Obama's plan is having a bumpy ride

As the specifics of President-elect Obama's proposed economic recovery plan have started to circulate more widely over the past several days, criticism of the proposed is coming from those who ought to be Obama's most reliable cheerleaders.

Here's the nut of the plan from today's Wall Street Journal:

Mr. Obama's team has laid out some components of his plan: a $500-per-worker tax cut; tax write-offs for businesses suffering losses in 2008 and 2009; incentives for business investment; about $100 billion for health care, to temporarily take on more of the states' burden for Medicaid and to finance computerized medical records; billions for old-style building projects targeting roads, bridges, water systems and schools; and billions more to foster alternative energy and energy efficiency.

So, who has a problem with that?

• House Speaker Nancy Pelosi on repeal of the Bush tax cuts now (which Obama has not committed to do) instead of letting them expire at the end of this year: ""Put me down as clearly as you possibly can as one who wants to have those tax cuts for the wealthiest in America repealed."
• Senate Budget Chairman Kent Conrad on the $500 payroll tax credit: "How much lift is that going to give?" he said. "I don't think there's much bang for the buck there."
• Sen. Ron Wyden, who sits on the Finance Committee, on the $3,000 business tax credit for each new job created: "There's just not a lot of history of that working very well."
• Economy guru Paul Krugman on the size of the stimulus plan: "Mr. Obama’s prescription doesn’t live up to his diagnosis. The economic plan he’s offering isn’t as strong as his language about the economic threat. In fact, it falls well short of what’s needed."
• Columnist E.J. Dionne assessing economists' (like Krugman's) perception of tax cuts: "Many economists, particularly but not exclusively liberals, argue that government spending programs stimulate the economy more quickly than tax cuts. Recipients of tax cuts might choose to save rather than spend the money they get back or use it to pay down debt."

Democrat, Democrat, Democrat, Democrat and Democrat.

I get that Republicans love tax cuts and Obama wants bipartisan support for the recovery plan, but there's no reason to think that $500 tax rebates will make any more of an impact on the economy than the last round of stimulus checks.

What happened to doing well by doing good? Why not cut payroll taxes on the first $25,000 of household income and target a modest gas-tax increase toward transportation infrastructure? Why not repeal the Bush tax cuts (as promised) and apply them to lower-income brackets?

Bipartisan support should not come at the expense of putting our best economic foot forward. The Republican congressmen who would not support a plan for lack of enough tax cuts represent the minority view on the issue -- as evidenced by the fact that they lost huge numbers in both houses.

Rundown of 2008 New Yorker fiction

Max Magee at The Millions blog has a phenomenal post summarizing all of the short stories that appeared in The New Yorker in 2008, finding "suburban malaise" a common theme among many of them. Each blurb has a brief synopsis and links to the author's recent work.

My favorite stories of that bunch that I've read so far -- I am perpetually behind on New Yorkers and still have a good dozen 2008 issues left to read -- are "Raj, Bohemian," by Hari Kunzru, an inventive, paranoid little nugget; "The Dinner Party," by Joshua Ferris, a darkly funny riff on boring dinner parties; and "Clara," by Roberto Bolaño, about love and distance.

I would welcome suggestions on how to work in more New Yorker and book-reading time, but I already know. Less TV.

Sunday shows: Jan. 4, 2009

Talking head lineup for Sunday, Jan. 4, 2009:

* NBC's "Meet the Press": Guest: Harry Reid. Panel: Richard Engel, NBC News; Jeffrey Goldberg, The Atlantic; Katty Kay, BBC World News America, Andrea Mitchell, NBC News.

* ABC's "This Week with George Stephanopoulos": Guests: Illinois Senate nominee Roland Burris, Sens. Richard Durbin and Mitch McConnell. Panel: Katrine vanden Heuvel, The Nation; George Will, ABC News; Jonathan Karl, ABC News; Cokie Roberts, ABC News.

David Gregory continues to dust Mr. Steph on guests. And on panelists. (Gees, isn't it time to put Cokie Roberts and George Will to pasture?)

* CBS's "Face the Nation": Another exit interview with Dick Cheney.

* CNN's "Late Edition": Guests: New Jersey Gov. Jon Corzine, South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford, robotronic Mitt Romney.

Krugman: It's the GOP's own fault

Paul Krugman sets aside economics this morning to explain why the Republicans have been sucking it so hard here lately: If you run the government like government doesn't matter, it will eventually smack you in the face. Also, Republicans don't like black people.

If the Bush administration became a byword for policy bungles, for government by the unqualified, well, it was just following the advice of leading conservative think tanks: after the 2000 election the Heritage Foundation specifically urged the new team to “make appointments based on loyalty first and expertise second.”

Contempt for expertise, in turn, rested on contempt for government in general. “Government is not the solution to our problem,” declared Ronald Reagan. “Government is the problem.” So why worry about governing well?

Where did this hostility to government come from? In 1981 Lee Atwater, the famed Republican political consultant, explained the evolution of the G.O.P.’s “Southern strategy,” which originally focused on opposition to the Voting Rights Act but eventually took a more coded form: “You’re getting so abstract now you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is blacks get hurt worse than whites.” In other words, government is the problem because it takes your money and gives it to Those People.

Krugman concludes that Obama has plenty of latitude to do what he needs to to fix the economy's foundational problems.

Mr. Obama therefore has room to be bold. If Republicans try a 1993-style strategy of attacking him for promoting big government, they’ll learn two things: not only has the financial crisis discredited their economic theories, the racial subtext of anti-government rhetoric doesn’t play the way it used to.

That is partly true. Barack Obama is going to sink or swim based on how the economy performs in the next few years, but there is a segment -- a shrinking but significant segment, mostly in the Deep South -- that is suspicious of Obama because he is a Democrat and because he is black.

Still, if Obama wins over even 10 percent of McCain voters in Georgia, he could reduce the Republican South to a block of seven tiny states -- South Carolina, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Arkansas, Tennessee, Kentucky -- that will have fewer than 60 electoral votes even after the 2010 redistricting.

How would a revenue-neutral gas tax work?

Two different op-ed pieces -- one from the left and one from the right -- call for the incoming Congress and Obama Administration to reduce oil consumption by increasing the gas tax and off-setting it dollar for dollar with payroll or income tax cuts.

Both state essentially the same reasons that we need to reduce oil consumption.

Columnist Tom Friedman, who argues the same points in Hot, Flat, and Crowded:

There has to be a system that permanently changes consumer demand, which would permanently change what Detroit makes, which would attract more investment in battery technology to make electric cars, which would hugely help the expansion of the wind and solar industries — where the biggest drawback is the lack of batteries to store electrons when the wind isn’t blowing or the sun isn’t shining. A higher gas tax would drive all these systemic benefits.

The same is true in geopolitics. A gas tax reduces gasoline demand and keeps dollars in America, dries up funding for terrorists and reduces the clout of Iran and Russia at a time when Obama will be looking for greater leverage against petro-dictatorships. It reduces our current account deficit, which strengthens the dollar. It reduces U.S. carbon emissions driving climate change, which means more global respect for America. And it increases the incentives for U.S. innovation on clean cars and clean-tech.

Conservative economist Arthur B. Laffer -- yes that Laffer -- and Republican congressman Bob Englis:

As long as national security risks aren’t factored into the cost of gasoline and as long as carbon dioxide can be emitted without penalty, oil will continue to have an advantage over emerging fuels in the marketplace, and we’ll continue our ruinous addiction to it.
...
A carbon tax would attach the national security and environmental costs to carbon-based fuels like oil, causing the market to recognize the price of these negative externalities.

And both offer the same mechanism for making an increase in the gas tax palatable to the people who would get hit at the pump.

Tom Friedman:

Obama is coming in with enormous popularity. This is his best window of opportunity to impose a gas tax. And he could make it painless: offset the gas tax by lowering payroll taxes, or phase it in over two years at 10 cents a month.

Laffer and Englis:

A carbon tax that isn’t accompanied by a reduction in other taxes is a nonstarter. Fiscal conservatives would gladly trade a carbon tax for a reduction in payroll or income taxes, but we can’t go along with an overall tax increase.

Using the tax code to effect behavioral changes is not new. (Why do you think charitable contributions are tax deductible?) The difficulty in pushing through a big increase in the gas tax would be: (1) structuring the tax code in such a way that the changes are not regressive, i.e., do not result in an overall tax increase to the people who can least afford it, and (2) selling it to a populous that it wary of anything that looks like a new tax when there is already enough worry about jobs and retirement accounts.

Would it be regressive?

A quickie payroll calculation, shows that Person A with a $35,000 salary and typical income tax withholding pays about $120 a week in FICA, Medicare and income tax withholding. Cutting those payroll taxes to $80 a week and increasing the gas tax by $2 a gallon, Person A's taxes would be revenue neutral if he uses 20 gallons of gas a week.

Person B with an $18,000 salary and typical income tax withholding pays about $45 a week in FICA, Medicare and income tax withholding. You would have to nearly eliminate Person B's payroll taxes to put him in the same position as Person A. Person B's taxes would be -- just barely -- revenue neutral.

How to adjust the withholding? Based on IRS guidelines, an employer and employee now pay 6.2% of the employee's first $102,000 of income in FICA (Social Security) withholding and 1.45% of all of the employee's income in Medicare withholding. More progressive payroll taxes would need to: (1) scale the FICA and Medicare withholding by income the same as income-tax withholding, i.e., higher-income employees would pay higher percentages of withholding, (2) begin withholding at a certain income level, i.e., not withhold on the first dollar of income, or (3) some combination of the two.

In the Jan. 5 Weekly Standard cover story, "The Case for a Net-Zero Gas Tax," Charles Krauthammer calls for a more modest $1 increase in the federal gas tax to be offset by a $14-a-week reduction in FICA withholding.

Here is how it works. The simultaneous enactment of two measures: A $1 increase in the federal gasoline tax--together with an immediate $14 a week reduction of the FICA tax. Indeed, that reduction in payroll tax should go into effect the preceding week, so that the upside of the swap (the cash from the payroll tax rebate) is in hand even before the downside (the tax) kicks in.

The math is simple. The average American buys roughly 14 gallons of gasoline a week. The $1 gas tax takes $14 out of his pocket. The reduction in payroll tax puts it right back. The average driver comes out even, and the government makes nothing on the transaction. (There are, of course, more drivers than workers--203 million vs. 163 million. The 10 million unemployed would receive the extra $14 in their unemployment insurance checks. And the elderly who drive--there are 30 million licensed drivers over 65--would receive it with their Social Security payments.)

Convincing Americans that a $2 or even $1 increase in the federal gas tax is good for them will not be easy, but it is worth the effort.

Moving tax dollars from income to gas would almost certainly reduce fuel consumption. Laffer and Inglis: "We need to impose a tax on the thing we want less of (carbon dioxide) and reduce taxes on the things we want more of (income and jobs)." Krauthammer: "The $14 in cash can be spent on anything. You can blow it all on gas by driving your usual number of miles, or you can drive a bit less and actually have money in your pocket for something else."

Consumers proved in July and August that they will buy more fuel-efficient cars and drive them less when gas is $4 a gallon than when it is $2 a gallon. If there is no downside to the pocketbook, why not make it permanent?

Daddy Brzezinski rips Joe Scarborough

Zbignew Brzezinski to Joe Scarborough today on "Morning Joe" about Bush's Middle East policy:

[Y]ou have such a stunningly superficial knowledge of what went on that it's almost embarrassing to listen to you.

Oh, snap! It may have been better than watching Scarborough flounder around after his on-air f-bomb in November.

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

George Bush has read how many books?

The Bush Revisionist History Project is in full swing. In interviews on Sunday, Condi Rice told CBS News that Bush "has delivered policies that are going to stand the test of time," and Laura Bush had this exchange with Chris Wallace on "Fox News Sunday":

WALLACE: And how do you respond to some people — and you know this is going to be true, because you look at the polls — who are going to view this as a failed presidency?

L. BUSH: Well, I know it's not. And so I don't really feel like I need to respond to people that view it that way. And I think history will judge and we'll see later.

In Friday's Wall Street Journal, Karl Rove called Bush a closet intellectual. I shit you not.

In the 35 years I've known George W. Bush, he's always had a book nearby. He plays up being a good ol' boy from Midland, Texas, but he was a history major at Yale and graduated from Harvard Business School. You don't make it through either unless you are a reader.

Or unless your dad is the director of the CIA. Whatever.

Rove, Condi, et al., will spend the next two decades revising the Dubya Years: recasting the administration's foreign policy from a failure on every front -- Afghanistan, Iraq, the Middle East, Burma, Darfur -- into a reasoned response to 9/11; recasting Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo and waterboarding from embarrassing violations of human rights to necessary steps in the War on Terror; and recasting the financial meltdown as, um, as -- I have no idea how they'll spin that one.

Dubious as the 200-book claim sounds, Richard Cohen didn't call bullshit in today's Washington Post column -- instead turning the book list into another example of Bush's decision-now-evidence-later approach to governing.

It is awfully late in the day for Rove -- and, presumably, Bush -- to assert the president's intellectual bona fides. Now feeling the hot breath of history, they are dropping the good ol' boy persona and picking up the ol' bifocals one. But the books themselves reveal -- actually, confirm -- something about Bush that maybe Rove did not intend. They are not the reading of a widely read man, but instead the books of a man who seeks -- and sees -- vindication in every page. Bush has always been the captive of fixed ideas. His books just support that.

The list Rove provides is long, but it is narrow. It lacks whole shelves of books on how and why the Iraq war was a mistake, one that metastasized into a debacle. Absent is Rajiv Chandrasekaran's "Imperial Life in the Emerald City," Tom Ricks's "Fiasco," George Packer's "The Assassins' Gate" or, on a related topic, Jane Mayer's "The Dark Side" about "extraordinary rendition" and other riffs on the Constitution. Absent too is Barton Gellman's "Angler," about Dick Cheney, the waterboarder in chief.

Jason Linkins did call bullshit Monday in The Huffington Post.

Consider your own reading habits and imagine the sheer amount of free time it would take you to read ninety-five books in a year. This is the feat that Karl Rove insists President Bush pulled off in 2006. Granted, at first one suspects that many of those may have been picture books, or pop-up books, or brochures for pop-up books that came in the mail, addressed to "RESIDENT." Still, we told are Bush read many weighty tomes during 2006. Of course, one of those was Team Of Rivals, and I've decided that I no longer believe anyone when they say they've read Team Of Rivals. Bush is said to have read 51 books in 2007 and 40 this year -- a curious decline, given that this year, Bush seemed to have much more free time at his disposal.

For the record, I call bullshit.

Energy, education, healthcare, infrastructure

If you can tear yourself away from all the Blago bloviation and meaningless "news" about Caroline Kennedy, there was some actual news from Team Obama over the weekend about how the new administration is going to approach the economy.

On Sunday, Larry Summers and David Axelrod talked about the president's recovery proposal, which Summers, writing in the Washington Post, called the American Recovery and Reinvestment Plan. (That's the first time I've seen the transition put a name on the evolving plan.)

Investments in an array of areas -- including energy, education, infrastructure and health care -- offer the potential of extraordinarily high social returns while allowing our country to address some long-standing national challenges and put our economy on a solid footing for years to come.

Those are four of the areas that the New York Times reported in a Dec. 21 article as areas that Obama staffers had identified as targets for stimulus and tax cuts.

On "Meet the Press," Axelrod answered questions about Hamas (one president at a time) and Blagojevich (we've said what we're going to say) before talking about the economy. Axelrod reinforced the Summers op-ed.

So we're talking about investing in alternative energy projects that will help us achieve energy independence. We're talking about rebuilding the nation's classrooms to bring them into the 21st century, and labs and libraries so our kids can compete. Health: In the area of health, IT, so that we can computerize medical records, which will cut costs, reduce errors and improve, and improve care. And of course, infrastructure -- rebuilding our crumbling bridges and roads and waterways. These are things that will put people to work, but also that will strengthen our economy in the long run, and that's where we're focusing our attention.

Axelrod said no decision had been made about whether to repeal the Bush tax cuts in 2009 or let them expire in 2010.

Well, look, the question is on the Bush tax cuts for the very wealthiest Americans, and it's something that we plainly can't afford moving forward. And whether it, it, it expires or whether we repeal it a little bit early we'll determine later, but it's going to go. It has to go.