The Wonk Monkey is a bit bleary eyed this morning, he was playing monkey games into the wee hours of the morning. Bad monkey.
Now… for something completely different.
Nate Silver at FiveThirtyEight looks at how Democratic candidates fared in the last election cycle compared to their voting record.
This simple analysis would conclude, then, that Democrats were punished by voters for their bailout and health care votes, but not to any particularly important extent for cap-and-trade or the stimulus package.
Although the Treasury Department is confident that the issues revealed due to problems with the foreclosure paperwork has been contained, not everyone is feeling comfortable with it, and they fear it will lead to a new round of problems in the housing market.
The fear is that uncertainty about the ownership of all mortgages could deal another blow to confidence in the housing market and cause home values to plunge again.
Dem’s see no chance of cap-and-trade passing in the next congress.
President Obama has reassured Democrats that he want’s the Bush’s middle class tax cuts to be made permanent but he is still against making the tax cuts for the upper 2% permanent.
Politifact gives the following statement from Paul Krugman a False rating:
They simply assumed they were going to reduce the rate of health care cost growth. And they said, how are we going to do that? By monitoring and taking additional measures as necessary. So the report was completely empty on the only thing that really matters and then had a whole bunch of things which involved large tax cuts for the top bracket. What on earth is that doing in there?
Politifact says:
In ruling on Krugman's statement, he said the deficit proposal was "completely empty" on reining in the future growth of health care costs. Krugman has a point that the co-chairs' proposal is vague. But the proposal does have several specific ideas on how to strengthen the IPAB. It has other recommendations on health care spending as well, and it includes dollar estimates for how much its ideas would reduce spending. It does recognize that health care spending must be controlled, and it's not completely empty of ideas. We rate Krugman's statement False.
It’s not surprising that the insurance companies didn’t like the health-care overhaul.
Health insurers last year gave theU.S. Chamber of Commerce $86.2 million that was used to oppose the health-care overhaul law, according to tax records and people familiar with the donation.
A Republican filibuster could prevent the extension of unemployment benefits, and the Democrats are not happy about it.
"On the one hand they want to provide $700 billion in tax cuts to the wealthiest Americans but not pay for them. And on the other hand they're demanding that UI benefits for the middle class be paid for," Reed said.
Everyone hates the deficit commission’s recommendations, partially because most people don’t understand how difficult of a situation is.
"I think the public doesn't understand the choices very well yet," Rivlin says, "and that's because in the election, there were a lot of people saying, 'It's really easy — just do this one simple thing.' Just cut the spending or just raise the taxes or just cut out waste, fraud and abuse. But if you sit down with the numbers and look at what the government actually does and how it pays for it, it's obvious that there is no simple solution."
Interestingly, one of the reasons why we may have out-lived our Neanderthal kin is due to our slow growth.
The GOP is swearing off pork for two years. I will see it and then I might believe it.
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