Month: August 2012

The thing about yesterday’s 6-MINUTE CLIP is that it’s freely available, at least to anyone with Internet access, and everyone in America should see it.  They are free to disagree with it, although I would love to know their logic.  But everyone who’s been exposed to the “job creators” mantra, over and endlessly over, needs to at least have one shot at understanding why it’s a crock.  And why Steve Jobs was not deterred from starting Apple because tax rates were high, and why no business, small or otherwise, is going to pass up the chance to hire workers needed to increase profits because of the rate at which those extra profits will be taxed.

The thing about THE NEWSROOM, especially, for example, Episode Three about the 112^th Congress and the Tea Party and the Koch brothers and the news media, is that it’s only available to those who have HBO (though if you do, you can watch that episode right now on your computer or iPhone via HBOGO).  But, boy, would it be great if everybody saw it.  Smart, funny, entertaining, dramatic – raising issues fundamental to the course of our democracy.

The difference between the Nick Hanauer clip and “The Newsroom” – apart from one’s being readily available and the other not – is that, realistically, those predisposed to tuning out Rush Limbaugh’s “four pillars of deceit” — “science, academia, government, and the media” — will find a dozen reasons to dismiss it.  For starters, Episode Three guest stars Jane Fonda (knuckling under to the Koch brothers, but still).

So, realistically, THE NEWSROOM will likely not reach the people who need to see it – although it’s as gripping as, and even more important than, Aaron Sorkin’s previous series, THE WEST WING.

But that 6-minute “job creators” clip?  Where the only “performer” is a self-made American billionaire?  With a short, compelling, logical message?  That, maybe, they will watch.  If you know anyone who believes that lowering taxes on the rich creates jobs, send them that clip.

Henry Ford, that old commie, may really have been onto something when he paid his workers enough to afford to buy what he was selling.

In this must-see 6-minute TED talk* — initially withheld from a wider audience — serial entrepreneur Nick Hanauer makes the case that it’s the middle class who are the job creators.

So if we went back to tax rates high enough to pay people decently to modernize our crumbling infrastructure, we’d accomplish three things:  We’d put those people to work.  We’d arrest the decay (even, here and there, leapfrog back into first place).  And — by returning people to the middle class — we’d be swelling the ranks of the job creators.  America’s normally virtuous economic cycle, disrupted at times of massive inequality, could resume.  Powerfully.

This is exactly the opposite of what Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan propose.

It is exactly the opposite of what Rush Limbaugh, Joe the Plumber, Joe the Scarborough, Michele Bachmann, and Sarah Palin preach.

It is exactly the opposite of what the Koch brothers (who are busily buying Congress and the White House) hope they are paying for.

*Thanks to reader Mark Langenderfer for reminding me of this talk.

THREE GOOD THINGS ABOUT PAUL RYAN

In Paul Ryan the Republicans have chosen a man who co-sponsored the national personhood bill — a good thing if you believe a rape victim should be forced by the government to carry her rapist’s child to term (and that common forms of contraception and should be banned) . . . a man with a near-zero percent rating from the Human Rights Campaign — a good thing if you believe gays do not deserve equal rights under the law (he didn’t even want the hate crimes law extended to cover gays) . . . a man whose tax plan would slash Mitt Romney’s tax rate from its already remarkable 13.9% to less than 1% — a good thing if you think the problem with America today is that guys and gals like Mitt Romney are over-taxed.

Ask your Republican friends whether this is really who they are — or whether, with the entire political landscape having sifted so far to the right these last few decades, they’re not actually more comfortable identifying as Independents.  And voting for a man under whose Administration the stock market has doubled over the last three years, corporate profits are at record highs, private sector jobs have expanded for 29 straight months, stem cell research lines have sextupled, our standing in the world has soared, and our number-one enemy has been decimated.

Not such a bad record considering the disaster he was handed and the Republican determination to see him fail.

THE POLICY GAP

Ezra Klein explores it here:

. . . The policy gap, put simply, is this: Obama has proposed policies. Mitt Romney hasn’t.

It is important to say that this exists separately from any judgments about the quality of either man’s policies. You can believe every idea Obama has proposed is a socialist horror inspired by Kenyan revenge fantasies. This would, I think, be a strange judgment to reach about plans to invest in infrastructure, temporarily double the size of the payroll tax cuts and raise the marginal tax rate on income over $250,000 by 4.5 percentage points. Nevertheless, Obama’s policy proposals are sufficiently detailed that they can be fully assessed and conclusions — even odd ones — confidently drawn. Romney’s policies are not.

Romney’s offerings are more like simulacra of policy proposals. They look, from far away, like policy proposals. They exist on his Web site, under the heading of “Issues,” with subheads like “Tax” and “Health care.” But read closely, they are not policy proposals. They do not include the details necessary to judge Romney’s policy ideas. In many cases, they don’t contain any details at all.

Take taxes. Romney has promised a “permanent, across-the-board 20 percent cut in marginal rates,” alongside a grab bag of other goodies, like the end of “the death tax.” Glenn Hubbard, his top economic adviser, has promised that the plan will “broaden the tax base to ensure that tax reform is revenue-neutral.”

It is in the distance between “cut in marginal rates” and “revenue-neutral” that all the policy happens. That is where Romney must choose which deductions to cap or close. It’s where we learn what his plan means for the mortgage-interest deduction, and the tax-free status of employer health plans and the Child Tax Credit. It is where we learn, in other words, what his plan means for people like you and me. And it is empty. Romney does not name even one deduction that he would cap or close. He even admitted, in an interview with CNBC, that his plan “can’t be scored because those details have to be worked out.” . . .

But this much is clear: to make his cuts for the wealthy revenue-neutral (including his elimination of the estate tax on billionheirs), he will have to get more revenue from the not-wealthy.

. . . On financial regulation, Romney would “repeal Dodd-Frank and replace with streamlined, modern regulatory framework.” That is literally his entire plan. Three years after a homegrown financial crisis wrecked the global economy, the likely Republican nominee for president would repeal the new regulatory architecture and replace it with … something. . . .

. . . Romney’s vagueness is unique among modern presidential campaigns. . . . so far, Romney has refused to give voters the most basic information about what he would do as president. That means he has refused to give voters the most basic information necessary for them to make an informed choice this November. That’s not acceptable. And neither voters nor the media should accept it.

Look: things are rough out there.  But did I mention that the stock market has doubled in the last three years?  That we’ve gained private-sector jobs for 29 consecutive months (too slowly, because Republicans manufactured a debt ceiling crisis and blocked the American Jobs Act and its infrastructure investments that cry out to be done)?  That corporate profits are at record highs?  That the number of stem cell lines made available to researchers has sextupled?  That our standing in the world has soared?  That our number-one enemy has been decimated?

Ask your friends who like Romney (or hate Obama): why would we reverse course now?  Which was better for job creation and our national balance sheet: the Clinton policy of modestly higher taxes on the best off?  Or the the Bush policy of record-low taxes on the best off, which Romney wants to lower further still?  (For readers too young to recall: 23 million new jobs were created during the Clinton years and the talk by the end of his term was of “budget surpluses as far as the eye can see.”)

THREE GOOD THINGS ABOUT PAUL RYAN

In Paul Ryan the Republicans have chosen a man who co-sponsored the national personhood bill — a good thing if you believe a rape victim should be forced by the government to carry her rapist’s child to term (and that common forms of contraception and should be banned) . . . a man with a near-zero percent rating from the Human Rights Campaign — a good thing if you believe gays do not deserve equal rights under the law (he didn’t even want the hate crimes law extended to cover gays) . . . a man whose tax plan would slash Mitt Romney’s tax rate from its already remarkable 13.9% to less than 1% — a good thing if you think the problem with America today is that guys and gals like Mitt Romney are over-taxed.

Ask your Republican friends whether this is really who they are — or whether, with the entire political landscape having sifted so far to the right these last few decades, they’re not actually more comfortable identifying as Independents.  And voting for a man under whose Administration the stock market has doubled over the last three years, corporate profits are at record highs, private sector jobs have expanded for 29 straight months, stem cell research lines have sextupled, our standing in the world has soared, and our number-one enemy has been decimated.

Not such a bad record considering the disaster he was handed and the Republican determination to see him fail.

THE POLICY GAP

Ezra Klein explores it here:

. . . The policy gap, put simply, is this: Obama has proposed policies. Mitt Romney hasn’t.

It is important to say that this exists separately from any judgments about the quality of either man’s policies. You can believe every idea Obama has proposed is a socialist horror inspired by Kenyan revenge fantasies. This would, I think, be a strange judgment to reach about plans to invest in infrastructure, temporarily double the size of the payroll tax cuts and raise the marginal tax rate on income over $250,000 by 4.5 percentage points. Nevertheless, Obama’s policy proposals are sufficiently detailed that they can be fully assessed and conclusions — even odd ones — confidently drawn. Romney’s policies are not.

Romney’s offerings are more like simulacra of policy proposals. They look, from far away, like policy proposals. They exist on his Web site, under the heading of “Issues,” with subheads like “Tax” and “Health care.” But read closely, they are not policy proposals. They do not include the details necessary to judge Romney’s policy ideas. In many cases, they don’t contain any details at all.

Take taxes. Romney has promised a “permanent, across-the-board 20 percent cut in marginal rates,” alongside a grab bag of other goodies, like the end of “the death tax.” Glenn Hubbard, his top economic adviser, has promised that the plan will “broaden the tax base to ensure that tax reform is revenue-neutral.”

It is in the distance between “cut in marginal rates” and “revenue-neutral” that all the policy happens. That is where Romney must choose which deductions to cap or close. It’s where we learn what his plan means for the mortgage-interest deduction, and the tax-free status of employer health plans and the Child Tax Credit. It is where we learn, in other words, what his plan means for people like you and me. And it is empty. Romney does not name even one deduction that he would cap or close. He even admitted, in an interview with CNBC, that his plan “can’t be scored because those details have to be worked out.” . . .

But this much is clear: to make his cuts for the wealthy revenue-neutral (including his elimination of the estate tax on billionheirs), he will have to get more revenue from the not-wealthy.

. . . On financial regulation, Romney would “repeal Dodd-Frank and replace with streamlined, modern regulatory framework.” That is literally his entire plan. Three years after a homegrown financial crisis wrecked the global economy, the likely Republican nominee for president would repeal the new regulatory architecture and replace it with … something. . . .

. . . Romney’s vagueness is unique among modern presidential campaigns. . . . so far, Romney has refused to give voters the most basic information about what he would do as president. That means he has refused to give voters the most basic information necessary for them to make an informed choice this November. That’s not acceptable. And neither voters nor the media should accept it.

Look: things are rough out there.  But did I mention that the stock market has doubled in the last three years?  That we’ve gained private-sector jobs for 29 consecutive months (too slowly, because Republicans manufactured a debt ceiling crisis and blocked the American Jobs Act and its infrastructure investments that cry out to be done)?  That corporate profits are at record highs?  That the number of stem cell lines made available to researchers has sextupled?  That our standing in the world has soared?  That our number-one enemy has been decimated?

Ask your friends who like Romney (or hate Obama): why would we reverse course now?  Which was better for job creation and our national balance sheet: the Clinton policy of modestly higher taxes on the best off?  Or the the Bush policy of record-low taxes on the best off, which Romney wants to lower further still?  (For readers too young to recall: 23 million new jobs were created during the Clinton years and the talk by the end of his term was of “budget surpluses as far as the eye can see.”)

EVOLUTION OF THE HUMAN RACE

Tamara Hendrickson:  “While that video of the Olympic 100-meter race you linked to last week is absolutely fascinating and factual, it, sadly, doesn’t represent evolution of the human race.  Our evolution takes centuries and even millennia because we have such long life spans and so few children.  (These stats are compared to bacteria. A population of E. coli with enough food will double in 20 minutes and divide—produce copy cells—exponentially.)  Instead, the increases in speed graphically represented in the video reflect better nutrition (leading to taller, more fit people), antibiotics (fewer deaths), and huge advances in our understanding of human metabolism, nutrition specific for athletes, and the science of athletics (training regimens, muscle recovery, etc.)   None of this detracts from the fascinating observation that humans run a lot faster now than they did 100 years ago.  The Olympics are such an amazing testament to the capabilities of our race!”

WHAT IF SOLAR GOT THE SAME SUBSIDIES AS FOSSIL FUELS?

This dramatic graphic claims three things:

> As a taxpayer, you’ve paid $7.24 toward solar subsidies over te past five years — versus $521.73 for fossil fuels.

> Solar is cheaper than grid power in 14% of the country now – but would be cheaper in 100% of the country if it received an equal subsidy.

> The US has 39 times as much sun hitting it as Germany, but Germany generates 60 times as much solar energy.

Not every effort will succeed — witness Solyndra — but the above suggests the Obama Administration is serving us well by choosing not to cede the solar industry to China, which is investing a fortune in solar subsidies to dominate the energy of the future.  One Chinese report has projected solar becoming as cheap as coal  by 2015.

Jimmy Carter installed solar panels on the White House roof, Ronald Reagan removed them.  (This according to Michael Grunwald’s The NEW New Deal, out today.)  Not to say it’s more than symbolic — but it is symbolic.  Progressives progress.  Conservatives retrench.  Democrats boost expenditures for basic research, help kids afford college, sextuple the number of stem cell lines available for research, confront climate change.  Republicans tend to lean the other way.  Some even side with Rush Limbaugh, who calls “science” one of the “four pillars of deceit.”

YOUR TAXES

Seriously: if Romney wins, he plans to lower his own taxes and, though he doesn’t cop to it, raise yours.  Download the report of the Brookings analysis here.

ABSTRACT
This paper examines the tradeoffs among three competing goals that are inherent in a revenue-neutral income tax reform—maintaining tax revenues, ensuring a progressive tax system, and lowering marginal tax rates—drawing on the example of the tax policies advanced in presidential candidate Mitt Romney’s tax plan. Our major conclusion is that any revenue-neutral individual income tax change that incorporates the features Governor Romney has proposed would provide large tax cuts to high-income households, and increase the tax burdens on middle- and/or lower-income taxpayers.

The PBS NewsHour interview with the study’s co-author is here.  The New York Times reports on it here (“middle-income [taxpayers] would pay on average $546 more a year, according to the study, and upper-middle class taxpayers would pay $1,880 more, while the taxes of the richest 1 percent would be cut by $29,282”), noting the Romney team’s rebuttal that lower tax rates will lead to faster growth (it worked so well these last ten years) and that will lessen or eliminate the burden on the rest of us that Brookings projects.

In Paul Ryan, Mr. Romney has chosen a guy who shares his commitment to further — insane — tax cuts for the wealthy, while placing greater burdens on everyone else.  Somehow, this will get the economy moving?  Ryan’s House budget calls for deep cuts in education, from Head Start to college aid, and for shifting thousands of dollars in Medicare costs to seniors.  Romney’s choice Saturday just confirms the gravity of our own 85 days from now.  (Or sooner, if your state has early voting.)

MARS, SHMARZ — WHAT ABOUT THE COMET?

Usually, I just write fundraising pitches and click SEND — for better or worse.

The most recent one I planned to send my list  I thought might be too shrill, so I asked a wise donor — who had had nothing more to drink than a soda water with pomegranate juice — if I could test it out on her.

(We had been discussing our prospects for the election.)

She said:  “Sure.”

So I explained that there was a comet hurtling our way with a 70% chance of missing Earth — so we would likely barely notice — but a 30% chance it would blow us to smithereens . . . except that a new kind of force field had been developed that could almost surely divert the comet if we all just pooled our energy into doing so.

“Really?” her eyes widened.

Whether they were widening more at the comet or at the invention of the force field I do not know.

“Well, no, of course not!” I said, confused that she could be taking this literally. (As the Ugandan woman so marvelously explains to the disillusioned missionary near the end of THE BOOK OF MORMON: “Eeet . . . eeez . . . a . . . METAPHOR!”)

And then she got it.

“Oh,” she said.

And that’s the thing. The President will probably be reelected — in which case we’ll continue to make progress and will barely notice the catastrophe we dodged . . . but there’s a 30% chance Mr. Romney will win (intrade actually puts it at more like 41%), which will mean we failed to turn out enough votes to hold the White House OR the Senate, let alone take back the House, in which case Rush Limbaugh / Karl Rove, et al, will have a complete lock on all three branches of government. We will lose the Supreme Court for 20 years, democracy will give way to oligarchy, we will have a global depression (as the Republican austerity budget sucks hundreds of billions of dollars of demand OUT of the economy at exactly the time we should be putting hundreds of billions IN, to modernize our infrastructure), with all the war and horror global depressions are all too prone to lead to.

And all we have to do to avert it –- like the comet –- is pool our energy. Our votes, our voices, our Visa cards.

“It’s actually worse than the comet,” said my pal, warming to the analogy.

“Huh?”

(It is usually I, not my donors, who flirt with hyperbole. How could a Romney win be worse than the planet being blown to smithereens?)

“With the comet,” she explained, “we’d experience no pain. We’d just die instantly. We’d be living with the election for decades.”

Just as we are living now with the fall-out from the President’s predecessor.

We have 85 days. Fewer, really, because early voting starts in just a few weeks — and because it doesn’t really help to send a check the day before the election, when the comet is moments from impact. NOW is the time to bend its course.

Blame this pitch, if it’s too shrill, on my pal with the pomegranate and soda. She said I should go with it. But if you know folks who’ve not yet done all they can . . . because they “don’t do political giving” (time to make an exception!) . . . or because “Obama’s going to win” (not if we stand by as they outspend us by a billion dollars of superPAC money) . . . or because they “have another engagement that day” (truthfully, I don’t CARE if they come shoot hoops with the NBA stars –- it’s not about attending an event, it’s about climate change and stem cell research and the separation of church and state and what kind of country we’re going to be) . . .

. . . if you know folks like that, who are with us but have not yet done all they can, please tell them, with love but with urgency, that a comet is headed our way, and that all we have to do to divert it is make a modest but meaningful sacrifice. Like, say, 1% of our net worth.

Here.

As always, I’ll see the $$$ the minute it comes through, to say thanks.

[Or — if you’re not a part of QuickDonate yet — you should know that you can donate to the campaign with a single click in emails, online, or on your smartphone. All you need to do is securely save your payment info: here.]
Tomorrow:  Evolution of the Human Race v. Evolution of the E. Coli Bacterium . . . Solar v. Fossil . . . And More.

YOUR TAXES

Click here to see how you’d fare depending on who wins.

If you make $20 million a year (and are adequately hedged to weather a depression), the choice is clear:  you will come out ahead if the new guy wins.

Speaking of whom:

HORSE BALLET

Their candidate would have us believe he doesn’t follow dressage.  Matt Miller suggests this is mitticulous.

EVOLUTION OF THE HUMAN RACE

The 100-meter dash.  Very cool.

Hitting bookstores next week, as I mentioned a couple of days ago, The NEW New Deal by Michael Grunwald.

Mel White: “Your confession that you had only read the book jacket was hilarious BUT you and I both know that the publisher writes those blurbs.  I’m wondering if the blurb represents the author accurately. When you have time, write a followup piece to assure us.”

Indeed it does.  And it makes you want to scream at how little the country knows of the important, far-sighted, hopeful things the Administration has done.  For every 100 people who have heard of Solyndra, and think it’s a scandal (which it is not), is there even 1 who’s heard of ARPA-E and knows its its importance to our long-term prosperity and competitive position in thew world?

Ultimately [Grunwald writes of the $786 billion Recovery Act that turned out to be $831 billion], one of the most sweeping pieces of legislation in modern history [“in constant dollars, more than 50% bigger than the entire New Deal, twice as big as the Louisiana Purchase and Marshall Plan combined”] was reduced [in the pubic mind] to an afterthought.  In April, 2011, Obama’s most influential supporter asked him on national TV whether he wished he had started his presidency by focusing on the economy instead of health care.  “Oprah, I’ve got to tell you, we did start with the economy,” Obama replied with evident irritation.  “Remember, the first thing we did was pass a Recovery Act.”  Polls have found that most Americans see the stimulus as a giveaway to bankers, confusing it with the $700 billion financial bailout that passed before Obama was elected.  I interviewed several congressmen who were under the same misimpression.

This book aims to tell the story of the stimulus — how it happened, how it’s changing the country, how Republicans found their voice in opposing it, and how it’s been distorted by the Washington funhouse.  . . .

It was greeted with virtually unanimous opposition by congressional Republicans, who had secretly decided to fight Obama on just about everything.

“If he was for it,” explains former Republican senator George Voinovich of Ohio, “we had to be against it.”

And yet it prevented a full-scale depression and, as you will read, offers real hope for our future.  The same American ingenuity that could successfully land a one-ton nuclear-powered rover on Mars in the astounding way it just did — on Mars! — is being unleashed and nurtured in game-changing ways.

ARPA-E, modeled after DARPA, is a big piece of that effort.  And by the way?  When President Obama noted that entrepreneurs didn’t achieve their success entirely on their own — they had help from the folks who built the national infrastructure and perhaps from the public school system or government-backed student loans or government contracts or SBA loans — he might have mentioned DARPA, which gave us the Internet.  Can you think of any entrepreneurs whose success has depended partly on that?  The same will hold true of ARPA-E, and almost nobody knows about it.

Read the book.  Spread the word.  Vote to keep moving forward.  Vote for the party under whose leadership $10,000 would have grown to $415,000 since 1929 instead of $11,700.  Or — if you can’t bear to do that for some reason — stay home.

Yesterday I suggested that the 172,000 private-sector jobs gained in July were pretty good, considering the lengths the Republicans have gone to to keep from putting people back to work modernizing our infrastructure.  To show the progress made to date, I invited you to “click here to see it in graphic form.”

What the opposition tries to pin on Obama are the gigantic 2009 deficit (even though the 2009 fiscal year started more than a month before Obama was even elected, let alone sworn in) . . . and the job losses of his first few months, before he could realistically have had an effect on the job numbers.

As the website Political Irony has noted . . .

The next time Romney tries to blame Obama for disappointing job numbers, someone should remind him of what he said at a press conference in 2006 to reporters who were trying to hold him accountable for disappointing job creation numbers from his time as governor:

“You guys are bright enough to look at the numbers. I came in and the jobs had been just falling right off a cliff, I came in and they kept falling for 11 months. And if you are going to suggest to me that somehow the day I got elected, somehow jobs should have immediately turned around, well that would be silly. It takes awhile to get things turned around. We were in a recession, we were losing jobs every month.”

Your comments from yesterday’s post included:

Bob Sanderson:  “I’m pretty sure you’re right about the (lack of) influence of tax rates on job creators.  I own a small business, and I can’t remember ever contemplating my tax rate when considering the hiring of a new employee.”

Andrew Lees: “As a small business owner (micro biotech company), I can tell you taxes play almost no role in my business thinking, except to try to avoid doing anything that makes my (tax) life more complicated.  It’s affordable health care coverage that is at the top of my list of concerns.  Maryland is a good state because there is already something like an insurance exchange for small businesses.”

Gene Somdahl:  “The ‘job creators’ have had their tax breaks for ten years. Where are the jobs?“

Jeff Cox:  “OK, OK.  Unless someone drops me on my head between now and November, I will vote for the re-election of the President.  However, I would still like some investment insight on your website.  Maybe you could approach environmental concerns, jobs and politics all in one stroke.  What is the best way to play the growing supply of natural gas?“

I don’t know — but I hear you.

Hitting bookstores this month, The NEW New Deal:

In a riveting account based on new documents and interviews with more than 400 sources on both sides of the aisle, award-winning reporter Michael Grunwald reveals the vivid story behind President Obama’s $800 billion stimulus bill, one of the most important and least understood pieces of legislation in the history of the country. Grunwald’s meticulous reporting shows how the stimulus, though reviled on the right and the left, helped prevent a depression while jump-starting the president’s agenda for lasting change. As ambitious and far-reaching as FDR’s New Deal, the Recovery Act is a down payment on the nation’s economic and environmental future, the purest distillation of change in the Obama era.

The stimulus has launched a transition to a clean-energy economy, doubled our renewable power, and financed unprecedented investments in energy efficiency, a smarter grid, electric cars, advanced biofuels, and green manufacturing. It is computerizing America’s pen-and-paper medical system. Its Race to the Top is the boldest education reform in U.S. history. It has put in place the biggest middle-class tax cuts in a generation, the largest research investments ever, and the most extensive infrastructure investments since Eisenhower’s interstate highway system. It includes the largest expansion of antipoverty programs since the Great Society, lifting millions of Americans above the poverty line, reducing homelessness, and modernizing unemployment insurance. Like the first New Deal, Obama’s stimulus has created legacies that last: the world’s largest wind and solar projects, a new battery industry, a fledgling high-speed rail network, and the world’s highest-speed Internet network.

Michael Grunwald goes behind the scenes—sitting in on cabinet meetings, as well as recounting the secret strategy sessions where Republicans devised their resistance to Obama—to show how the stimulus was born, how it fueled a resurgence on the right, and how it is changing America. The New New Deal shatters the conventional Washington narrative and it will redefine the way Obama’s first term is perceived.

That’s all I’ve read so far — the flap copy.  Being a glass half-full kind of guy, I’m going to try to find time to read the whole thing.  With all the challenges we face — including the polarization that automatically keeps nearly half the country from even considering positive news — we’re entitled to enjoy the gains from time to time.

MORE GOOD NEWS

We added 172,000 private-sector jobs in July, the 29th consecutive month of gains, for a total of 4.5 million.  It would have been more if the stimulus package Michael Grunwald writes about had been larger; more still if the Republicans hadn’t blocked the American Jobs Act the President proposed to a joint session of Congress 11 months ago.

Still, it’s amazing how much progress has been made, given the mess the Administration inherited and the unprecedented level of obstruction.

Click here to see it in graphic form.

The idea that the way to accelerate growth is to slam on the brakes (the Ryan/Romney budget) . . . is bizarre.  The idea that at a time of high unemployment and zero real borrowing costs we should let our infrastructure crumble still further rather than put people to work moving forward . . . is bizarre.  The idea that “job creators” are rich people who don’t create jobs because their tax rates — slashed to the lowest rates in modern times — were not slashed enough . . . is bizarre.  Let me tell you about job creators: if they see a way to make more profit by hiring someone, they will do it, regardless of their tax rate.  If they don’t, they won’t, even if their tax rate were zero.  Why would they?