The Wonk Monkey is excited today. He gets to go and sit down with Thing #2’s teacher and discuss how he is progressing. For some reason, the Wonk Monkey enjoys finding out how things are and coming up with a plan to make progress.
Yes, Nancy Pelosi is the most unpopular politician in the country. Nate at FiveThirtyEight shows her favorability ratings compared with many of the other politicians working right now.
Robert Reich makes an impassioned plea to extend the jobless benefits for the long term unemployed while at the same time not giving tax cuts to the Rich.
The long-term unemployed can’t get work because there are still five people needing work for every job opening. And the long-term jobless are often at the end of the job line: Either they don’t have the right skills or enough education, or have been out of work so long prospective employers are nervous about hiring them.
Moreover, the top 1 percent spends a small fraction of their income. That’s what it means to be rich — you already have most of what you want. So extending the Bush tax cut to them won’t stimulate the economy.
Yet people without jobs, and their families, are likely to spend every penny of unemployment benefits they receive. That will go back into the economy and save or create jobs.
A Labor Department report shows that for every $1 spent on unemployment insurance, $2 are spent in the economy. If you don’t believe the Labor Department, maybe you’ll believe Goldman Sachs analyst Alec Phillips, who estimates that if unemployment benefits are allowed to expire, the American economy would slow by a half a percent.
For once a politician (President Obama) is governing exactly as he said he would.
Yet Obama is doing exactly what he said he would do. Perhaps the critics should read—or reread—the president’s own books. Dreams From My Father (1995) and The Audacity of Hope (2006) are the most substantial works written by anyone elected president since Woodrow Wilson (who wrote several books before he won election in 1912). In laying out his philosophy, Obama contrasts the GOP’s excessive individualism with the ideal of “ordered liberty” and the rich traditions of civic engagement typical of America in the 18th and 19th centuries. He also criticizes orthodox Democrats for too quickly dismissing market solutions and too often defending failed government programs. Above all, he criticizes the hyperpartisan atmosphere of contemporary public life.
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