Category: Policy Page 11 of 35

I’d very much like to be shown up as too cynical:

A source present at today’s White House signing ceremony for the Lilly Ledbetter bill tells me that President Obama gave assurances that the family planning aid would be done soon — perhaps as soon as next week, when the House is set to take up a spending bill that would keep the government funded until October.

Obama emphasized that the family-planning aid “makes the budget look better, it’s a money saver,” the source said. In fact, removing the need for Medicaid waivers for family planning saves states an estimated $700 million over 10 years.

I was wrong – in a big way – about Obama in the election.  I’d very much like to be wrong – in a similarly big way – about my view of his approach to the politics of governing.

TPM pointed me to this excellent short piece from Barry Ritholtz, wherein he notes that new Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner doesn’t seem to understand that he’s no longer working for private interests:

Consider this statement from Geithner, who said that Treasury  is considering a “range of options” for its financial rescue plan, with the goal of preserving the private banking system.  “We have a financial system that is run by private shareholders, managed by private institutions, and we’d like to do our best to preserve that system.”

No! Defending these idiots was your old gig. In the new job, you no longer work for the cretins responsible for bringing down the global economy. Please stop rationalizing their behavior, and preserving the status quo!

I’ve got a longer post on financial issues percolating, but I think that Josh Marshall might have cut to the quick of my questions earlier today, when he wrote:

The core problem is that many, perhaps most of our major financial institutions are insolvent. They have more liabilities than assets. A functioning financial system requires solvent banks. And only the government has the resources to manage the massive recapitalization to get the key institutions back on their feet. At that level of generality, the issue assumes a degree of clarity.

All the different fix permutations are just different ways of accounting for the transfer of cash. You can take the banks over and assume their debts. Or just give them tons of money to make them whole. Or you can buy their bad investments at the price the banks wish they were worth and thus get the banks out of under the consequences of the financial collapse they helped create.

It’s not clear to me why the dollar amounts spent would really be different in the various permutations. It’s all a question of who owns what when it’s all said and done and who runs the institutions.

The who ought to own it part is pretty clear for me, though I have to admit to being stumped about who ought to run them.  Even if you make the very big assumption of competence on the part of the current crop of folks in there, there is such an extreme amount of demonstrated bad faith that I wouldn’t hire them to run a 7-Eleven.   However, I suspect if the right tone were clearly set at the top – that we’re done fucking around, and that it’s time to grow up and realize there’s a world outside of your own, to which you have some responsibility – we could find some talent in the financial ranks.  But that tone setting?  Well, that gets us back to the failure pointed out in the beginning of this post.

This is bang-my-head-against-the-wall frustrating:

House Democrats are likely to jettison family planning funds for the low-income from an $825 billion economic stimulus bill, officials said late Monday, following a personal appeal from President Barack Obama at a time the administration is courting Republican critics of the legislation.

[ . . . ]

Under the provision, states no longer would be required to obtain federal permission to offer family planning services — including contraceptives — under Medicaid, the health program for the low-income.

Yes, that’s right, the Democrats will be caving to the Taliban-aping GOP.  The “controversial” idea here is that states could automatically elect to use their federal Medicaid funding to cover services that they’re presently providing with state funds.   In other words, states would no longer be the ones paying for condoms and such for low-income Medicaid recipients, thus freeing up the state to use its tax revenues to meet other needs while ensuring that contraception is still available.   Seems pretty straightforward, no?  And since it’s up to each state to make this election, it should appeal to those conservatives who are always claiming that issues like this should be decided at the state level (in theory, anyway – I’ve found that that’s more often than not still as much a cover as “states’ rights” used to be).   And yet here Democrats are, allowing something as simple as plain contraception to be treated as some divisive issue?  I’m sorry, didn’t the American public just spend two years throwing out the theocracy supporters?  And Democrats react like this?  Pathetic.

I’ve never been a fan of holding up lobbyists as some inherently evil group.  I think running against them is mostly a stunt, and I think broad prohibitions against them entering government is a bad idea.  That said, if you’re going to make a point of adopting rules against lobbyists, you really should stick to them.

Update: While I’m not a fan of the rhetorical device of slamming lobbyists, I’m absolutely appalled by the revolving door. As such, I’m completely okay with fairly severe post-employment bans on lobbying agencies of which you were previously a part. Not a perfect solution, but it’s better than nothing. (Thought I’d made this part of my original post, but somehow bungled it.)