Take a good long look at that graph up there. The numbers are indisputable too – the kind of turnaround that President Obama has managed to cause in such a short period of time – and with the help of The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (also known as the Stimulus Plan) is remarkable.

The White House also released a handy video to help people get up to speed with the effects of the plan and how much it’s probably helped them without them even knowing it:

The brilliant thing behind the chart and the video is that it shows that the White House is trying to get back in the saddle about shaping and controlling their message.

Almost just as importantly, this kind of message control is good for calling out Republican congresscritters for bashing the White House on the stimulus plan and then greedily sucking up money for their districts and happily spending it — all while lambasting the President and the government for so-called “wasteful spending;” — all while their home districts are profiting off of the hard work and political will of the President and Congressional Democrats. The truth-telling is becoming so loud that even one very prominent Republican is calling out his own party on their hypocrisy.

[ The Road to Recovery ]

Good old white privilege – it rears its head in so many ways. This time, at the so-called Tea Party Convention (hardly a convention, more like a Klan rally or a gathering of thugs with political ideologies – and I say that clearly; the Tea Party can pretend they’re a real party or a real option as much as they like, but they are nothing more than a group of political thugs masquerading as a group with an agenda – their “agenda” is really “burn it all down.” They are not a political party, they have no platform, they have no plans for America.) Tom Tancredo, mister “proud to be a racist,” makes the claim that the only reason Barack Obama was elected was because, “we do not have a civics, literacy test before people can vote in this country,” as he put it.

Funny, that’s a lot like what progressives said when George W. Bush got elected the second time, but the difference here is that it’s not just dismissable rage, this is actually white supremacist, racist rage bubbling furiously. The Teabaggers honestly believe that Black people, Latinos, and everyone else who doesn’t believe and think the way that they do is somehow idiotic and should be stripped of the right to vote so they’re able to take the reins of power.

…and they call Democrats socialist? They try to tie President Obama with Nazis? Oh to look into the abyss and see yourself staring back in the darkness, eh Teabaggers?

Seriously – these folks are claiming that America needs poll taxes and poll tests like the kind that were used in the pre-Civil Rights years to keep Black Americans – who had the right to vote – away from the polls, intimidate them so they wouldn’t vote, or somehow find a way to disqualify their vote so Republicans managed to hold their majorities in the South.

The simmering movement is the whitest phenomenon on the national scene, evident not just in the millions of Caucasians committed to its cause, but in the bedrock beliefs stirring its anti-government contempt.

How fitting, therefore, that Sarah Palin keynote the movement’s first organized confab. Neglected in all the fevered conversation around the movement’s meteoric rise, and Palin’s selection, is any useful reflection on what the cause and this figurehead stand for: white racial resentment. Packed beneath her beehive is a spitfire brew of optimistic, yet aggrieved, whiteness. Palin embodies a bizarre, sometimes alluring, combination of triumph and complaint that many Caucasian Tea Partiers identify with through and through.

Deciphering the racial codes on the movement’s ubiquitous placards does not require a doctorate in semiotics. One popular sign shows the president’s face and a caption: “Undocumented worker.” Another combines Obama’s image with this caption: “The Zoo Has an African Lion and the White House Has a Lyin’ African!”

Oh yes – if you had any doubt that these folks are racist, and that these folks are the cancer that desperately needs to be excised from the Republican Party, read on:

Denouncing government assistance and free school lunches at a town hall meeting in late January, South Carolina Lieutenant Governor Andre Bauer, a Tea Party supporter, said: “My grandmother was not a highly educated woman, but she told me as a small child to quit feeding stray animals. You know why? Because they breed. You’re facilitating the problem if you give an animal or a person ample food supply. They will reproduce, especially ones that don’t think too much further than that.”

At a Tea Party rally in Boone County, Kentucky (roughly 92 percent non-Hispanic white), Congressman Geoff Davis called cap-and-trade legislation “economic colonization of the hardworking states that produce the energy, the food, and the manufactured goods of the heartland, to take that and pay for social programs in the large coastal states.” In Tea Party-speak, “heartland” often means “white” — what Palin calls “the real America” — while “coastal state” means the urbanized communities that teem with racial minorities, doubling as “gateway states” for Latino immigrants.

“Immigrants are 21 percent of the uninsured, but only 7 percent of the population. This means white folks on Medicare or headed there will see benefits curtailed, while new arrivals from the Third World, whence almost all immigrants come, get taxpayer-subsidized health insurance,” gripes Patrick Buchanan on his blog. “Any wonder why all those Tea Party and town-hall protests seem to be made up of angry white folks?”

How about a dose of truth to round us out, eh?

The bar-stool version of the Tea Party canard goes like this: Why should we, self-sufficient small-town whites, pay taxes to support all those welfare queens, food stamp cheats and Medicaid layabouts in the big cities and coastal states? The media’s version, parroted by Palin and other Fox talking heads, commiserates with Americans in the heartland, christened “the average taxpayer,” for unjustly having to subsidize ethnic enclaves that mooch off the national treasury.

Well, not so fast. A disproportionately high share of our federal government’s tax income comes from racially diverse, immigrant-rich, urbanized states, including California, Illinois, New York, New Jersey and Massachusetts; not from extremely homogeneous, conservative, anti-tax strongholds like Idaho, Montana, Utah, the Dakotas and Wyoming.

All of this is not to say that any given rank-and-file member of the movement personally despises racial minorities. Rather, the Tea Party ethos is a direct descendant of the anti-tax segregationist politics that swept the South in the 1950s and ’60s.

There we go. As if anyone with half a mind really needed any additional proof that the Teabaggers are not just maliciously misinformed, they’re actually taking great lengths to perpetuate and maintain their stupidity in the face of overwhelming evidence. They are, quite simply, proof of how far hatred can take you.

[ White Racial Resentment Bubbles Under the Surface of the Tea Party Movement ]
Source: AlterNet

Here we are, right back where we started from oh so many years ago – Republicans stand in the pulpit complaining that every dollar that Democrats want to spend is somehow wasted, that somehow Republicans would never spend money when in office (even though recent history – and deficits – prove otherwise) and that somehow putting Americans back to work, providing access to health care for everyone, and cleaning up our air and water are all wasted when compared to the incessant need for bombs and guns – which to be clear, is all the Republicans really spent money on when in office, aside from their own interests, friends, and failed programs.

Paul Krugman, in an op-ed for the New York Times, quite accurately takes on the problem of deficit fear-mongering, which has always been one of the Republican party’s staple tactics. Lately the right-wing has been drumming up the media with “doom and gloom” scenarios of massive deficits and budget gaps, which they conveniently blame on the President’s domestic priorities and not at all on the massive escalation of overseas conflicts caused by the previous Republican administration and its majority in Congress.

Even so, Krugman points out that this fear-mongering is ultimately pointless and is designed to make more of a political point than it does an economic point:

These days it’s hard to pick up a newspaper or turn on a news program without encountering stern warnings about the federal budget deficit. The deficit threatens economic recovery, we’re told; it puts American economic stability at risk; it will undermine our influence in the world. These claims generally aren’t stated as opinions, as views held by some analysts but disputed by others. Instead, they’re reported as if they were facts, plain and simple.

Yet they aren’t facts. Many economists take a much calmer view of budget deficits than anything you’ll see on TV. Nor do investors seem unduly concerned: U.S. government bonds continue to find ready buyers, even at historically low interest rates. The long-run budget outlook is problematic, but short-term deficits aren’t — and even the long-term outlook is much less frightening than the public is being led to believe.

…

Let’s talk for a moment about budget reality. Contrary to what you often hear, the large deficit the federal government is running right now isn’t the result of runaway spending growth. Instead, well more than half of the deficit was caused by the ongoing economic crisis, which has led to a plunge in tax receipts, required federal bailouts of financial institutions, and been met — appropriately — with temporary measures to stimulate growth and support employment.

The point is that running big deficits in the face of the worst economic slump since the 1930s is actually the right thing to do. If anything, deficits should be bigger than they are because the government should be doing more than it is to create jobs.

True, there is a longer-term budget problem. Even a full economic recovery wouldn’t balance the budget, and it probably wouldn’t even reduce the deficit to a permanently sustainable level. So once the economic crisis is past, the U.S. government will have to increase its revenue and control its costs. And in the long run there’s no way to make the budget math work unless something is done about health care costs.

But there’s no reason to panic about budget prospects for the next few years, or even for the next decade. Consider, for example, what the latest budget proposal from the Obama administration says about interest payments on federal debt; according to the projections, a decade from now they’ll have risen to 3.5 percent of G.D.P. How scary is that? It’s about the same as interest costs under the first President Bush.

Why, then, all the hysteria? The answer is politics.

Heaven forbid the conservatives running around like chickens with their heads cut off acknowledge that we’re in the same position as -or better than- we were under one of their own. Instead they’d rather storm the airwaves with stories of excessive government spending, even though that government spending is what’s keeping the economic engine of the country running right now.

[ Fiscal Scare Tactics ]
Source: The New York Times

(click the graphic for a larger version)

The National Geographic Magazine blog has this very telling infographic today detailing the cost of health care as a line between the cost of care per person and that person’s average life expectancy based on the country in which they live. The line also shows how many average doctor’s visits the person takes (on average) per year as the thickness of the line. You can clearly see that those of us in the United States spend the most on health care as any other nation on the list, is only one of two without a universal health care system, and our life expectancy doesn’t really show much for all of those dollars and the socially-reinforced lack of doctor’s office trips we take for things like preventative care.

From the NatGeo blog:

The United States spends more on medical care per person than any country, yet life expectancy is shorter than in most other developed nations and many developing ones. Lack of health insurance is a factor in life span and contributes to an estimated 45,000 deaths a year. Why the high cost? The U.S. has a fee-for-service system—paying medical providers piecemeal for appointments, surgery, and the like. That can lead to unneeded treatment that doesn’t reliably improve a patient’s health. Says Gerard Anderson, a professor at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health who studies health insurance worldwide, “More care does not necessarily mean better care.” —Michelle Andrews

Sounds right to me, and by “right” I mean horrendously unacceptable.

[ The Cost of Care ]
Source: The National Geographic Magazine Blog

Quickly overshadowed by continuing discussions around the war in Afghanistan, the biggest news point I think that’s of interest from last week is the slight dip in the unemployment numbers, which may be a tentative indicator that the economy is recovering faster than we initially thought – thanks to the economic policies of President Obama.

Contrast this with the Republicans in and out of Congress who were whining and complaining about the Stimulus package and government jobs and technology programs (essentially saying “let the town burn, not like we have any other options”) saying they cost too much and did too little, and you have more than enough validation that not only is the stimulus plan working, but it’s working the way it should – slowly. If the effects were a flash in the pan, the Republicans would be complaining about that – now that it’s not they’re complaining it’s not enough of a flash in the pan.

Now the debate is mostly around whether or not we should have another stimulus, or a jobs-related stimulus, to entice companies to hire or to get local governments and municipalities to start hiring. The money would be well spent, I admit, but the issue is pretty complex. Here’s one video analysis:

Leo Gerard discusses how strengthening and enforcing trade law can go along way to preserving American jobs, and how he believes bringing manufacturing back to its proper place in the American economy is the way to go. I’m hesitant to that extent, unless we’re talking about manufacturing items that support next generation technologies that we can both use here at home and we can export to the rest of the world. I’m not a huge fan of trying to rebuild the same, stagnant, previous-generation technologies, but as Gerard says, if we’re investing in things like high-speed rail, next generation power transmission infrastructure, information networks, and more, then I’m completely on board.

[ Some Jobs Taxpayers Don't Need to Buy ]
Source: The Campaign for America’s Future

Let’s start off with some of the opening text from this article, written for The Campaign for America’s Future by Natasha Chart:

Sen. Claire McCaskill said last week that the Senate wasn’t going to tackle the Clean Energy Jobs and American Protection Act this year because it would be “really, really hard.” If the Senate doesn’t handle it this year, will they deal with it in an election year? I think everyone working in progressive politics has heard the ‘it’s an election year’ excuse for why something terribly important can’t be done.

While McCaskill’s comment in particular was frustrating, she has a lot of colleagues in the Senate who obviously feel the same way. So I’d like to talk about some of the hard things people who aren’t Senators are facing that the CEJAPA legislation could begin fixing.

Chart goes on to discuss a number of amazing points – all things that the Senate really needs to take up before they get bogged down in election-year politics in 2010 and wind up doing little, if nothing at all in order to try and save their skins for re-election. Whether it’s health care, climate change, jobs, or transportation, all the Republicans need to do in order to prove to the public that the Democrats haven’t brought the change they swept in promising is continue to be obstinate and block any progress they can, and all the Democrats in the Senate have to do to play into their hands is do nothing for fear or not being bipartisan. At the same time, if they’re too aggressive, they risk earning the same rep that Republicans earned when they tried to push through changes using dirty tricks. It’s a fine line, but I’d rather see them push the barriers of progress than do nothing at all.

Let’s take a look at some of those issues that need to be addressed, shall we?

Earlier this year, a report came out on how the bottom 15 percent of the work force was having its wages stolen to the tune of $2.9 billion per year in, if you can believe it, three US cities. Workers in Chicago, Los Angeles and New York City are getting almost $3 billion dollars per year stolen from them by their employers. Workers can try to fight wage theft, but they can lose their jobs in the process, and face having to fight court battles against employers who lie and falsify records.

…

Speaking of climate, scientists’ concerns over the state of our planetary life support system are growing. While the scientific community was hopeful even three years ago that we could hold warming to 2 degrees Celsius, a global temperature increase that would already mean the loss of the Arctic sea ice and heat waves that might end corn production in the US Midwest, more of them are seeing signs that a business-as-usual approach will get us 6 degrees Celsius in global warming. If 6 degrees of warming happen, not only will many coastal cities go under water, but the North American and Eurasian temperate zones could become uninhabitable.

As some 350.org activists wrote, “There is no Planet B.”

…

The world can’t wait, and neither can Americans who need good jobs and fair pay. Our leaders need to step up and correct these problems responsibly, which they were hired to do by a public that is increasingly too sick, broke and tired to keep hounding them about it all the time.

The Senate needs to do its duty by the planet and their voters. They need to start cranking the gears down on emissions and get America back to work with all possible speed.

This is critical – the issues of climate change and jobs and unemployment are closely related – they can be fixed with some of the same forces, and those forces don’t involve leaving people to fend for themselves or shaming them into vanishing into the shadows away from the light of the public. Smarter energy solutions and green energy technologies could go a long way to putting the millions of Americans currently out of work back to work in high-paying, high-skill jobs that, as the President so often says, cannot be outsourced. It’s absolutely true – if only we have the political will to make it happen and private industry would get moving on it.

I’m doing Chart a horrible injustice here by snipping her post up to snag some of what I think are her most poignant paragraphs. You should very definitely head over and see her post in its original context. In the end though, her critical point is that the Democrats in the Senate can’t shy away from the issues in front of them because they’re “hard,” or because they require a great deal of political will. We elected them to do the hard things, work through the difficult problems, and help make America a better place. There’s a lot of work to do, I understand, and there are some seriously obstructionist Republicans on the other side, I understand that as well, but if anything that only adds to the urgency.

[ The Hard Things We Elect Them To Solve ]
Source: Campaign for America’s Future

Ah, the tax cuts.

I remember back when the Republicans were in control of Congress they told us all that their sweeping tax cuts for the wealthy were going to yield unparalleled and sustainable growth and prosperity for America for years and years to come. They said we’d never regret it, and obstructionist Democrats who were concerned about that much money going to the wealthy and the economic and income divide that it would create would cause serious problems in a few short years simply hated freedom and America and small business owners and jobs and whatever else they could say progressives hated in order to get their agenda passed.

So they did get passed, and here we are. What have those tax cuts gotten us? The deepest recession since the Great Depression, and now, as a Democratic president is left to clean up the mess they left behind while they head home with their tails between their legs to mansions full of money they’ve pilfered from the American taxpayer, we’re left to wonder as some of them start piping up again that tax cuts are the answer what they could possibly be thinking.

It’s no secret that memories are short inside the Beltway – only as short as an election cycle in many cases, but this time we need to remember what happened shortly before the economic downturn – and when I say “shortly,” I mean in the years leading up, when we all thought everything was fine: the Bush-era tax cuts. But before then? Let’s look even farther back to another, similar push against taxes:

You don’t have to dig particularly deep, in the United States today, to find some striking similarities between today’s virulently anti-Obama “Tea Party” crowd and the media darlings who birthed the “Tax Revolt” phenomenon back in the late 1970s.

The Tax Revolters burst onto the national scene amid an inflation-battered economy. They blamed “big government” for what ailed America, and they offered a simple remedy: cut taxes. Lower taxes, they promised, would get average Americans back on track.

The Tea Party zealots have, like the Tax Revolters, also coalesced in tough economic times. They attack “big government,” too. They even make the same promises about taxes.

But the Tea Party types, so far at least, haven’t scored any early political success. The Tax Revolters did. In 1978, in a ballot-box stunner, they passed a statewide initiative in California known as Prop 13, an unprecedented cap on property taxes.

Within a few short years, almost half America’s states had followed suit with tax cuts and caps of their own. In 1980, at the national level, this Tax Revolt surge would carry Ronald Reagan into the White House. One year later, a pliant Congress would give President Reagan the biggest across-the-board federal tax cut in U.S. history.

Tax relief had become, in the wink of an eye, America’s most potent political creed. Tax cutting and capping would go on to dominate the nation’s political discourse for the next three decades, an entire generation.

And what do we have to show for all this cutting and capping? Last week, researchers offered up two new studies that offer up a useful assessment.

The first, funded by the Social Security Administration, looks at the wealth of American families. That wealth, the Tax Revolters assured us,would start amassing again once taxpayers yanked “big government” out of our pockets.

The second new study zeroes in on state and local taxes. After years of tax revolting, this Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy report asks, who exactly is paying taxes at the state and local level? Who has benefited the most, in tax terms, from the Tax Revolt the Tea Party zealots are now so fervently seeking to extend?

The answer: The rich have benefited the most. The Tax Revolt that began back in the late 1970s has, in state after state, let the affluent off the tax hook.

In fact, notes the new Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy analysis, “nearly every state and local tax system takes a much greater share of income from middle- and low-income families than from the wealthy.”

In the entire United States, the analysis adds, “only two states require their best-off citizens to pay as much of their incomes in taxes as their very poorest taxpayers must pay, and only one state taxes its wealthiest individuals at a higher effective rate than middle-income families have to pay.”

America’s most affluent 1 percent now pay, on average, just 6.4 percent of their incomes in state and local taxes. But they actually pay even less than that, since they can deduct their state and local taxes from their federal tax bill. The state and local tax burden on America’s rich, after taking this offset into account, drops to 5.2 percent.

Middle-income families — to be precise, those families who make up the middle fifth of America’s income distribution — pay, after the federal offset, 9.4 percent of their incomes in total state and local taxes.

America’s poorest families pay even more. Tax collectors take 10.9 percent of the incomes of households in the nation’s bottom 20 percent, more than double the share they take from the incomes of the nation’s top 1 percent.

The Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy paper, Who Pays? A Distributional Analysis of the Tax Systems in All 50 States, covers non-elderly households. Incredibly, the study details, some states “ask their poorest residents — those in the bottom 20 percent of the income scale — to pay up to six times as much of their income in taxes as they ask the wealthy to pay.”

That’s right folks – not only has the income gap widened immeasurably since the libertarian/conservative took the helm and demanded that no one should have to pay for anything and subsequently made it common in America for people to want everything from their government when it has to do with them and their lives but not want to pay for any of it. (I call this the libertarian syndrome – the people who actually believe “government will just screw up health care and waste our money,” and the people who want a fire truck to be at their house in seconds when they call 911 but complain about their local taxes.)

Look at those numbers a bit more closely: the middle-class and the poor pay WAY MORE in taxes than their wealthy counterparts do. That absolutely shatters this libertarian notion that somehow the government “punishes” you for making more money and being successful, and it destroys the conservative notion that taxation is somehow the “redistribution of wealth” from wealthiest to the poorest through social programs.

So this, this is why additional tax cuts are a horrible idea. The data is absolutely clear – the only thing left for the libertarians and the conservatives to do is question reality, spin the study, question who did it, or somehow dig up some old or skewed data to try and gloss over the facts at hand.

[ What Ever Happened to the Good Times the Tax-Cutters Promised? ]
Source: Campaign for America’s Future

While I completely agree with the President, his economic advisory board, and the majority of economists in the country that our economy is getting stronger every day and crawling slowly but surely out of a pretty deep hole that could have been even deeper without the government’s intervention with the stimulus plan, I’m incredibly worried about the fact that job growth tends to trail behind economic growth by several months if not years – President Obama is aware of this too, and has lately been engaging Congressional Democrats and his Cabinet to start thinking of ways to jumpstart hiring in the private sector, whether it’s through government hiring or incentives to private businesses to pick up employees.

Now the Republicans are going to start saying “tax cuts! we need more tax cuts!” like they always do, but I’ll get to why that’s a horrible idea in another post (the next one, actually) – but it is a terrible idea. Now you can offer tax cuts to businesses that increase their employee rolls by a certain appreciable amount, I’d be okay with that, because it’s actually a performance-based and verifiable incentive for a business to hire people, and they’ll have to prove they did it to the government before getting the carrot. If you just slash corporate taxes across the board with the hopes that businesses will say thank you by hiring people, you’ll be sorely dissapointed.

I’m also a big fan of more government spending in startup industries that can lead to long-term, sustainable, highly trained and high paying jobs, like jobs in the green sector and in renewable energy technologies, maintenance, and development. I’m also a big fan of growth areas that could use more people, like technology. (which has shown itself to be influenced by but still strong in a down economy)

But Rob Borosage, writing for the Campaign for America’s Future, sees bigger things on the horizon:

With the Senate befuddled by the antics of Joe Lieberman and Max Baucus on health care and the White House Clintonistas lobbying President Obama to devote his January State of the Union address to deficit reduction, Pelosi ladled up a portion of common sense. Unemployment is over 10 percent and rising. It is time to focus on jobs. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid added his support. The President announced a job summit for December. Democrats finally got the subject right.

The need is clear. One in six workers is unemployed, has given up looking or is forced to work part-time. For young workers aged 16 to 24, unemployment is 19 percent. For young African Americans, unemployment is at 30 percent. And as Federal Reserve Chair Ben Bernanke testified yesterday, we’re likely to see—at best—a slow recovery with no new job growth. That exacts a devastating toll in hopes crushed, families stressed, young people stalled, and poverty and hunger spreading.

And even if we avoid another downturn, the job picture will get worse. Crippling state deficits—over $260 billion over two years—will force layoffs that cost an estimated 900,000 jobs next year if nothing is done.

How do we produce jobs?

Republicans, of course, voted unanimously against Obama’s first recovery plan, and have gleefully trumpeted its failure ever since (although many don’t hesitate to take credit for local projects that are putting people to work).

What’s their plan? It can’t be found on the national party’s web page.

…

And then of course, the Republicans recycle their panacea for anything that ails you—more tax cuts. One of these, letting businesses write off losses against profits over an extended period of time, has just been signed into law. The other is Bush lite: small tax cuts for everyone but low-wage workers.

Now, despite all the posturing about Obama’s red ink, these Republican ideas will create larger deficits and more debt. Is this the best way to spend money we borrow?

Well, we tried the same thing under Bush at the beginning of the Great Recession and it didn’t work very well. The reason is pretty simple. Americans have lost some $13 trillion in assets from the housing crash and the stock market decline. They no longer can spend more than they earn, and use their homes as an ATM machine. So they are tightening their belts, paying down debts and rebuilding their savings. Provide them with small tax cuts and they will sensibly save most of the money—and not provide the demand need to get reluctant companies to rehire workers.

Okay, I couldn’t resist – I’m going to touch on this a little more in a subsequent post, like I said, but this is an excellent rationale of why the “tax cuts fix everything” psuedo-republican/totally-libertarian mantra doesn’t fix anything – as with most libertarian ideals, it causes more problems than it solves, and takes a chainsaw to a series of social problems that really need a scalpel to fix.

In any event, Borosage goes on to hit some of the Democratic ideas to fix the problem, and a number of them are remarkably good:

AFL-CIO President Rich Trumka released a program this week—joining with leaders of the NAACP, the National Council of La Raza, and the Center for Community Change and the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights—that will frame the discussion.

Trumka’s agenda features five initiatives:

1. Extend the lifeline to jobless workers, continuing unemployment benefits, food assistance and health care subsidies.

2. Rebuild schools, roads and energy systems. This is the very area that got slashed in the first recovery plan by so called Republican moderates and Blue Dog Democrats. Repairs— to schools, sewers and bridges—can begin rapidly. More ambitious projects—fast trains and a modernized electric grid—take longer, but as Bernanke says, unemployment will be with us a long time.

3. Aid to state and local governments to maintain vital services. This is the least popular but most effective program. It forestalls deep layoffs in basic services, from teachers to police.

4. Direct public service jobs in communities. Congress could dramatically expand the Youth Corps, AmericaCorps and Vista to put young people to work. New initiatives—a Green Corps to rebuild parks, an Urban Corps to build low-cost housing—could be targeted for areas with the greatest job loss.

5. Use Wall Street bailout funds for Main Street. Use the billions still in the TARP to enable community banks to lend money to small and medium sized businesses. Even Republicans might sign onto increasing low-interest-rate loans to small businesses with expansion plans. This surely is a better idea than job tax credits to businesses, almost of all which will reward companies for jobs they would have created anyway.

Obama would be well advised to go even bigger. His most compelling argument has been the simple truth that we can’t go back to the old boom-and-bust economy and should not want to. We’ve got to build a new economy on a strong foundation of basic investment in education and training, in 21st-century infrastructure, in research and development—all of which have got the short end of the stick in the era of tax cut, squander and plunder conservatism. And we’ve got to insure that the US is a leader in the new green industrial revolution that will be the growth industry of the future.

Excellent ideas, and all of them ideas that don’t require a massive new stimulus package, and all of them are ideas that progressives and Democrats in Congress could easily sell to their consituents at home as bring able to provide jobs locally and for long periods of time. I would urge the President to take notice here, but something tells me he already has.

[ Jobs, Jobs, Jobs -- Finally ]
Source: Campaign for America’s Future

Remember just a year or so ago, when people were dancing in the streets because George W Bush wouldn’t be their president anymore? When people were so thrilled that the Republicans were out of office that they couldn’t help but celebrate the future?

Sure, some of that euphoria has worn off, and the honeymoon is definitely over with President Obama, but if you ask anyone if they’d rather go back to the civil-liberties-stealing, war-funding, fear-mongering, terrorists-blaming days of a government run and managed by the Republicans, most Americans would visibly shudder in fear. Why? Because even though things aren’t perfect today and there are serious hardships at hand, people still feel like today is a better day than yesterday.

But what if the Republicans were still in control? Let’s take a look at what kinds of “change” we probably would have to deal with if they were still in power. Here are some of my favorites from a roundup at Alternet:

3) Stubbornly deny the existence of ominous climate change while blithely pumping more pollutants into the environment from lucrative, dirty industries and practices. Although reputable scientists say 350 carbon parts per atmospheric million is the safe limit for sustained life on Earth, Republicans dismiss the frightening fact that we’re already at a carbon level of roughly 390 ppm.

4) Remove “restrictive” regulations on everything from investment banks and credit card companies to a broad array of “profit-eroding” consumer protections, leaving the American masses exposed to a host of resulting abuses and dangers.

5) Continue to criticize and insufficiently fund public education, advocating private schooling instead, thus entirely ignoring that progressive public systems are used in every country that has education outcomes superior to our own.

6) Outlaw abortion, under a fraudulently moral guise, compelling the US to bloodily join those benighted, backward nations where thousands of already-born, living, breathing, socially functioning females perish because of sexist denials of their basic reproductive rights.

7) Continue to recite a Pledge of Allegiance whose last six words are “with liberty and justice for all,” while remaining numbly oblivious to the harsh hypocrisy of preventing our homosexual citizens from marrying.

8 ) Speak often and loftily of freedom, but engage in secret wiretapping, repression of domestic dissent, neo-McCarthyite witch hunts, Red-baiting name calling, and a panoply of Patriot Act transgressions against the Constitution of the United States…all under the misused rubric of “national security.”

Those are some good ones, but here are some shiners:

14) Give full vent to the intensely bigoted hatred that has crazed extremists dreaming of literally tearing Barack Obama to pieces and gassing all liberals…if only they could.

15) Place the livelihoods and lives of over 300 million Americans in the hands of incompetent ideological “purists” such as Sarah Palin.

Yeah, that sums it up nicely.

[ 15 Awful Things Republicans Would Do If They Had the Chance ]
Source: Alternet

Let’s start this off with the facts: first reported by the AP and quickly denounced by conservatives and conservative media as somehow being lapdogs of the White House, but then independantly verified and picked up by dozens of other news entities (thus as usual, leaving conservatives out in the cold whining again when the truth doesn’t match up with their world view), we got the following good news last week:

Some 640,000 jobs exist nationwide as a direct result of the government’s record economic stimulus program, the Obama administration reported Friday.

The White House released a detailed tally, allowing Americans to see how many jobs have been saved or created in their own state or ZIP code. California and North Carolina were among the states reaping the most jobs so far, on a per capita basis. Both those states have higher-than-average unemployment rates, and the administration highlighted this pattern.

“The Recovery Act is creating jobs where they are needed the most,” White House economist Jared Bernstein said in a report accompanying the data, which are viewable at http://www.recovery.gov/Pages/home.aspx.

According to the Christian Science Monitor’s initial review of the data, the White House report found that $159 billion in stimulus spending is providing nearly 2100 jobs for every million people in the country. That number, again, reflects direct impacts reported by states and businesses receiving the money.

California and North Carolina have each reaped more than 3,000 jobs per million people.

Now that’s the good news. The better news is that because the stimulus money has been coming out at a slow but steady pace – exactly the bane of conservative politicians who have been whining that it hasn’t done enough or moved fast enough – these jobs are jobs that will have funding for a while, and there are even more jobs that will be saved or created because there’s more money in the tap – a lot more.

But the picture isn’t completely rosy, and a number of areas around the country, including some where the local legislatures and politicians have resisted spending stimulus cash, lag behind in job creation even though the money is there to use:

Although the White House appears to be correct that many hard-hit states have reaped above-average job gains, some states with higher-than-average unemployment lag behind. Florida shows about 1,600 jobs per million residents, and Ohio 1,500. Michigan and Nevada, hit hard by an automotive recession and housing slump, respectively, report job gains that are barely above average.

Friday’s White House report covers much of the spending that has occurred under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act this year, but not all. It includes federal contracts and grants to states.

The report does not track the impact of expanded safety net programs (like unemployment insurance), tax cuts, or small business lending. Those programs are also having an impact on US consumer spending and hence on jobs.

Western states fared well.

The states with the biggest job gains, on a per capita basis, are Montana and Washington State (both with more than 5,000 per million residents). Alaska came in third. The states showing the fewest jobs were Texas and Pennsylvania, with about 800 and 600 jobs per million residents, respectively.

Teaching and construction jobs made up a large share of all jobs saved or created under the stimulus, thanks largely to aid flowing to state and local governments.

In a conference call with reporters, administration officials said the jobs also flowed in some cases to areas with lots of federal facilities (including the District of Columbia) or nuclear-waste cleanups under way.

Stay tuned to this story, there’s more to come, and while it’ll all be good news because jobs will be saved or created, the trick is going to be WHERE those jobs are saved and created, and whether it’ll actually come out that some of these districts that need the most help but are represented by conservatives that would rather leave the cash on the table than help the people they claim to represent could have fared better if they had made use of the available funds.

[ Economic Stimulus: Which States have Gained the Most Jobs ]
Source: The Christian Science Monitor