Monday, January 16, 2012

Romney v. Obama


Nate Silver all but calls it for Romney.

Read it at The New York Times — FiveThirtyEight
National Polls Suggest Romney Is Overwhelming Favorite for G.O.P. Nomination
By Nate Silver

Now the question is who Wall Street will choose as its champion?

UPDATE:

Whoever Wins in November Will Be an Economic Genius
by Keven Drum at Mother Jones
Eventually the American economy will recover no matter how badly we screw things up. Ezra Klein explains what this could mean:
"Because a recovery is likely within five years, whichever party wins the White House in 2012 is likely to get the credit, and so too will its policy agenda. You can see how this will work. If Romney wins the presidency and the economy begins to rebound, Republicans will argue, and America’s experience will seem to show, that they were right all along: The stimulus was useless and the regulatory uncertainty the Obama administration created with its health-care plan and its talk of cap-and-trade and all the rest kept businesses from investing."
The nightmare scenario would be four more years of Reaganonomics heavily influenced by the Tea Party base toward fiscal austerity, privatization, and Rothbardian Libertarianism.

3 comments:

Matt Franko said...

"Eventually the American economy will recover no matter how badly we screw things up."

I dont think so this time Tom, and I think this is what our moron "leaders" are banking on and have been for going on 3 years now.... it's not coming via "the invisible hand" I'm afraid...

This time it IS different. We have globalization, exponential productivity gains via IT, oil monopoly operating with impunity. These are 3 mega factors that are lined up to screw the US worker that have never existed before.

And entrenched klepto-morons in control who have no clue about what any of this means....

Resp,

beowulf said...

For what its worth, Newt Gingrich is more or less in the Job Guarantee camp (I see this paper was co-written by Peter Ferrara who I've quoted here before).

States would then be free to each completely redesign welfare for their state. But if they would provide assistance to the able bodied only in return for work first, they can completely eliminate the work disincentives of welfare.

Moreover, the minimum wage, plus the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC), plus the Child Tax Credit are enough by themselves to bring every family out of poverty with full time employment.
Additionally, any individual who cannot find work and collects unemployment benefits (currently a joint state-federal program, with federal taxes paying for a majority of the program) will be required to participate in a job-training program. We can better help these Americans by requiring them to participate in real training programs in private companies, in exchange for temporary unemployment aid.Our goal is to convert the time and money now lost to a maintenance unemployment program into a human capital investment program that increases the competitiveness of the American worker in the world market in a time of dramatic scientific and technological change.

Through required work, the welfare incentives for family breakup and births out of wedlock would also be eliminated entirely.

http://www.scribd.com/doc/73359031/Unleashing-Growth-and-Innovation-to-Move-Beyond-the-Welfare-State

Tom Hickey said...

Right, the invisible hand is turning out to be the fickle finger of fate.

I think that we are now at the beginning of the second leg down globally with the EZ playing the role of catalyst this time rather than the US.

Of course "the invisible hand" will eventually establish a new equilibrium, unless we enter a death spiral, but who knows what the new normal will be. Looks to me like TPTB have neo-feudalism as their goal.

As we enter the era of a closed global economy and a world in flux without the map of a global economics to guide us based on relevant data gleaned over time, it is anyone's guess were this is headed. Worse, the maps we are using are using are highly unreliable, and their use is exacerbating the situation.