Lunchtime: less ‘positive’ about Bush Edition

Toles Cartoons


from Think Progress comes 100 Days of Opposition. Good compilation:


Think Progress: Americans feel less ‘positive’ about Bush since he left office.

In January 2009, just as former President George W. Bush was leaving office, the Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll found that 31 percent of Americans viewed him somewhat or very positively. In their latest poll, positive views of Bush have dropped to just 26 percent. In roughly the same time period, positive views of former Vice President Cheney dropped from 21 percent to 18 percent.

Yglesias: Orszag on Saez

I see that on Monday, Peter Orszag did a blog post about Bates Medal winner Emmanuel Saez’s work and its policy implications:

Emmanuel’s work on income inequality has helped to point the way for the Administration in its pledge to rebalance the tax code, with a tax cut going to 95 percent of working Americans while asking those at the very top to contribute more. The inequality that has arisen over the past three decades is not going to go away overnight, and it has been driven by many factors—including a decline in the growth rate of college-educated workers. But where the prior administration used changes in the tax code to exacerbate these trends, this Administration thinks that the tax code should be used to mitigate them because an economy in which all can enjoy success is one that is strong for us all.

Good stuff. In the long run, I expect Saez’s work on taxes and elasticity to prove even more influential, as I think it lays out the rationale for an approach to tax reform that could raise a ton of revenue in a progressive manner at a low economic cost.

Drum: Green Shoots

Tapped glosses an EPI report on green jobs:

Most notable is its pronouncement that a "green" investment is one of the most stimulative forms of government spending, providing a 1.6:1 return-to-investment ratio. This is greater than generic infrastructure investment (1.59), temporary tax cuts (1.03), and corporate tax cuts (0.3)....Now for the less-than-rosy projection: men would be disproportionately advantaged by this spending, accounting for 75 percent of the total employment gains.

Actually, that's not as bad as it sounds — at least in the short run. As CAP's Heather Boushey points out, men have absorbed 75% of all job losses during the current recession, so a stimulus program that targets them disproportionately makes some sense. After all, it's either that or let them stay home grinding their teeth and taking cues from Fox News about who to blame for all this. And we don't want that, do we?

Overall, EPI's model projects that $100 billion in green investments would generate 750,000 jobs and raise wages of non-college educated workers by about half a percent per year. Plus it would help prevent us from turning the planet into a cinder. So that would be another bonus. The whole paper is here.

Benen: CANTOR CAN'T CLAIM CREDIT....

In February, there were a few Republican lawmakers who claimed credit for spending projects in the stimulus bill they opposed. It was more than a little awkward -- lawmakers usually don't take credit for legislation they reject.

As spending increases, and new projects get underway, we may soon see more of this. Take House Minority Whip Eric Cantor (R-Va.), for example.

Rep. Eric I. Cantor, the House minority whip, led House GOP opposition to President Barack Obama's $740 billion [sic] stimulus program.

Yesterday, though, the Henrico County Republican said bringing high-speed rail to the region could further spur economic development, creating as many as 185,000 jobs and bringing $21.2 billion to a region already home to about a half-dozen Fortune 500 companies and 20,000 small businesses.

"If there is one thing that I think all of us here on both sides of the political aisle from all parts of the region agree with, it's that we need to do all we can to promote jobs here in the Richmond area," Cantor said.

You've got to be kidding me. Eric Cantor was arguably the leading Republican critic of the economic recovery package. He not only publicly mocked government funding for high-speed rail, Cantor also rejected the very idea that government spending could generate economic growth.

Now, however, thanks to a spending bill Cantor fought to kill, there may be money available for HSR connecting Richmond to D.C. Cantor is all for it, despite the fact that if it were up to him, the money wouldn't exist. (Indeed, it wouldn't even be a possibility until 2014, since Cantor wants to improve the economy by way of an insane five-year spending freeze.)

Cantor's hope, in other words, is that his constituents just aren't paying attention to what their elected representative is up to on the Hill. He goes to work and fights against government spending on HSR, and the notion that more spending can lead to more jobs. Cantor then heads home and says the opposite.

It's one of those truths I think all of us here on both sides of the political aisle should agree with.

Left out? April 28: Rachel Maddow is joined by Rep. Lynn Woolsey, D-CA, and co-chair of the Progressive Caucus that had so much trouble getting a meeting with the president, who discusses whether Obama has to answer to the Democratic liberal base.

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

Atrios on Fluff:

I'm one who thinks that it's perfectly fine to have a vegetables and dessert approach to news. Provide some tasty sweets along with the broccoli, and people can enjoy informing themselves. The problem is, as Boehlert says, for so many in the press corps the fluff is what's important. More than that, the news consuming public also starts to think that the fluff is what's important and that being an informed citizen is about knowing what was in MoDo's latest column.

I don't have a problem with reporting on presidential puppies and other similar things, I just have a problem with an elite press that is more interested in presidential puppies than policy.