.  Just to give one example, there is quite a bit of merit to the notion that children who come from financially disadvantaged homes and neighborhoods deserve a leg up when it comes to, say college admissions.  However, when the Democrats go about setting policy, they don’t seek to give children from financially disadvantaged children a leg up, they seek to give minority children a leg up (so long as those minorities are non-Asian).  No one argues that there is a 1:1 correlation (or even nearly a 1:1 correlation) between being a non-Asian minority and being financially and socioeconomically disadvantaged, but any attempts to implement an affirmative action plan that operates on relevant socioeconomic factors (instead of on race per se) are stridently resisted by these Democrats, who are apparently under the impression that even wealthy non-Asian minorities are, as a class, less intelligent than whites and non-Asian minorities.  This view is, by definition, racist.

 

Time and time again, elected Democrats expose this bigotry by admitting - often in embarrassing ways - that they have the same set of expectations for all people of a given minority (be it black, hispanic, or other).  In their worldview, these privileged white liberals are simply incapable of understanding that people of a given minority are capable of thinking, believing, acting, or achieving as individuals, but instead must be patronizingly dealt with as some inferior class. Behold Exhibit A, Barbara Boxer attempting to deal with Harry Alford of the National Black Chamber of Commerce.  The NBCC has done quite a lot research on cap and trade and climate change issues, and was testifying before the Senate Public Works Committee in support of the NBCC’s view.  Boxer, apparently of the belief that all black people should feel the same about every given issue, counters the NBCC’s view with a resolution passed by the NAACP, despite its total non-relevance to anything Alford was discussing.  Alford’s reaction was… well, you can see it for yourself:

 And there's even more Democrats behaving this way beneath the fold over at RS if you are having trouble being convinced...

...but facts are stubborn things .

Today I had the opportunity to testify before the Senate Budget Committee about CBO’s most recent analysis of the long-term budget outlook .

Under current law, the federal budget is on an unsustainable path, because federal debt will continue to grow much faster than the economy over the long run. Although great uncertainty surrounds long-term fiscal projections, rising costs for health care and the aging of the population will cause federal spending to increase rapidly under any plausible scenario for current law. Unless revenues increase just as rapidly, the rise in spending will produce growing budget deficits. Large budget deficits would reduce national saving, leading to more borrowing from abroad and less domestic investment, which in turn would depress economic growth in the United States. Over time, accumulating debt would cause substantial harm to the economy.

 It certainly doesn't require a degree in economics to understand Obama is just completely F'ing our country and our economy over!

right now the Dow & unemployment are both up, so the results are mixed.

The problem with judging Obama's economic performance now is this: few would argue against the notion there was tons of downward economic momentum in January.  Which means that before you can reasonably expect growth, new policies have to slow and stop the fall.

I'm not trying to move the goalposts here, just trying to be realistic.  Short of a complete federal takeover of the economy I don't see how any president could have prevented further job losses in six months under these conditions.  I'd be OK with using the historical lag of unemployement after the Dow turnaround as a performance benchmark (need to look that up).

I, like many liberals, believe Obama was far too accommodating of investment banks' interests.  I want to see the GDP share of the financial services industry plummet in the next decade.  I want banking to go back to being a boring, predicable business and if that involves a Federal Special Lending Reserve (kind of like Fannie or Freddie I guess, but targeted at stimulus projects) accompanied by major Wall Street upheavel, so be it.

My prediction is that the Obama economy will do OK, far better than Bush's (because he's not stupid, lazy and fundamentally corrupt) but not nearly as well as Clinton's.  Partly because there can only be one internet gold rush, and partly because Bush's policies did so much damage that new underlying weaknesses in our economy will gimp any growth.