Category: Politics As Usual

‘Structural unemployment’?

~ susie ~ 2 Comments

unemployment

Why NOT throw money at the problem?

Dean Baker: Paul Solman takes me and my grumpy friend Paul Krugman to task for insisting that there is a growing consensus within the economics profession that we are not suffering from structural unemployment. Krugman and I used our blogs to complain about Aug. 2’s segment in which Brooks suggested structural unemployment was the economy’s main problem and that there was little that could be done about it.

The United States currently has about 9 million fewer people working than if it had continued on its trend of growth from 2002 to 2007.

The question is whether the unemployment problem is a lack of demand due to a loss of $8 trillion in housing bubble wealth, or whether there are structural problems that would prevent most of these 9 million people from being re-employed even if the demand were there. Krugman and I support the former idea; those who see unemployment as structural are in the latter camp. Here’s another way to think about the problem. Imagine someone found a $1 trillion bill in the street and decided that, as a public service, she would spend the money over the next 12 months to boost the economy. For simplicity, let’s assume that she decides to divide her $1 trillion so that it is spent in exactly the same way that the economy’s current $16 trillion in annual spending is spent.

In my view, this $1 trillion of new spending would cause output to increase by roughly 6 percent. (I’m ignoring multiplier effects to keep things simple.) Employment would also rise by roughly the same amount, filling the bulk of the 9-million-jobs hole. In other words, this would be great news for the country.
Continue reading “‘Structural unemployment’?” →

‘Grow up’

~ susie

Well, yes:

Christians in Britain and the US who claim that they are persecuted should “grow up” and not exaggerate what amounts to feeling “mildly uncomfortable”, according to Rowan Williams, who last year stepped down as archbishop of Canterbury after an often turbulent decade.

“When you’ve had any contact with real persecuted minorities you learn to use the word very chastely,” he said. “Persecution is not being made to feel mildly uncomfortable. ‘For goodness sake, grow up,’ I want to say.”

True persecution was “systematic brutality and often murderous hostility that means that every morning you wonder if you and your children are going to live through the day”. He cited the experience of a woman he met in India “who had seen her husband butchered by a mob”.

Lord Williams’s years as archbishop of Canterbury were marked by turbulence over the church’s stance on the role of gay priests and bishops; gay marriage; and homophobia in the wider Anglican communion – with many members of the church expressing disappointment at a perceived hardening in its position on homosexuality.

Asked if he had let down gay and lesbian people, he said after a pause: “I know that a very great many of my gay and lesbian friends would say that I did. The best thing I can say is that is a question that I ask myself really rather a lot and I don’t quite know the answer.”

Weaker than the storm

~ susie

So Chris Christie really is using the marketing money to glorify himself, and not to help storm victims:

ATLANTIC CITY – Hurricane Sandy victims told members of the New Jersey Legislature during a session here Thursday that they have grown weary of “Stronger Than the Storm” ads, and are exhausted by months of futile attempts to seek assistance in repairing and holding on to their storm-ravaged homes. “I haven’t seen one billboard or ad that tells people exactly how they can be stronger than the storm. . . . So many people still don’t know where to go for help,” said Staci Berger, executive director of the Housing and Community Development Network of New Jersey.

Berger testified before the Joint Senate and Assembly Environment Committee about the hundreds of Shore homeowners her agency has been trying to assist since the Oct. 29 storm. The session was held at the Atlantic City Convention Center so legislators – among them State Sen. James Whelan (D., Atlantic) and Assemblywoman Holly Schepisi (R., Bergen) – could hear about the status of rebuilding efforts at the Shore. And that status, nearly 10 months after the horrific storm created $38 billion in damage in New Jersey, is: Not so great.

Hmm

~ susie ~ 3 Comments

Well, he said at Netroots Nation he was thinking about running. It would be good to have someone in the Democratic field pushing the candidates to the left:

Former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean, who says he’s open to making another bid for president, will travel next week to Iowa, a move that will surely stoke further speculation that Dean may run in 2016.

The former presidential candidate will speak Wednesday at the Iowa Federation of Labor convention, taking him back to the same state where he finished third in the 2004 Iowa caucuses and made his infamous “Dean Scream.”

A spokesman for Dean’s independent group, Democracy for America, said Dean will be talking next week about the organization’s “Purple to Blue Project,” a plan aimed to help Democrats win state House and Senate seats.

While the project is focused on five races in Virginia this year, the group plans to expand to other states next year, including an effort to win the majority in Iowa’s state House.

Mayor Nutter says city will borrow $50 million to open schools

~ susie ~ 1 Comment

But I think it only postpones the long-term plan:

NOTE: Council President Clarke is holding a news conference momentarily. This post will be updated throughout the day.

Unable to reach an agreement with City Council on Philly’s school-funding crisis, Mayor Nutter today pledged that the city will borrow the $50 million needed for schools to open on time Sept. 9. “I will not risk a catastrophe,” Nutter told reporters in City Hall. “Schools are going to open on time and safely.”

The borrowing will be a general obligation bond. The mayor hopes to pay for it with revenue from the extension of a 1 percentage point city sales-tax increase that was supposed to expire after this year. But he and Council President Darrell Clarke have been sparring over how to handle the sales tax. If Council does not adopt the extension, Nutter said, the borrowing costs will be paid out of the city’s General Fund.

Gee

~ susie

I wonder if they’ll get it this time?

HARRISBURG — For years, local school district officials have tried to get state lawmakers to pass laws reducing the amount of tax dollars paid to charter schools.

Now charter schools — which since 1997 have evolved from independent, isolated institutions into a united, powerful political force — are fighting back. They have launched a coordinated effort to gain up to $150 million annually in additional funding from local school districts in the Lehigh Valley and across the state.

In hopes of doing it, charter schools are bypassing the House, Senate and state Board of Education and going right to Gov. Tom Corbett’s administration in a bid to change the funding formula in their favor.

Tom Terrific

~ susie

tom
‘How big a crook am I?’

Corbett is such a outright thief, liar and scumbag.

How is it that Gov. Corbett and one of his cabinet members overlooked a wee detail – their newly purchased vacation homes – in their financial interest statement filings? Corbett failed to report the 2012 purchase of a $265,000 Hilton Head condo in the annual filing under the governor’s Code of Conduct, according to StateImpact Pennsylvania, a public radio investigative unit focusing on energy and the environment. Michael Krancer, who was until March the secretary of the Department of Environmental Protection, also failed to report the Vermont ski area property he purchased for $1 million last year. The news didn’t sit well with government reform advocates.

“It kind of defies one’s credibility, that ‘whoops I forgot a $265k or million dollar asset,'” said Barry Kauffman, executive director of Common Cause Pennsylvania. “We talking about the ethics law here which helps the public understand intregrity of public officials. If they treat it with a cavalier attitude then the message to the public is laws don’t matter.”

Well, duh. Laws don’t matter, except to the people vulnerable enough to be charged in the first place.

‘Cory Booker is even worse than his critics say’

~ susie

Noam Schieber at the New Republic:

Cory Booker has just won New Jersey’s Democratic Senate primary in a rout, making him an easy favorite to claim the seat this fall. But even stronger than the pundit consensus that Booker will soon be in Washington is the belief that the camera-savvy Twitter celebrity will be a rabble-rouser once he gets there. “He would be a disruptor,” the pros at NBC’s First Read have predicted. “Someone who wants to shake things up.” A vehicle for bringing “street-level experience to a Senate that often seems disembodied from the whole planet,” is how The New York Times endorsement put it. No less an expert than Booker himself has suggested that agitprop will be his preferred mode of discourse, approvingly citing Ted Cruz and Rand Paul as his senatorial role models.

You might be inclined to conclude from this that Booker intends to be the Senate’s liberal conscience—someone who can channel the progressive id from a perch inside Washington, in the same way that Cruz and Paul function as voices of the Tea Party from deep within the capital. Booker is, after all, an inner-city Democrat from a solidly blue state, whose predecessor was a reliably liberal vote. Who better than him to swing for the fences? But, if you happened to conclude this, you’d be way off the mark. What Booker has in mind when he alludes to being an agitator is agitating for the cause of himself.

Cory Booker isn’t the first politician to run for office because he wants recognition and power without any idea of what he wanted it for. In his case, it seems to be that he wants everyone to love him.