Okay. Let’s say everything go according to plan and Barack Obama is elected along with huge pickups in the House and Senate. Would the first thing you would advise doing be to reconvene Congress to pass $150 billion in stimulus? With the GOP Senate filibuster and Bush’s veto still in place? Really?
As Sarah Palin says, “Do we have to?”
Stimulus package? What we need are jobs. Spending $150b on a stimulus plan doesn’t make sense to me.
I’ve been thinking about this for a while though, BooMan. I think Obama needs to have an economic team ready to hit the ground running on Nov. 5. He needs to wrestle a seat at the $700b table along with Paulson because it’s in Paulson’s hands how bad the situation looks in January. Obama will need to put tremendous political pressure on the administration to begin to take this over before January.
This is a huge mess…but also a huge opportunity. If Obama’s team can dig in and begin to make some progress early, it makes his job just a little easier come Jan.
The day after the election, the House of Representatives should begin impeachment hearings. Not because they will actually impeach Bush, but instead so that Bush will be prevented from issuing any pardons in his final two months.
The Constitution says that a president has pardon powers except in cases of impeachment. I don’t know what the lawyers say, but perhaps ongoing impeachment hearings can prevent him from issuing pardons.
And if the House needs to actually file impeachment charges, so be it. Bush is going to try and pardon everyone, from Dick Cheney to Sen. Stevens to Harriet Miers, so we need to do something to stop him.
Obama could save about 12 billion a month by getting the hell out of Iraq.
Not if he just shifts the troops to Afghanistan.
Besides, we should be sticking that 12 billion per month in the bank anyway so our children or grandchildren can pay off the massive war reparations the Iraqis are going to be entitled to.
Yes, well, attacking Afghanistan was the wrong response in the first place, and escalating the situation will not solve the problems the U.S. has caused there.
Actually, going into Afghanistan and overthrowing the Taliban was the exact right thing to do. But it’s too bad Bush did such a half-ass job of it. He didn’t send enough troops immediately and allowed Bin Laden to escape at Tora Bora.
Jesus, that lack of resolve at the beginning has made the whole war close to a FAIL. But I have no love for the Taliban govt that used to exist there, especially when they blew up those massive mountain statues.
While I agree with the sentiment, the sad truth of the matter is that there is no 12 billion dollars per month to stick in the bank. It would just be 12 billion dollars per month we wouldn’t be borrowing.
It’s not a sound investment strategy to fill your savings accounts with cash advances from your credit cards.
Yes, quite true.
only one president at a time. Bush-Paulson is still in charge….and clueless…as events are out of control.
Obama need not rush. The Bush-Paulson plan will be in place only in two weeks.. …not enough time to see results.
The unintended collateral damage from the Lehman bankruptcy has disrupted the spending plans for that $700 bln package. It’s being posited that another $385 bln will be required to bailout those 350 banks and other insurers holding Lehman’s
bondsderivatives.Looks like the little guys and gals will need to wait for mortgage relief.
You can fool the public over and over but you can’t fool the banksters.
Maybe I misunderstood this, but I thought the idea was just that they would meet to start planning,not to try to pass anything.
Rescuing the economy is job #1 of course, but a very close and important second is to start anti-trust suits against media concentration. We had, I think, about 50 media companies before Reagan took office and we’ve got what? Three or four today? When Colin Powell’s son at the FCC tried to concentrate the media still further, he was pressured into requesting public comments. The pro-concentration ones numbered about half a dozen, the anti ones were over two million. Of course, the pro side was by wealthy corporations, so the voice of the people didn’t really count.
Can we afford to wait until January to do anything?
who says the senate would fillibuster and bush would veto? like with everything, it depends.
i say obama winning in a landslide is going to start to change the entire dynamics in the country, even while bush is still in office. if the demorats would grow some spine
let’s see ’em push for the moon and settle for a $500 billion recovery package something along the lines of what Roubini suggests (among many others):
“- a massive direct government fiscal stimulus packages that includes public works, infrastructure spending, unemployment benefits, tax rebates to lower income households and provision of grants to strapped and crunched state and local government…”
http://www.rgemonitor.com/roubini-monitor/253973/the_world_is_at_severe_risk_of_a_global_systemic_fi
nancial_meltdown_and_a_severe_global_depression
let’s get a new new deal started, and if the white house don’t like it, keep pushing away and putting the repukelicans on the spot for fillibustering and vetoing. and let’s see some actual fillibusters, instead of just threatening; i dare ’em.
and the first thing the demorats should do is end both those wars in asia. and stop threatening iran.
Wow! Does this program make sense and with the present economic and military crises ever deepening, do we need sense. I fear that Bush and Co are going to give us first hand evidence of what the Great Depression was really like.