I don’t know if you’ve been following it, but the first signs that the in-coming Obama administration will be center-right in character have – on a policy level – emerged in the new administration’s plans for stimulus or recovery spending. Many people like me quietly (or loudly) worried that the cabinet & White House appointments were Clintonian in character. The appointments of Senator Clinton, Rep. Emmanuel and the rest worried me, but I’ve thought that – if the team were led in a progressive direction, having centrist Democrats on board could be handy.

However, Obama-inspired press leaks about the stimulus package have made clear than on a policy basis, the far right of the Republican party may be accommodated with useless tax cuts while the needs of the nation may be ignored. The New York Times and Washington Post carried the news a couple of days ago and its very bad.

Mr. Obama plans a $750 Billion stimulus, $300 Billion of that will be spent on tax cuts . The reason this is a ghastly idea, from the point of view of softening the nation’s deepening depression is that the $300 Billion is – in essence – money thrown away. The stimulus value of the proposed tax cuts is very, very small, as compared to other ways of spending the money.  read more »

Do you have to be a Nobel-prize winning economist like Joseph Stiglitz to understand that a fast, effective way to spend our way out of the Bush-GOP-invented economic swamp is to put cash into the hands of the poor? Food stamp increases and extension of unemployment insurance benefits could be done quickly by Congress and would be spent right away by the lower-income people they’d reach.

Yet, of course, the Bush-Pelosi plan doesn’t include them. It could be a worse plan, of course but its mechanism, tax refunds, will take five months (best case) and it directs the pump-priming cash to people who might well bank it instead of spending it. Indeed two-thirds of the money in the Bush-Pelosi plan goes to higher income while only a third goes to poorer people. ( Andrew Leonard at Salon tracks the saddest-funniest food story: Republicans saving the poor from fatness by blocking boost in food stamps. Who knew?) Many, many (too many?) updates (5 sets) are at the end of the post. Also Take Action! Urge a progressive stimulus package! Link at the end. .

This has led progressives like economist-columnist Paul Krugman to pan the Bush-Pelosi deal:  read more »

Something Different After Day 181. Gov. Elliot Spitzer and his NYS Division of Housing and Community Renewal (DHCR) dramatically altered and improved the housing fate of tens of thousands of Mitchell-Lama tenants. When the owners of Mitchell-Lama projects opt out of the program, the usual rule of law had been that those tenants become rent-stabilized – no big windfall for the owner. However, some owners, seizing on language in the enabling legislation, had won a court ruling that opting out of Mitchell-Lama was itself such a “unique and peculiar circumstance” that the apartments could instantly be converted to market rate. Yesterday, the Governor and the DCHR closed that loophole. NYDN article here.  read more »

You may think universal single-payer health insurance is an item whose time has finally come. Opening nationally next weekend, Michael Moore’s SiCKO, the documentary about our outrageous, expensive, irrational anarchic crazy-quilt patch work of health insurance has been the subject of substantial discussion and buzz everywhere. 43.6 Million Americans have no health insurance at all. Perhaps as many as 100 million more have insurance so porous that any illness will clean them out completely. Corporations and public employers which provide health coverage are being drained of cash by the costs of coverage.

Kevin Stack’s NY Times story features a photo of Moore with Congressional supporters of HR 676, the Medicare for all, universal single payer bill. (Where is your Congress Member? Mine, Nydia Velazquez, whom I like, refuses to favor single payer for no reason I understand.)  read more »