However, towards the end of the show when criticising other spending (not his projects), he was very critical of the size of the deficits and the long term implications.

I would love to know how big our deficits are projected to be compared to GDP and how much (to Dr. Reich’s point) we have to grow to start shrinking the national debt. My guess is that is not realistic for a long time.

But I would also like to find someone who doesn’t spin the facts. Imagine what he says in a classroom.

May I call you Zeus?

Because people who don’t think deeply, and who obviously don’t write well enough to express something that can be worked with, understood, debated, usually believe they know it all and can lord it over people from high above Olympus. They usually say things that do no more than produce an alley fight, like, “Get a Clue”. Your words my friend, not mine.

But since you really don’t know it all and need to think much more deeply, I suggest you go to Robert Reich’s blog, and read his latest post titled: The real work begins after the stimulus plan is passed. Subsitute his words ‘public investment’ for my words ‘economic policy’, and you have essentially two posts that express roughly the same ideas about what ails the economy, and when they are not addressed sufficiently, they grow into bigger problems. Mr. Reich’s post takes up much more space than I wanted to in order to explain the historical context to the present crisis, which really began thirty five years ago.

You know, we all can’t agree. But we can be gentlemen.

if “dust bowl oakies” are our FEAR… then genetics and superior embryo octuplits are THE GREATEST ULTIMATE COMMODITY. and we need to have this quality of immigrant

It will require a HUGE paradigm shift for Americans, businesses, the government and industries. Americans want their cake and eat it too, and we talk out of both sides of our mouth. We need to look in the mirror because WE ARE A BIG PART OF THE PROBLEM!! WE want/need the economy to turn around, WE want our investments to provide good returns on our money, and WE want unemployment to return to lower numbers and how does all that happen? To achieve profitable numbers companies need to reduce spending and lay people off, even companies that are profitable take “pro-active” action. That’s ok because when companies take this action the market rewards them with higher stock prices. Have you ever looked at the stock of a public company after they announce a layoff? Many times the stock goes up because that’s viewed as a good step to getting the business in-line with the changing market and an unknown economic future.

Now we expect government to step in to extend benefits and spend in place of the consumer. What’s wrong with this picture? What about a paradigm shift that says, hey let’s stop the craziness. Let’s reward companies for hanging tough, for NOT reducing their workforce, for NOT reducing their spending. Even before this crisis how many companies have reported losses over the years, but are still around? How many companies could actually take a hit- maybe just reduced profit or even take on losses, and they could do so for a few years with minimal impact to the company? The problem with that is that THE MARKET would have their heads on a platter. BUT HEY-WE ARE THE MARKET!

Some would say, this is a Wall Street problem………. Excuse me, WE ARE Wall Street! Sure the major financial companies are the ones that make the big trades that move the market, but THEY ARE US, our money rolls up to the Fidelities and other investment vehicles. Where was our out-cry on executive bonuses when times where good.

Wouldn’t it be great if we could create a whole new set of economic indicators and corporate measurements that are used to describe how we “rate” and reward companies for doing what’s best long-term for the nation?

Until Americans come to terms with the elephant in the room….. our need for “greed”, I hold little hope that we’ll see any long term change.

Dear Robert,

Get a clue.

Also, if we are asking the question, “should we rethink the whole nature of our economy?”, I’m wondering, do we want it to grow? Is that automatically a good thing? It would seem, given the state of our environment and the population, etc, that we might want to look at a steady state economy as an alternative.

“If the bee disappeared off the surface of the globe then man would only have four years of life left.”

Taken from Washington Post article, Honeybees in a Mite More Than Trouble: Parasites, an Exodus of Apiarists and Budget Cuts Imperil Vital Insect

For those advocating a high speed train, good luck our lines are so antiquated it would take years to even get close to the French. By the way the French trains are highly subsidized which is another issue. Countries such as Germany and France have been investing in rail transport for decades. We have not. It’s not cost effective and those huge desael
engines are not exactly good for the environment.

so i hope the tukey doesnt run around with his head cut off blaming all unions for the actions of a few

I am not confident that the present debate is going to get us there. The individual ethos being what it is in America, we seem too afraid of taking on deep systemic reform. Leave it to the free hand of the market, we say. Let’s not interfere too much. That will suppress innovation. So therefore, as Mr. Reich suggested, battles over ideology have the economy forever cycling between Laizzez Faire and rules-based regulation. Each time, the compromise requires yet another compromise. Reform will always need further reform. We get so busy horse-trading, deep structural flaws get ignored.

Take for example our healthcare crisis, just one of the many economic crises we now face, and which we’ve been debating ad nauseum for years. The number of Americans without health insurance keeps rising relentlessly, while citizens in industrialized countries the world over are covered. The cost of healthcare keeps skyrocketing, while other countries keep their costs down. It pressures businesses to lay off or not hire people to stay competitive. Why hasn’t the invisible hand fixed this problem? We always say it is too expensive. It seems it is too expensive not to fix.

It’s high time we get past ideology, and take corporate lobbyist-driven corruption out of our political and economic systems. Americans are more ideological than any other industrialized nation in the world. Ideology drove the financial implosion on Wall Street that we have exported around the world. The world is sick and tired of us, our ideology, our militarism, our empire.

One previous poster said unemployment is the #1 issue; that the stimulus plan needs to focus on job creation. I agree. Let me suggest that we raise the ante, and I think this is what Mr. Reich is getting at. We need to examine why our economy has lost so many jobs in the last thirty five years, examine why the greatest inequality and job insecurity since the 1930’s has occurred. While giving credit to Laizzez Faire for what it does well, we need to focus on what it does poorly and strangle that aspect of it in the bathtub.

A truly responsible economic policy (we currently don’t have an economic policy) would assess the actual state of the economy, how our economy became so hollowed out, outsourced and off-shored, and then respond forcefully to change this situation. Anything else is mere tinkering, allows the smoke-and-mirrors economic status quo to continue, and will waste so much money waving a sword at a tidal wave.

I’ll end with a quote from Chalmer’s Johnson in a piece penned today (TomDispatch.com), that cites all the industries we have lost in recent years:

Like much of the rest of the world, Americans know that the U.S. automotive industry is in the grips of what may be a fatal decline. Unless it receives emergency financing and undergoes significant reform, it is undoubtedly headed for the graveyard in which many American industries are already buried, including those that made televisions and other consumer electronics, many types of scientific and medical equipment, machine tools, textiles, and much earth-moving equipment — and that’s to name only the most obvious candidates. They all lost their competitiveness to newly emerging economies that were able to outpace them in innovative design, price, quality, service, and fuel economy, among other things.

A similar, if far less well known, crisis exists when it comes to the military-industrial complex. That crisis has its roots in the corrupt and deceitful practices that have long characterized the high command of the Armed Forces, civilian executives of the armaments industries, and Congressional opportunists and criminals looking for pork-barrel projects, defense installations for their districts, or even bribes for votes.

Given our economic crisis, the estimated trillion dollars we spend each year on the military and its weaponry is simply unsustainable. Even if present fiscal constraints no longer existed, we would still have misspent too much of our tax revenues on too few, overly expensive, overly complex weapons systems that leave us ill-prepared to defend the country in a real military emergency. We face a double crisis at the Pentagon: we can no longer afford the pretense of being the Earth’s sole superpower, and we cannot afford to perpetuate a system in which the military-industrial complex makes its fortune off inferior, poorly designed weapons.

Great show, as ever, and thank heavens Bob Reich can keep up with you (and he doesn’t choke on his coffee–and can even remember the callers’ names!)

I was waiting to here either or both of you say that China probably is now aware that “The US is too big to fail” and will, once again, bail us out.

And it’s so much easier for the Chinese, because they don’t have to go through with the time-wasting charade of “obtaining consensus” as we do in the US. (My skeptical, nay, cynical opinion now tends towards The Onion, The Daily Show and the wag(s) who have posited that we’re living, once again, in déjà vu: “The puppets have changed; the puppeteers have not.”

For Alyssa, check out the Don’t Marry; Incorporate website–the plan to first keep the money in the home, then the state, then, last and least, the irresponsible, too-easy-to-rob federal treasury.

For the foes of Amtrak, check out the european trains, notably the French Great Fastness Train and their new aluminum horses (now that chemin de iron is, um, passe). A 2-engine, 3-car TGV got up to something like 347 miles per hour (they normally poke along at 185 mph when they’ve got some station-to-station running room) and the Japanese magnetic levitation people-mover bested the wheels-on-rails TGV by less than 10 mph–something like 405 mph, or something like that.

And for the foes of “honeybee insurance” or research, or whatever, I would ask that they at least set a minimum wage for the millions of us out-of-workers who will find new employment hand-pollinating every plant of: wheat, rice, oats, sorghum, corn, and every flower on every blueberry, raspberry, gooseberry, apple, banana, pineapple, fig, pear, peach, …(that is, pollinate all the flora that the honeybees will no longer be pollinating for us so we can eat).

The good news is that we won’t have to pollinate the fauna by hand (although I suppose cattle breeders will continue to do so, anyway.).

The bad news is that, once born, the fauna will have no flora to eat, either.

Just think of the bees as a horseshoe nail: For want of a nail, a shoe was lost; for want of a shoe, a horse was lost; for want of a horse, a rider was lost; for want of a rider, the war was lost. (Or you could think of the buzz of a honeybee’s wings as the now proverbial, if not prosaic, flutter of the monarch’s wings that triggers the himicane or hurricane (depending on name, of course).