The Week's Worst: Republicans Block Tax cut for All Americans Because Democrats Won't Let Them Cut Taxes for Millionaires Even More

So I took a little pause from the Week's Worst series last week in honour of the Thanksgiving spirit. But this week we're back looking at Terrible Things Republicans Do That Hurt the Country(TM) with a doozy of an example. This week, after the House passed a bill that would keep in place the Bush era tax cuts for every American, but would restore tax on incomes over $250,000 to the level they were under the Clinton Administration, Republicans in the Senate successfully "defeated" the Senate's attempt to do the same. That is, it was defeated with 53 people voting for it and 4X voting against. In other words, most Senators agreed that the this is the approach we should take, but by taking advantage of the filibuster, Republicans were once again able to ensure that they look out for the interests of the richest at the expense of... well, everyone else.

What fascinates me is that this is a wildly unpopular position Republicans have taken. 67% of Americans polled agree that it is time for these tax handouts for the wealthiest to end. Even 52% of REPUBLICANS agree that tax cuts on income over $250,000 should expire. It's just what makes sense - the wealthy have been the group of people least affected by the economic crisis, their incomes have been rising while everyone elses's has been stagnating, they certainly don't suffer from high unemployment, and they won't be deeply harmed by restoring them to Clinton-era tax rates under which, if you recall, they also did pretty darn well.

Billionaire Warren Buffet agrees, pointing out that,

"The rich are always going to say that, you know, just give us more money and we'll go out and spend more and then it will all trickle down to the rest of you. But that has not worked the last 10 years, and I hope the American public is catching on,"

Indeed.

So why are Republicans so determined to offer this hand out to the people who need it most, at the same time they are trying to deny unemployment insurance to the people who need it a lot?

Well 2 reasons, I guess. 1) They really, really love millionaires. I mean, a lot. Way more than they like the rest of us. They just love them. That's why they're Republicans after all. Duh. But also 2) they calculate that any political failure for the Democrats and the President is good for them. And they may be right.

But I'm really hoping that the American people will see that a bunch of people who would fight tooth and nail to help the few who are least in need and will fight equally hard to avoid helping the many who are in need is not a party that's got the interests of the country at heart.

Wikileaks: All I have to say on the subject...

Is that the current set of leaked documents do not unveil any government wrongdoing that requires public exposure to be redressed. What they do, however, is make it much harder for diplomats to actually do the difficult work of preventing wars and easing international tensions. Our diplomatic corps are heroes, in my eyes. And whilst it is certainly very interesting to know that China - for instance - might be open to allowing the reuinification of North and South Korea, it is also deeply saddening to realise that the exposure of these views now makes it far less likely that any deal could be struck to make this happen. The prospect of peacefully defusing some of the threat from one of the world's most deadly nuclear aspirants strikes me as a compelling public interest and a great example of the kind of thing that diplomacy can do as long as it remains in the category of a closely held secret.

So I do not agree with Julian Assanage's simple-minded "More transparency always makes the world better," viewpoint. Some things worth doing can only be done in secret, and he has done no one in the world any favours by making that work impossible. Alas.

That does not mean I'm against transparency - or that all leaks are bad. If there is criminal or unethical activity it shoudl be exposed, and if public servants are wasteful or ineffective that should be known. But these documents seem to show nothing but US diplomats doing effective and difficult work and providing honest, candid advice. A shame that such advice will be virtually impossible to draft in future.

I'm Thankful for the Tea Party. Seriously.

I never feel more American than I do on the few days following Thanksgiving - here I sit, stuffed full of turkey sandwiches and leftover pie, I've had two Thanksgiving dinners this weekend, one hosted by arne and I right here at home and one - the traditional deep fried turkey and champagne festival - with some friends in Hampstead Garden Suburb. I've started a little bit of online Christmas shopping, and the cats are huddling close to me for warmth.

All is, more or less, well. And despite the setbacks and disappointments for Democrats in the midterm elections, I remain genuinely hopeful and optimistic about America. So although I have a long list of things to be thankful for personally (good friends and family, an interesting job, a husband who puts up with my quirks, the aforementioned cats...) I wanted to take a moment to mention some of the things I am thankful for as a Democrat - and as an American.


1) I'm Thankful for the Perfectibility of America: Obama in his famous speech on race in Philadelphia spoke thoughtfully of the nation as something that is not yet perfect, but is on a never ending journey to becoming more perfect. Not every step on that journey is a step forward, and sometimes it must feel like we've gone backwards as much as we've gone forward, but I think that view is short sighted. Read the biography of any man or woman of my parents' generation and you can't help but be struck by how far the country has moved in their lifetime. From a place where the simple notion that a black man might be allowed to cast his ballot in a state like North Carolina to a place where a black man can win the state in a Presidential election. From a place where gay men and women could literally be arrested just for existing to a place where federal workers enjoy job benefits for their same sex partners and it is legal for them to marry in 5 states plus the District of Columbia. From a place where the majority of senior citizens lived in poverty to a place where - almost none do.

2) I'm Thankful that the Tea Party is a Non-Violent Political Movement: I believe that most of the so-called Tea Party activists who have been getting so much attention in recent months are catastrophically wrong both on the facts and on the philosophy of politics. But I don't begrudge them their right to organise politically on behalf of their ideas (however wrong they may be) and in fact I am extremely grateful to them for expressing their opposition to the President and to the Democratic Party policy almost entirely through peaceful and non-violent political organisation. This may seem like something unworthy of praise, but it was within my adult lifetime that I can remember extremist right wing fanatics urging citizens to take arms against their own government as part of the so-called "Milita Movement", apparently mobilised by Bill Clinton's ascent to the Presidency. And, of course, for generations before that there was often some version of an extreme political movement that would go beyond political anger, and stir up some of the bloody kind - activists of both the right and the left. Think not only of the Ku Klux Klan, but also of the Weather Underground. Right wing populist rabble rousing has a long and shameful history in the US, going back to the radio rantings of Father Coughlin in the 1930's.

He drew 40 million listeners in the early thirties to his Sunday afternoon program, double the 20 million that Rush Limbaugh has claimed for his audience. But he didn’t just talk; he urged action — illegal and terrifying. By1938, increasingly unhinged and openly anti-Semitic, Coughlin was using his radio pulpit and his 200,000-circulation newspaper, Social Justice, to advocate for the creation of a violent hate group, the Christian Front. The group soon boasted members numbering in the thousands throughout the cities of Northeast. It has largely been forgotten that Coughlin’s “platoons,” as he called them, were responsible for a months-long campaign of low-level mayhem in New York City: They attacked Jews with fists and sometimes knives. They boycotted Jewish-owned businesses (guided by a “Christian index” of shopkeepers) and sometimes smashed their windows in the German fashion. This ugly episode culminated when 17 Coughlinites were arrested by the FBI in January 1940 and charged with planning acts of terrorism against Jewish individuals and institutions (and those deemed their allies).

3) I'm thankful for the It Gets Better Project: Which not only is doing something useful and constructive to help young gay men and women who are do devoid of hope that they might consider suicide, but has also inspired contributions from the highest levels, from President Obama himself, from Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and even from the Conservative British Prime Minister David Cameron. Some might say that these contributions from leaders are purely symbolic, and it's true that no leader should be exempt from doing the right thing just because they are willing to say the right thing. But symbolism in this case is no small thing - for a young person who is on the point of taking their own life because they believe themselves utterly alone in the world to know that the President of the United States or the Prime Minister of Britain is on their side and against the bullies who are attacking them is a very big deal. Sometime symbols actually do make a difference in the world.

4) I'm thankful for the excellence of our federal law enforcement services: They have by undying gratitude today for catching the 19 year old would-be bomber who was, chillingly, determined to blow up the Christmas tree lighting ceremony in downtown Portland, OR. I'm trebly grateful in this case because my Mom and her husband live just outside of Portland so this feels very close to home. However, the FBI was constantly in control of the situation, and gave the man a fake phone number that he thought would detonate the bomb. In a win-win scenario, we have not only stopped this man from perpetrating a terrible crime, but we have done so in a way that ensures he can be clearly and quickly prosecuted for his crime. Praise to the calm, decisive and effective work of the FBI in this case and in the many other instances we will probably never hear about in which they are quietly keeping us safe.

5) And finally, I'm Thankful for Health Care Reform: A year ago at this time, I was hopeful about the prospects of passage, but things were still up in the air, and it got scarier. In the end, as much through sheer bloody minded stubbornness as for any other reason, we passed the first ever comprehensive reform of the US Health Care system, guaranteeing a right to coverage for every US citizen. And, in timely fashion, part of the promise is being fulfilled now - as of this week, insurers will be required to spend at least 80 cents of every health care dollar that they take in on delivering actual health care.

And if anyone out there is reading this - I'm thankful for that too! Would love to hear your own "I'm thankful fors" in comments.

The Week's Worst: Republicans block START treaty...

I'm having a little trouble keeping up with the unrelenting awfulness of Right Wing activity as, emboldened by their post-midterm strength they begin a full court press with their newly emboldened "everything that is bad for the President is good for us strategy." Obviously, things that are good for the President are quite often the things that are best for the country - economic recovery being one example. Or diplomatic successes overseas. Or improvements in Americans' health and life expectancy.

All of these things must now be halted in their tracks, argue the new Republicn insurgency, for they aid the President and therefore are bad for Republicans and thus, counter-intuitively, ultimately bad for the country. After all, would you really want to have a thriving  nation when you could have a Republican majority instead? Well, YOU AND I would, of course. But they wouldn't.

In any case, I have decided to start a little weekly feature just to try and get my head around one terrible Republican action per week. Each week I'll write a Week's Worst post highlighting the thing Republicans have done that seems most obviously worst for the country.

There was a lot to choose from this week, but in my mind a clear winner emerged:


Republican Senator John Kyl, who had been the point man with the White House appointed by Republicans to negotiate ratification of the new START treaty, after months of negotiation, and after the White House believed that they had secured a mutual agreement on all the key points, that he would not support ratification in the upcoming "lame duck" session of the Senate. He offered no rationale for this position.

The treaty has been described by many as President Obama's key foreing policy priority for this year - and that's accurate. But it would also be accurate to describe it as America's key foreign policy priority. Certainly, Republican Senator sees it as such - he recently begged his colleagues to come to their senses and vote for the treaty:

"Please do your duty for your country," Lugar said in a message to his colleagues. "We do not have verification of the Russian nuclear posture right now. We're not going to have it until we sign the START treaty. We're not going to be able to get rid of further missiles and warheads aimed at us.

"I state it candidly to my colleagues, one of those warheads ... could demolish my city of Indianapolis -- obliterate it! Now Americans may have forgotten that. I've not forgotten it and I think that most people who are concentrating on the START treaty want to move ahead to move down the ladder of the number of weapons aimed at us."

That's exactly right. After the previous START treaty expired in December last year, American inspectors have not been able to access Russian nuclear facilities to ensure that the weapons are secured and that they are complying with their commitment to reduce their arsenal.

The Russians think we have gone insane - they see the treaty as transparently in the US national interest, and they are gobsmacked that it might not pass. Frankly, so am I.

For the Record: Liberals Hate the Deficit...

There's a commonly accepted conventional wisdom that somehow Republicans are supposed to be the party that is "Fiscally Conservative" whereas Democrats love running up giant debts. There is no evidence whatsoever that the Republican party actually behaves in this manner, and there's equally little evidence that Democrats don't take the deficit very seriously. In fact, welcome to opposite world, the complete opposite of the conventional wisdom has been the actual behaviour of Democratic and Republican Presidents for longer than I've been alive.

I'm not going to comment on the Republican love of deficits, but from a progressive point of view, it's fairly obvious why Democrats might behave this way.

Liberals don't love govenment spending for its own sake - we support it when and because it actually does things that we think are worth doing. So, if it can stimulate the economy, educate children, put out fires, build infrastructure, keep people alive then we want the government to do those things. But we also realise that there is a limited amount of money that can be raised from taxation. If it's necessary to go into debt in the short term to keep the country moving, then that's the right thing to do. But in the long run, every dollar that we spend on interest for loans is a dollar we're not spending on health, education, poverty reduction or innovation. So it's in our interest as progressives to find a stable way of funding our programs that is sustainable. That's why we want to reduce medicare costs. That's why we want to cut waste from the Pentagon. That's why we consistently support Pay as You Go policies.



The 5% of the federal that we spent last year on debt interest was not wasted money, but it wasn't maximally efficient either. In the long run, we want to stabilise this in a way that doesn't cause people too much pain in the short term.

But Republicans... just don't care about this at all. Not even a little bit. So ask them why not...

A Black President, Universal US Health Care and... Peace in the Middle East?

I always hesitate to write anything at all about the Israeli-Palestinian situation, because I can rarely think of anything to say other than, "Abandon hope all ye who enter here!"

So it's with some doubt and trepidation, that I am letting my inherent optimism link you to this article, which speculates that the same type of messy, ugly, but ultimately effective process that led to the this government passing the first ever comprehensive universal health care provision - as dreamed of by generations - has the distant hope of, after a similarly gruelling and painful process of compromise and setbacks, to put the Israeli-Palestinian conflict on a path towards lasting peace.

Because what this deal actually does is provide the various parties to the negotiation an opportunity to delineate a border. As New York Times correspondent Mark Langer writes, burying his lead:


The logic behind a 90-day extension is that the two sides would aim for a swift agreement on the borders of a Palestinian state. That would make the long dispute over settlements irrelevant since it would be clear which housing blocks fell into Israel and which fell into a Palestinian state.

As with healthcare, the administration is taking a path that is not easy to watch, but may be the most practical. I have argued here before that the US government must have, and eventually convey to the parties, a view regarding the elements of a final status agreement: more Dr. Kissinger, less Dr. Phil. But the occasion for putting a thumb on the scales should be a negotiation over the border, not a dispute over continued settlements, which has been clouded by past negotiations over the border. Various talks between Israelis and PA officials, from the Geneva group, to the Olmert meetings, portended land swaps. These first efforts to draw lines, all of which assumed the Eztzion bloc would be part of Israel, say, cannot simply be erased from everyone's consciousness.

THE ANALOGY TO healthcare may be pushed further. The administration has been criticized for allowing Senate committees to debate the shape of the healthcare bill before committing itself to a final plan. The process was ugly; and the administration sweetened the outcome for resistant blue-dogs along the way. In the end, however, it got senators who had skin in the game, and it used their disagreements to define the "solution space" in which to intervene. And once (as Jonathan Cohn has shown) Obama saw the shape of the bill he could get, he still had to choose: let it go, for political reasons, or campaign for it, for historical ones. Had he not chosen the latter course, we would not have had a health reform bill at all.

As always, I'll take a humilating victory over a noble defeat any day. There are still a million and one steps between this moment and a lasting peace for the people of Israel and Palestine. But one step in the right direction is not nothing.

Nancy Pelosi, American Hero

As we bid farewell to Nancy Pelosi's Speakership, let's pause a moment to realise that the first female Speaker of the House of Representatives - the most powerful woman ever to serve in elected office in the USA - was also the most effective leader the Democrats have had in Congress for many generations.

Progressive, feminist, climate change hawk, child advocate, and proud San Fransican, Nancy was never a politician to win elections or legislative battles by selling out her beliefs. But win them she did.

Her term as Speaker was relatively short, but her accomplishments outrank most of her predecessors by a long way.

By any measure, Pelosi has been one of the most effective House speakers in American history, especially given her relatively short tenure. At Salon, Steve Kornacki offers a helpful recollection of her many accomplishments, from health care to student loan reform to the credit card bill of rights to cap and trade. Pelosi consistently delivered legislation that became law, as well as legislation that the Senate then stalled on and failed to pass. As Kornacki writes, Pelosi is unpopular less because of what the House has done or failed to do — most Americans have little idea of those particulars — but because the economy is bad and voters wanted someone to blame.

But there’s another factor that makes Pelosi that much easier to scapegoat: She is a woman — the highest-ranked woman ever to hold elective office in the United States. In January 2007, Pelosi gaveled in her first legislative session as speaker while cradling her newborn grandson (one of seven grandchildren) and surrounded by other legislators’ offspring, whom she had invited to the dais to celebrate. She spoke about her own journey from “kitchen to Congress” and promised that the Democratic Party would govern on behalf of children, and their mothers, too — a vow she fulfilled by collecting the votes to pass the State Children’s Health Insurance Program, which insures 11 million kids, and the Lily Ledbetter Act, which made it easier for victims of gender- and race-based pay discrimination to file civil rights complaints and collect back pay.

Thanks.

Get Angrier

Last night, the Republicans appear to have won over 60 seats in the US House of Representatives, taking back majority control of that body, while at the same time picking up at least 6 seats in the Senate. Democrats will retain a majority in the Senate and were relieved to hold onto some critical seats there that looked like they would be hard to hold - most notably, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid held onto his seat in Nevada against all odds.

So... that was a pretty crappy night for us, really. No two ways about it. The defeat of (sorry Mom) batshit crazy non-Witch Christine O'Donnell in Delaware and baseball bat wielding loon Carl Paladino in New York by substantial double digits won't stop the so called Tea Party from tightening their stranglehold on the Republican party. They now own it. They've proved in this election cycle that they can take down in the primary any Republican who shows any hint of an interest in actually solving the nation's problems. Climate change doesn't exist, immigration should be punished (and screw the law abiding Latinos who get caught up their dragnet), the only acceptable way to even attempt to fix the economy is with more tax breaks for the rich. Welcome to the new rules.

Well I say screw that.

President Obama's going to make a speech pretty soon, and I'm sure that as usual his words will be wise, reasonable and right. But I wanted to post before he speaks to tell you that, from my point of view, election 2012 starts today.

I'm incredibly proud of the Democrats accomplishments of the past two year. Against resistance from every faction of the Republican party we've salvaged the economy, rescued the auto industry (which, amazingly, is now restored to full profitibility), delivered a stimulus package that economists agree is responsible for keeping or creating between 1.5 and 3.3 million jobs, and passed health care reform that will cover 95% of the population and will serve as our lasting legacy for generations to come.

It was the most successful Congress of the past hundred years, and seems to have started to but it wasn't enough - not nearly enough to solve the deep and lasting damage that has been done to the economy by 8 years of Republican mismanagement. And people angry. I don't blame them

The problem is that people have lashed out, in their anger, at the only people they could knowck down - the overwhelming Democratic majorities in Congress. We were in their sites, so they took us down.

I think the voters weren't nearly angry enough. I know I wasn't.

Republicans now say they want to spend the next two years obstructing, blocking, investigating and holding hearings on the Democrats. For instance,

The GOP plans to hold high profile hearings examining the alleged "scientific fraud" behind global warming, a sleeper issue in this election that motivated the base quite a bit.

Now that they have the reigns of power in the House, what are they hoping to accomplish with it? Well, nothing actually,

"If you put too much of the actual official power in the hands of the Republicans, it makes them responsible. Right now, I think they're in perfect position tactically. Control the House, object, propose stuff that Obama may veto and run on that against him in 2012.”

While the country has a 9.6% unemployment rate? Does this sound to you like a party that has any interest in, oh, I don't know, fixing things?

Me neither.

The 2012 election campaign starts RIGHT NOW. And I say, bring it on. This is a fight we have to win.

Obama Appoints Solicitor General Elena Kagan to Supreme Court

Kagan is a former Dean of Harvard Law School, and has been the Obama Administration's Solicitor General for over a year. She has had a varied career in law, working in the Clinto Administration, as an advisor to the Senate Judiciary Committee, and as a Law Professor. She clerked for Thurgood Marshall, and worked on Michael Dukakis' Presidential campaign.

If approved by the Senate, she will be the first Supreme Court appointee since 1972 not to have prior experience as a Federal judge.

I'll post more information and updates as the process goes on - but in the meantime my generic advice is: Read SCOTUSBlog.

They know more about this stuff than almost anyone, and they do a good job keeping up to date. Here for instance is their detailed summary of Kagan's experience, positives and negatives, and the perception of her by fellow lawyers and jurists.

Kagan is uniformly regarded as extremely smart, having risen to two of the most prestigious positions in all of law: dean of Harvard Law School and Solicitor General.


In government and academia, she has shown a special capacity to bring together people with deeply held, conflicting views. On a closely divided Supreme Court, that is an especially important skill.

Conservatives who she has dealt with respectfully (for example, Charles Fried and former Solicitors General to Republican Presidents) will likely come forward to rebut the claim that she is an extreme liberal.

She would also be only the fourth woman named to the Court in history, and President Obama would have named two. At age 50, she may serve for a quarter century or more, which would likely make her the President’s longest lasting legacy.


As with John Roberts, her service in a previous presidential Administration exposed her to a number of decisionmakers, who have confidence in her approach to legal questions.

The fact that she lacks a significant paper trail means that there is little basis on which to launch attacks against her, and no risk of a bruising Senate fight, much less a filibuster.

And finally, one point is often overlooked: Kagan had some experience on Capitol Hill and significant experience in the Executive Branch, not only as an attorney in the White House counsel’s office, but also as an important official dealing with domestic affairs. She has thus worked in the process of governing and does not merely come from what has recently been criticized (unfairly, in my view) as the “judicial monastery.”

Obama Administration Celebrates UK Labour Day by Protecting US Workers

Here in the UK, we're enjoying a long weekend in celebration of the international movement to protect workers rights. The Labour movement (as distinct from Labour, the political party) has had a massive impact on working conditions across the industrialised world, from regulating an 8 hour working day to restrictions on child labour to minimum wage and the right to unionise. Workers can no longer be discriminated against, in many places, on the basis of race, age, gender or (more recently) sexuality.

In the USA, Labour day doesn't happy until the first Monday of September. I guess the good people of America felt a little uncomforable celebrating their freedoms on the day appointed by the Second International in protest against the slaughter of pro-Labour protesters in Chicago. But in any case, President Obama has honoured the true spirit of International Workers day by the simple expedient of taking concrete steps to ensure companies comply with existing labor laws.

In a move that will affect most American corporations, the Labor Department plans to require companies to prepare and adopt compliance plans aimed at ensuring they do not violate wage, job safety and equal employment laws.

The effort, aimed in part at reducing the incidence of employers not paying overtime and improperly classifying workers as independent contractors, will require them to document many of their decisions and share that information with their workers and the government.

In announcing the department’s intentions on Thursday, Deputy Labor Secretary Seth Harris said his department wanted to foster a culture of compliance among employers to replace what he described as a “catch me if you can” system in which too many companies violated employment laws.

This is important to me for a couple of reasons. Firstly, because I think that people in general focus too much on imposing new legislation or regulation, and not quite enough on using the existing ones well. The Bush administration managed to do a lot of damage, in particular to environmental protection and worker's rights not by overturning laws protecting them, but by a kind of malign neglect. That kind of think - non-enforcement of longstanding laws - doesn't often make the news, but it can radically transform the landscape in insidious ways.

And secondly because I think that some of the tactics this reform is aimed at, for instance, treating people who are essentially full time, permanent workers as contractors to avoid offering them benefits, are a small part of the reason why the recovery has so far been slow to result in much job creation. If employers genuinely don't feel ready to hire again, and feel nervous of commitment in an unstable economy that's perhaps understandable - but it isn't a license to ignore the law.

Republicans Unify to Ensure Banks are Not Regulated

I'm so glad the Republican party has operated in lockstep to vote against Financial Reform. In recent years, our struggling banks have been the only salvation of the global economy, with their cautious and morally upright behaviour preventing us from falling into a cataclysmic financial crisis in 2008. Thank heavens the Republicans are unified to ensure that they can keep operating in exactly the same way. Shame on the Democrats for seeking to reign in these paragons of fiscal rectitude.

[Yes, it's OPPOSITE DAY here on the Obama London blog!]

The Liberal Democrat Surge...

So all of Britain has gone Lib Demtastic following Nick Clegg's good performance in last Thursday's leaders debate here.

Wondering who these upstarts are? Perhaps you'd be interested in the series of articles I wrote last year when I was introducing myself to the party.

Here's a short intro to the party.

Here's some info on the panel discussion I did at their conference.

And here's my "Beer Fuelled Rant" in which I gave the party a good talking to about their relative lack of ambition.

For the record - I can't vote in this election, but if I could I would probably vote for different parties locally and nationally. So I wouldn't classify myself as partisan in a UK context - although I'm sceptical of the Tories.

The Facts Show (and Businessweek Agrees) Obama Plan is Working

A lot has happened this week, both locally (a great Democrats Abroad health care celebration!) and back home (Justice Stevens is retiring!) but I wanted to take a moment now to write about the economy. Specifically, the improvement in the economy.

Businessweek magazine, hardly a bastion of economic populism, has just published an interesting article about how not only are the markets recovering, but they are doing so because there appears to be a solid grounding of underlying economic improvement. And they attribute this to directly to Obama's efforts:

Little more than a year ago, financial markets were in turmoil, major auto companies were on the verge of collapse and economists such as Paul Krugman were worried about the U.S. slumbering through a Japan-like Lost Decade. While no one would claim that all the pain is past or the danger gone, the economy is growing again, jumping to a 5.6% annualized growth rate in the fourth quarter of 2009 as businesses finally restocked their inventories. The consensus view now calls for 3% growth this year, significantly higher than the 2.1 % estimate for 2010 that economists surveyed by Bloomberg News saw coming when Obama first moved into the Oval Office. The U.S. manufacturing sector has expanded for eight straight months, the Business Roundtable's measure of CEO optimism reached its highest level since early 2006, and in March the economy added 162,000 jobs—more than it had during any month in the past three years. "There is more business confidence out there," says Boeing (BA) CEO Jim McNerney. "This Administration deserves significant credit."

It is worth stepping back to consider, in cool-headed policy terms, how all of this came to be—and whether the Obama team's approach amounts to a set of successful emergency measures or a new economic philosophy: Obamanomics.

But this doesn't need to be a question of  interpretation. The facts on the ground are very clear - on almost every measure, bar unembployment - which is only just starting to recover, with our first month of positive jobs news just reported - the economic situation has grown better under Obama's presidency.

I'm going to just flagrantly steal some charts from Ezra Klein's blog, but as usual you really should read it yourself.

Here's a chart showing job growth:

And yes, the blue bits are the Obama Presidency and the Red bits are Bushville. Spotted a pattern? Hmmm....


Here's a chart showing house prices. (Hint, remember Obama was inaugurated in Jan 2009...)

Here's a chart showing the Dow Jones Industrial average under the Obama Presidency:

This is fun. I could do this all day.

Here's one showing GDP growth under Obama - remember, the first quarter of his Presidency would have been reported in April 2009, so that's the first point of measure the chart uses:

 Now, the news is not all unmixed joy. It's true that in order to achieve these results, Obama has allowed the deficit to continue to rise (worth noting that the biggest chunk of the deficit still came under Bush - but also worth noting that Obama CHOSE to let it continue going up).

Ezra, and most professional economists, argue convincingly that it was this counter-cyclical spending and the increased deficits that they caused which made it possible for the other measures to go up. They further argue

that the deficit would also have continued to go up if the economy (e.g., GDP growth) had failed to grow, since tax revenues would have continued to plummet. I find all that convincing.

There's another point as well - it's possible Obama was just plain lucky. Maybe he just happened to be inaugurated at the peak moment of the recession and it would have naturally turned around even if he had done nothing. I don't think that's the case, and there's plenty of evidence to suggest that the direct job creation and protection (a lot of firefighters and teachers were due to be laid off without the stimulus) led to real growth. But it's theoretically possible.

What I DON'T think you can now argue, even as a hypothetical, is that anything Obama and his team did in any way slowed down of prevented a recovery. So the source of the anger and economic populism that springs from much of the right appears tome (how shall I put this delicately) to spring from factors other than a purely fact-based analysis.

UK Elections Will be on May 6th...

Gordon Brown meets with the Queen tomorrow to ask for a general election to be called. Yes, that's really how this works, the mad compromise with history that is political life in Britain remains as entertaining as it is, oddly, more or less effective.

As a non voter, with friends in all three British parties (and some Green party-ites as well, now I think of it), I'll largely be watching these elections as a keen and interested observer. Good luck to all of you who will be hitting the campaign trail for one

But in the competition to determine who our next Prime Minister will be, may I only issue a fervent and heartfelt: May the best man win.

In terms of our relationship with America, I feel confident in saying that Obama's relationship with a future PM will be the same as his dealings with the current one; a warm and close association in which we don't always agree but most often find ourselves on the same side. Call it a Special Relationship if you like - and the British Media love to check the pulse and temperature of the Specialness in our relationship, viewing it apparently as a very poorly patient. For me the point is that in the BEST of all possible ways America doesn't usually need to worry about Britain. We rarely worry that they will stockpile nuclear weapons, or crack down in totalitarian oppression against their own people. We don't worry that they'll mass troops against their neighbours, or intentionally destabilize global currencies. If Obama often doesn't spend as much time on the relationship with Britain as the British press would like, it's because there are a lot of countries out there for whom one or more of those descriptions apply.

That the UK is so often proudly unproblematic is something that (fortunately) is unlikely to change no matter which of the candidates becomes our next PM. So I don't expect Barack will be rushing to endorse any of them, whereas I do expect he'll be quick to congratulate whoever should come out ahead.

Which doesn't mean there won't be offices in the White House - including the Oval one - watching the forthcoming show with great interest.