THE SHUTDOWN AND DEBT LIMIT (RECAP)

On the TV political analysis show, Morning Joe, the other morning, Joe Scarborough and another conservative bemoaned Democrat Senate leader Harry Reid holding up 14 bills the House of Representative passed opening this and that part of the government from the House instituted shut down.  I suppose it is only natural when you are in the wrong that you try to justify your actions and blame it on the "other guy."

Pardon me, but there was a bill before the House, that Speaker John Boehner refused to let be voted upon that would have prevented the shut down for 12 weeks (sic!).*  Furthermore, the bill was in effect a Republican bill drafted and passed in the Senate that carried a budget actually not only below the original Paul Ryan level but even below the Sequester limit and significantly below what the Senate Democrats wanted (see figure).  The Democrats in the Senate helped pass this bill in a futile attempt to get a clean continuation resolution  bill. It turned out that budgetary success wasn't  enough for the House Republicans so they added bigger things to it than the bill itself (like destroying the ACA or Obamacare).  Though the Republican dominated House passed various bills opening up various agencies and attacking the ACA, they were held up in the Senate that was first asking for a clean continuing resolution bill such as the one they had passed.

However, the continuing resolution bill was not the only problem  After years of complaining that the Senate never came forth with a budget, this fiscal year they finally did.  The House also had a budget, but, again, Republican House Speaker Boehner refused to let their bill go to a conference committee to find an agreement between the two bills.  The Senate requested a conference committee 18 times.**  Included here is the record in excruciating detail.***

So spin as they might, the Republicans cannot squirm out of the responsibility for the October budget and debt limit fiascos.

It is interesting that in the final compromise bill, the government has been reopened for 12 weeks (as in the original continuing resolution), there is to be a conference Senate-House committee on the budget (that had been requested by the Senate for half a year), and income verification of earnings from ACA (Obamacare) recipients of subsidies (which is in the original ACA bill).  That's the bright side, but we get to go through this again in the middle of January.  Republican Sen. Mich Mcconnell, minority leader of the Senate, says there will be no shutdown in January (http://www.drudge.com/news/173116/mcconnell-promises-no-more-shutdowns).

* http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/budget/news/2013/09/30/76026/the-senate-continuing-resolution-is-already-a-compromise/
** http://www.chrisweigant.com/2013/10/10/a-complete-timeline-of-republican-obstructionism-on-budget-negotiations-they-are-now-demanding-part-2/
***
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/chris-weigant/a-complete-timeline-of-re_b_4074372.html
http://www.chrisweigant.com/2013/10/10/a-complete-timeline-of-republican-obstructionism-on-budget-negotiations-they-are-now-demanding-part-2/

SOME THOUGHTS ON THE RECENT ELECTIONS

First of all, I am thankful that we had two such fine families running for president.

Then I regret that the American electorate demands such negative campaigning.  Unfortunately if one side does it, the other must also.  The electorate says they don't like it, but they do pay attention to it.  In this regard, the Democrats seemed to be more effective in their negative campaigning than the Republicans.

After all the money spent by outside groups such as Super PACS in the campaign, we ended up having the same Democratic president, an increase in Democratic Senators by two (but not enough to break filibusters) and  an increase of Democratic Representatives by seven (but not enough to take over the House).  The electorate seems to say to our politicians "Make it work!"

Mitch McConnell's first priority of defeating the President didn't work.  Will we face another four years of total obstruction?

Somehow Republicans are going to have to learn how to love Hispanics and quit kicking them in the teeth.  It is going to be very hard for them, but Hispanics tend to be conservative and can be a natural component of a conservative movement.

There are no precedents in our politics anymore.  It used to be that politics was said to stop at the borders, but no longer. The immediate politicalization of the Benghazi attack on September 11 shows that.  I really thought that Benghazi couldn't be made to last until the election proved to be unfounded as the media was more than willing to keep this issue going.  Ronald Reagan suffered both the Lebanese Embassy bombing* in 1983 in which  63 people died was never politicized by the Democrats nor was the Beirut (Lebanon) base bombing in which 299 American and French forces were killed.*  These two disasters have not stopped Ronald Reagan from becoming deified by many Republicans, no doubt by some of those who want to keep the Benghazi issue alive even after the election.

Romney's demonizaton of the 47% who pay no Federal income tax as being lazy dependents may be unfortunate but is a widely held view of many Republicans.  I know this both from Republicans I know and from boards on Motley Fool.  But it also does insult many of the white working class people who vote Republican.  Please remember that 47% of the Households earn less than $47,000/yr which undoubtedly includes many of white workers.  One cause of this lack of Federal income tax payments is the child tax credit where there is a $1000 per child deduction from their taxes, and this deduction was raised under the Bush-43 administration from $500/child to $1,000/child.**

The Romney claim that he knows how to generate jobs is both right and wrong.  Private equity, at least in the short term, eliminates jobs and does not create them.  That is the first thing they do, fire people.  Labor is the elastic component of our system.  However in the beginning of Bain Capital, they emphasized Start Ups which do create new jobs.  Romney switched to private equity because it was a quicker way to make money and that is what Bain Capital is all about.  There is nothing wrong with that.  Whether in the long term private equity creates jobs, I don't know , but suspect that it doesn't.

But weren't start ups what Obama was doing in promoting alternative energy?  In spite of the Solyndra failure, the amount of losses in the Federal government Start Ups program is small.  Even Solyndra, however, served a good purpose because the Solyndra system didn't use the special glass used to solar energy.  Their approach caused the price of the special glass to plummet to make Solyndra uneconomic.  I have not seen any article examining whether the price of glass plummeting has saved more money in solar energy panels than the losses on Solyndra, but over time it might.  Personally I wish the government would have taken Solyndra to production before closing it down.  If you are going to be involved in start ups, there are going to be failures and the emphasis needs to be on the net.

There is a point in saying that the Federal government shouldn't be choosing winners and losers of course; however, the government does this sort of thing all the time.  Think how important the government emphasis by NASA and the DoD on miniaturization of electronics has been not only to producing inexpensive desk top computers but now the tablets and smart phones.  Consider the World Wide Web (WWW) and Geographic Positions Systems (GPS) for just two.  These were developed for military purposes.  The important thing was really permitting these two innovations to be released into the public sector where private industry could promote them for Civilian uses.

*  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1983_United_States_embassy_bombing; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1983_Beirut_barracks_bombing

** http://www.irs.gov/uac/Ten-Facts-about-the-Child-Tax-Credit

COMEBACK KID COMES BACK -- AGAIN!

Well!  So Obama came back to be reelected after all.  He has fooled me several times (an example is getting Obamacare), and here I had suggested he might be the best one-term president ever (http://stopcontinentaldrift.blogspot.com/2010/08/best-one-term-president-ever.html).  I did, however, protect myself a bit in writing " Therefore I feel that President Obama probably will be a one-term president no matter his other outstanding accomplishments; however, we have learned that it is dangerous to count out The Comeback Kid."  And so he did.  There is concern that Obama has not outlined a visionary agenda for his second term, but there is much to his first term that still need to be consummated.  A good example is that the Dodd-Frank bill is still being assimilated with maybe two-thirds of the regulations still to be decided.   Obamacare is not yet fully implemented.  And then there is the Dream Act still to be consummated  as well as the infrastructure legislation among others.  Also the "fiscal cliff" seems to need to be dealt with.

Will Republicans be more flexible in doing the nations' business?  Mitch McConnell's stated primary goal of defeating President Obama's reelection didn't work out so well.  Will Republican's somehow grow to love Hispanic Americans?  Oh sure, they do have a few Republican Hispanic governors,  Senators and Representative, but, after all, Obama did get 71% of the Hispanic vote.  Are Republican's happy that they kept Elizabeth Warren from being head of the Consumer Protection Agency only to have her take away a Senate seat from them?

So it has happened again.   As I type this, the stock exchanges are down big time although in 80% of the Democratic Presidencies, the S&P500 has been up and the DJIA almost as much.

It will interesting to follow.  But it sure appears that Obamamcare is protected.

WORST AMERICAN POLITICS EVER?

Over the last 20 years we have seen the evolution of the worst American politcs ever which is not to say that there have been previous intervals of bad politics. Consider: President Clinton was impeached in December of 1998 for trivial, if disgusting, sexual indiscretions in the Oval Office. The only other president to be impeached was Andrew Johnson in 1868, but at least he was impeached for violating the Tenure of Office Act, passed over Johnson's veto the previous year, that said certain office holders could not be removed by the president without approval by the Senate. The group involved were called the Radical Republicans: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radical_Republican.

I find it interesting that the group to impeach President Clinton was a group of radical Republicans led by Rep Gingrich some 130 years later. In a loose way the Radical Republicans of the 1860s were the equivalent of the "tea party" now. Both were groups within the Republican Party that controlled the Republican Party.

Nearly 14 years later with Republicans controlling the House of Representatives, we have for the first time ever the Attorney General of the United States has been held in contempt of Congress, allegedly for failure to turn over certain documents regarding an operation called Fast and Furious (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ATF_gunwalking_scandal), a program started in late 2006 under the George W. Bush administration and discontinued in 2011 under the Obama. This program is difficult summarize, and you should read the articles cited. Apparently ATF officials monitored the sale of guns by middle men who transported or passed them on to others on their way to Mexican cartels and other outlaws. The AFT officials were told not to interdict this passage of firearms because of second amendment issues and difficulties in prosecution. About 7,000 documents were turned over to the oversight committee, but another 1,600 were requested that were refused because of "Executive Privilege," the first such claim by the Obama administration.

So the two presidential impeachments and a congressional contempt of Congress for an Attorney General have all been conducted by the Republican Party, two of these in the last 20 years. If the Republican Party cannot impeach a president, then they go after one of his appointees. I believe we are living in a sad era of politics in the United States in which the Republican Party does everything in its power to destroy a Democratic Presidency, should they be elected. The efforts are not restricted to impeachments and contempts of Congress. See Clinton in: http://stopcontinentaldrift.blogspot.com/2012/05/land-mines-in-way-of-becoming-great.html. Mitch McConnell even has said in 2010, "The most import thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president." Please note that he didn't say to reduce unemployment, or reduce taxes on business, or increase manufacturing in the U.S., etc., but that he wants to defeat the president (http://thinkprogress.org/politics/2010/10/25/126242/mcconnell-obama-one-term/?mobile=nc). He has also said that to provide health care for 30 million Americans that don't have it is not the issue (http://www.politicususa.com/mitch-mcconnell-tells-millions-americans-healthcare-you-arent-issue.html).