Occupy Salt Lake City, Feb. 9 2012, by Gary M.

I was not looking forward to updating the State of the Occupation list but when I finally did, it was much bigger than I expected. The first State of the Occupation list we published on December 20 included 61 encampments, and the list is now at 50.

I had expected a much lower number at this point in time just due to attrition, cold weather and February sluggishness. The recent rash of crackdowns may actually have helped generate enthusiasm and support in places it was lagging.

Even as Occupy Nashville and Newark get their eviction papers, Occupy Berkeley has tents up once again in Sproul Plaza. And Occupy Pocatello joins the list. As the big occupations get torn down, new ones spring up to take their place, while others regroup and re-occupy.

My overall impression from talking to occupiers on a regular basis is that the movement is migrating across the country, growing stronger as it penetrates the “flyover states” hardest hit by unemployment. Even as urban middle-aged supporters grow bored with Occupy and their attention is once again diverted by the latest tribalistic rant in the horse race 2012 media cycle, young people with no jobs continue to find hope in a movement that isn’t so easily fooled.

It has actually been a blessing that fair-weather supporters have peeled off to harumph about the latest DNC outrage du jour, because it has left the most dedicated and idealistic occupiers to plan for the spring.

Occupy Supply is a project of the Firedoglake Membership Program. We hold webinar meetings each Sunday at 2pm and Wednesday at 8pm ET which are open to anyone who wants to discuss the future of the Occupy movement.

At upcoming webinars occupiers will be discussing:

• Wednesday February 15: Physical occupations – are they obsolete, or the sine qua non of Occupy? Panelists include Occupy Fairbanks, Occupy Erie, Occupy Scranton. (signup form)
• Sunday February 19: Where does Occupy go from here: A vision for the future (signup form)
• Wednesday February 22: Occupations that have prevented foreclosures, and how they did it (signup form)

You can find a recap of the recent Occupy Supply webinar on how to FOIA for Occupy here. [cont'd]

FDL OccupySupply State of the Occupation: Updated List of Encampments Across the Country

Current Encampments

Santorum is beating Romney, because he is now doing much better among more conservative voting groups. Santorum has a double digit lead among Tea Party supporters (42% Santorum – 23% Romney) and White Evangelicals (41% Santorum – 23% Romney).

Besides showing him with the national lead, the poll’s other piece of relatively good news for Santorum is that Romney does only slightly better than Santorum in a theoretical general election match up with Obama. Romney performs only two points better in the general. From Pew:

Obama leads Santorum by 10 points among all registered voters (53% to 43%) and his lead over Romney is nearly as large (52% to 44%). Romney ran about even with Obama in November and mid-January. Obama has a larger advantage over Newt Gingrich than over Santorum or Romney: Obama leads the former House speaker by 18 points (57% to 39%). Obama has made gains among independent voters. Today, 51% of independents favor Obama in a matchup against Romney, up from 40% a month ago.

Electability has always been a main selling point for Mitt Romney’s campaign. Against someone like Newt Gingrich, who has serious national imagine problems, the Romney campaign could easily make the argument to the base that nominating Gingrich would cost the GOP its one chance to beat Obama. With Romney only doing marginally better than Santorum in national polling, the electability argument becomes much hard for Romney’s campaign to make against Santorum.

Robo signing is about fabricating legally required signatures (source: Science.NASA.gov)

We’re going to have to endure this line of argument from those savvy business reporters, and Diana Olick is at the head of the pack, so we might as well take on this argument about the foreclosure fraud settlement directly.

Let’s take a step back for a second to remember the fall of 2010, when “robo-signing” came to light. The idea that one low-paid guy sitting in a room was signing his, or perhaps somebody else’s, name to thousands of foreclosure documents was appalling. It is appalling, no question. But let us not forget that the vast, vast majority of those foreclosures being processed were in fact legitimate foreclosures; it was the documentation process that was fraudulent. Banks didn’t foreclose on borrowers for no reason, they foreclosed because borrowers weren’t paying their mortgages.

It continues to amaze me how this “no harm, no foul” argument gets employed, when it would not fly in any other context in jurisprudence. Let’s rewrite that claim slightly, with a different scenario but the same spirit.

The idea that one rogue cop sitting at the police station was fabricating evidence was appalling. It is appalling, no question. But let us not forget that the vast, vast majority of criminal suspects are in fact legitimately guilty of some crime; it was the evidence gathering that was fraudulent. Cops didn’t pick up suspects for no reason, they picked them up because they did something wrong.

This flies in the face of hundreds of years of established law, and the cop, as well as the police department, would be rightly condemned by everyone for allowing a systematic process of evidence fabrication to go on. Practically nobody would make the argument that the suspects were guilty anyway, evidence fabrication be damned. But that’s precisely what Diana Olick is saying with a straight face.

So fast-forward to 2011 when the housing market is still in deep despair. Home prices are still falling, eleven million borrowers owe more on their mortgages than their homes are worth, home construction sees its worst year ever, and government relief programs are doing very little to help. Cries arise that the only way to help housing is to reduce the principal on all those underwater mortgages, give borrowers their equity back! But how does government force the banks to do that? Robo.

On the point that government leveraged the illegal actions of robo-signing and servicer abuse into principal reductions, I don’t totally disagree. Clearly that’s what state and federal regulators wanted over, say, prosecutions, or the dissolution of the Wall Street firms that caused the mess. But those actions did in fact cover up a series of crimes that perpetuated the housing bubble. And the bubble is the main driver of negative equity. So nobody should act like there isn’t a causal relationship here. Borrowers were often duped into purchasing homes, sucked into a mortgage business that consistently fed a monster that artificially drove up prices. By the accident of history, those borrowers bought at a height that deprived them of their home’s value when the bubble popped. And it was all done fraudulently. I’d say principal reductions are quite an appropriate remedy.

Getting the housing market back on track. Restoring stability in the housing market. That’s what [banks] want. They’ve already stopped “robo-signing” long ago. Now what they need is closure. Move the foreclosure process along again, so that the housing market can clear all the distress and move ahead. Let the bank black eye begin to heal. Sure, they will get hit with plenty more lawsuits over mortgage securitizations, but that has little to do with their customers on the street, the average consumers. That has to do with investors, and federal regulators and all kinds of complicated Wall Street products that are lost on average Americans. Robo-signing was more personal; it had to do with real people’s mortgage papers that they signed at their kitchen tables.

How does Diana Olick, exactly, know that the banks stopped robo-signing? I found a Wells Fargo job listing of robo-signers that’s only two weeks old. As recently as last July, Reuters found copious evidence suggesting that robo-signing is ongoing. American Banker found more evidence in September. There’s no reason to believe that robo-signing, and at a larger level mass fabrication of documents, has ended. Diana’s own media outlet, CNBC, reported that Goldman Sachs and Ocwen Financial only agreed to stop robo-signing last September, after an agreement with New York financial services superintendent Benjamin Lawsky. Is five months ago “long ago”? And considering all the other evidence, why should we think that any other bank has put an end to the practice?

Olick states that “Robo-signing was wrong.” Good for her. But she distorts so many of the other issues around this settlement, using the familiar trope that people “bought too much home” and that the ones with negative equity are getting off easy while “the rest of us who didn’t buy more house than we could afford” get nothing. The analysis from the business media on this is almost laughable.

GOP offers to extend payroll tax cuts without offsets (earlier photo: Speaker Boehner)

In an impressive bit of caving, the House Republican leadership has given up on finding offsets for the payroll tax cut, proposing a bill that would extend the current cut to the end of the year without any funding. However, the other two pieces that were tied to the overall legislation at the end of last year, extended unemployment benefits and the “doc fix” to avoid a reset of Medicare reimbursement rates, would not be included.

Here’s the full statement from Speaker John Boehner, Majority Leader Eric Cantor and Majority Whip Kevin McCarthy. Afterwards we will parse it.

We support the work of our conference negotiators and continue to support a responsible resolution that extends current payroll tax relief, reforms and extends unemployment insurance, and includes a Medicare ‘doc fix.’ Republicans have attempted to reach an agreement and negotiated in good faith for months, and we will continue to do so. Unfortunately, to date, Democrats have refused virtually every spending cut proposed – insisting instead on job-threatening tax hikes on small business job creators – and with respect to the need for an extension of the payroll tax cut, time is running short.

Because the president and Senate Democratic leaders have not allowed their conferees to support a responsible bipartisan agreement, today House Republicans will introduce a backup plan that would simply extend the payroll tax holiday for the remainder of the year while the conference negotiations continue regarding offsets, unemployment insurance, and the ‘doc fix.’ If Democrats continue to refuse to negotiate in good faith, Republicans may schedule this measure for House consideration later this week pending a conversation with our members. Democrats’ refusal to agree to any spending cuts in the conference committee has made it necessary for us to prepare this fallback option to protect small business job creators and ensure taxes don’t go up on middle class workers.

This is not our first choice. Our goal is to reach a responsible agreement in conference. But in the face of the Democrats’ stonewalling and obstructionism, we are prepared to act to protect small businesses and our economy from the consequences of Washington Democrats’ political games.

Both the unemployment insurance and the doc fix expire at the end of February as well, but only the payroll tax cut would be extended without offsets in standalone legislation. The House can do that under its rules because they changed to “cut-go” at the beginning of last year. This allows tax cuts to go unfunded but not new spending. So I assume their explanation for this would be to refer to its rules.

The Senate does not have such rules exempting tax cuts from paygo. So they would have to designate the payroll tax cut as an emergency, or just secure a waiver of paygo regulations, in order to pass it without offsets.

There’s a bit of a question as to whether House Republicans have the votes to pass a payroll tax cut without offsets. A good chunk of Republicans would rather not pass a payroll tax cut at all. But the overwhelming majority of Democrats would probably vote for this (except for the Blue Dogs who wear the cloak of “fiscal responsibility,” I assume), and if the leadership introduces the bill, it’s likely to pass. I can’t see the Senate getting too tied up in rules issues not to pass this to get out of town and get their one-week President’s Day break, either.

As a policy matter, I should say, this is absolutely the right thing to do. If you’re going to do a payroll tax cut as a stimulus matter, you don’t offset it with anything. That increases demand. This of course flies in the face of everything Republicans have been saying about cutting the deficit, but I’m sure they’ll find a way to ignore that.

But this leaves the issue of unemployment benefits and the doc fix on the table. The leadership says that they would let conference negotiations continue on those matters. But a lot of the urgency for that conference committee goes away when you take the payroll tax cut out of the equation. That also happens to be the most expensive of the three measures, at a 10-month cost of around $110 billion. You would probably need $40-$50 billion (a back-of-the-envelope calculation) to offset UI and the doc fix.

But Republicans are determined to cut public employee salaries or jobs to extend these measures, and Democrats want a millionaire’s surtax or the elimination of oil company subsidies or something similarly inviolate to Republicans. Nobody really wants to see Medicare reimbursements fall 27%, so there’s still some hope to get an extension on the other two matters. But it just got more difficult, and the jobless benefits of millions of Americans hang in the balance.

Detroit may get to vote on decriminalization at city level (photo: Duncan Brown "Cradlehall")

The residents of Detroit may get to vote this summer on a city ballot initiative that would remove all city-based criminal penalties for possession of up to an ounce of marijuana for people over 21.  Voters had been denied the chance to vote on this in 2010, but last Friday in a 2-1 decision the Michigan Court of Appeals concluded the city acted inappropriately in keeping the measure off the ballot.

Back in 2010 the group, Coalition for a Safer Detroit, collected sufficient signatures to put their decriminalization measure on the city ballot. The measure was prevented from going before the voters by the Detroit Election Commission, which voted to keep it off the ballot.  That decision was originally upheld by the Wayne County Circuit Court. This kept the measure from appearing on the ballot in 2010, because the Coalition ran out of time for further appeals.

Recently, though, the Coalition won its appeal to the Michigan Court of Appeals in a 2-1 decision. The Court of Appeals concluded the city had a clear legal duty to place the measure on the ballot regardless of whether the city law would be arguably inconsistent with state law.

The decision paves the way for the measure to appear on the ballot in Detroit this August, unless city officials decide to take the legal fight further.

If voters approve the measure it will amend the city code to remove city penalties for possession of up to an ounce of marijuana for adults over 21. Possession would still be illegal under state law, so individuals in the city could still be arrested under state law. The passage of this local ordinance would, however, be a powerful statement by the people of Detroit about how they want their limited police resources used.

The rich would pay higher taxes on dividends under Obama budget (photo: bright strangely)

I’m loath to dive into the numbers of the Administration’s FY 2013 budget, because it won’t be used as anyone’s baseline, and to the extent that it will, that was baked into the cake by the debt limit deal. If you want the hard numbers, the surprisingly best source I’ve found comes from the Guardian.

Just as an example about how this is a document that won’t cause much interest in Congress, look at the transportation numbers:

• Proposes $556 billion over six years to upgrade roads, bridges and expand high-speed rail, 60% more than the last plan enacted by Congress.
• Boosts funding by $50 billion in the first year to create jobs in industries suffering from protracted unemployment.
• Provides $53 billion over six years for high-speed passenger rail
• Invests $30 billion in a National Infrastructure Bank to provide loans and grants for projects of regional and national significance, supporting economic competitiveness.

The House Republican transportation bill, which Ray LaHood called the worst transportation bill I’ve ever seen, only provides $260 billion, actually far less than half of what the Administration wants.

So why cover this at all? Aside from the fact that little else is going on, there is one new wrinkle, or at least new to me, that would represent as significant a change to income inequality as anything the Administration has yet proposed.

In his new budget blueprint, President Obama is proposing to tax dividends of the wealthiest taxpayers as ordinary income subject to their top income-tax rate, which was the practice until the Bush administration lowered the rates. The proposal, released on Monday morning with other parts of the budget, would raise about $206 billion over 10 years.

Assuming that the Bush-era tax cuts expire at the end of the year, as required by law, dividends for the top 2 percent of income-earners would be taxed at 39.6 percent. Before 2002, the richest taxpayers paid a 35 percent tax on dividends, like on all ordinary income.

Republicans are certain to try to block the change, as they have done to thwart Mr. Obama’s 2008 campaign promise to end the Bush-era tax cuts for those making more than $250,000 a year.

This is not a change on capital gains, the money earned through sale of stock at a profit; it’s on dividends, the money earned through corporate payouts of profits to shareholders. The capital gains tax rate would rise to 20% from 15% under the Obama proposal, consistent with prior years. However, in the past, Obama budgets have proposed a similar increase to dividends, up to 15%. No more: this increases dividend taxes all the way to 39.6%.

This only would hold for the wealthiest households. Taxpayers making under $250,000 a year would see the same dividend tax rate as before. So this is a specific effort to extract more in dividend taxes from the wealthy.

And that attacks a soft underbelly of the tax code – investment gains that the wealthy save or pass to descendants, rather than use in the real economy. While much of income inequality can be explained through before-tax income, at least some of it can be explained by how softly the US taxes dividends and capital gains, and how easily the rich can shift their earnings from ordinary income into these other income sets. I would argue that capital gains should follow the same structure, but targeting dividends in this way at least puts those income sources on the same footing as others. As an Administration official told the New York Times, “Part of the motivation for this is that there are currently too many ways for the wealthy and the well connected to avoid paying their fair share of taxes. Much of income escapes taxation even at the corporate level.”

Generally, I think this is a pretty good idea, consistent with the new shift in emphasis toward using taxation to get at the deficit over spending, but also attacking one of the sources of income inequality, which has disastrous social effects.

UPDATE: The entire budget document is here.

In our “Running of the Bulls” event, RACE to the Ballot takes Durham, N.C., by storm on Friday, February 17, with day (and night)-long campus and community events designed to draw attention to the Bull City’s collective efforts to defeat Amendment One.

Duke University Vote Against Photoshoot
Friday, February 17, 10am-3pm
Old Trinity Room – West Union Building, 416 Chapel Drive
RSVP Today

NCCU RACE to the Ballot Campus Rally Against Amendment One
Friday, February 17, 1pm-3pm
Elder Student Union Building
Speakers include the Rev. Jimmy Creech, one of the co-founders of the National Black Justice Coalition currently serving on its Leadership Advisory Council, Mandy Carter, and State Representative Marcus Brandon
RSVP Today

NCCU Law Teach-in & Panel Discussion: Legal Implications of the Proposed Marriage Amendment
Friday, February 17, 3:30pm-5pm
NCCU School of Law
Room 100
RSVP Today

Panelists:
Barbara Fedders, UNC-CH School of Law
Irving Joyner, Angela Gilmore and Lydia Lavelle, NCCU School of Law
James Coleman, Duke University School of Law

Friend of the Blend, Protect NC Families Communications Director Jen Jones, is literally running across the state and participating in town halls where issues about the amendment are being discussed with people of all political persuasions to broaden understanding. She is joined by a team of campaign organizers, social media street teams, and documentarians, and has started off in the mountains of Asheville and will travel to the coastal city of Wilmington. She will be in Durham for the events this week, running her heart out in my old neighborhood, Old West Durham.

 

RACE to the Ballot “Running of the Bulls”
Join RACE to the Ballot as we run south on Ninth Street and down to the Pinhook on Main Street starting at 5:30 pm on Feb. 17. Runners big and small are encouraged to join this “Running of the Bulls” to raise awareness about the harms of Amendment One and to register voters. Following the run, there will be food trucks and family-friendly entertainment at the Pinhook. All runners and supporters will be gathering near Ninth and Markham at 5:00.
RSVP Today

And the Dance to the Ballot Dance Party – Race To the Ballot’s official End of The Race Party at the Pinhook – You can stay out until 10, but there will be music there following the race at 6:30 to…
http://www.facebook.com/events/149397245177516/

And of course on Saturday Feb. 18th, the Love Wins Dance Party: http://lovewins.nationbuilder.com/. Families Dance: 5:00pm-7:30pm and Adults Dance: 8:00pm-11:00pm. Tickets: $10 per Adult, $5 per Child

You can play a huge role in this effort to defeat Amendment One by supporting Race to the Ballot — donate here.

Related:

* Photos from RACE to the Ballot at HKonJ (with NAACP’s Ben Jealous and Rev. Dr. William Barber)
* The Truth About the Discriminatory, Job-Killing, Harmful, Family-Unfriendly, Divisive, Anti-LGBT Marriage Amendment
* Coalition at historically black North Carolina Central University opposes marriage discrimination amendment
* A Page of Key Amendment Talking Points

Missouri Governor Jay Nixon (photo via Wikipedia)

Lots of people were angered by Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker’s announcement that he would use money gained from the foreclosure fraud settlement to plug his budget hole. I suspected that a lot of states with a budget gap would go this route. And that apparently includes Missouri, a state with a Democratic Governor and a Democratic Attorney General:

Even before state attorneys general put the final touches on a $25 billion settlement with five major banks over improper mortgage practices on Thursday (February 9), Missouri Governor Jay Nixon announced that he wanted to use some of his state’s proceeds for an unexpected purpose: to help fund higher education.

Colleges and universities in Missouri have gone through several rounds of painful budget cuts in recent years, and Nixon, a Democrat, proposed using $40 million from the state’s share of the settlement to help offset the 12.5 percent cut to higher education that he initially proposed in his budget this year, The Kansas City Star reported. Republicans who control the state legislature expressed support for the plan, with the chair of a key budget committee saying he was “glad the governor is finally starting to listen to legislators and the people of this state who make education a priority.”

But while Nixon and Missouri lawmakers may agree on the need to put mortgage settlement dollars into higher education, the decision actually belongs to Attorney General Chris Koster, who signed onto the agreement with the banks and who, under the terms of the deal, has significant leeway to determine how Missouri’s share of the money will be spent. Koster, a Democrat, told reporters on Thursday that he agrees with the governor’s call for more higher education funding and will transfer the $40 million Nixon has requested into the general fund, citing the “severe budget shortages” the state faces.

Obviously, higher education is important, and fiscal transfers to the states should be a regular part of this recovery. But this is a fund paid by banks – the only hard payment in the settlement – ostensibly designed to aid homeowners in a variety of ways. It’s not meant to be a special kitty for whatever budget priority state leaders see fit to use it on. In Missouri, every dollar diverted to higher education means a dollar less for a mediation counselor to put banks and homeowners seeking modifications in the same room, or a dollar less for legal aid for a foreclosure victim, or a dollar less for anti-blight programs to clean up neighborhoods with vacant properties. That undermines the entire point of the settlement and deprives the victims of restitution.

And it’s not like Missouri has no other ways to fill that budget gap. For one, as Think Progress notes, they can stop handing out tax credits to corporations. You can see the settlement, if you will, as funding those tax credits.

So we can delete the $26 million from Walker in Wisconsin and the $40 million in Missouri from the total of the foreclosure fraud settlement, since it’s not going to help homeowners. That’s a $76 million reduction. And counting.

Rick Santorum's recent wins help give him a lead in Michigan

Rick Santorum’s surprise triple win last week in Colorado, Minnesota and Missouri has proven to be an amazing shot in the arm to his campaign. His polling numbers have skyrocketed both nationally and in the upcoming primary states.

In Gallup’s daily tracking poll Santorum’s support jumped from 16 percent before those three events to 27 percent yesterday. Similarly Santorum is surging in Michigan, where according to PPP he now holds a 15 point lead over Mitt Romney. From PPP:

Rick Santorum’s taken a large lead in Michigan’s upcoming Republican primary. He’s at 39% to 24% for Mitt Romney, 12% for Ron Paul, and 11% for Newt Gingrich.

Santorum’s rise is attributable to two major factors: his own personal popularity (a stellar 67/23 favorability) and GOP voters increasingly souring on Gingrich.  Santorum’s becoming something closer and closer to a consensus conservative candidate as Gingrich bleeds support.

Santorum’s winning an outright majority of the Tea Party vote with 53% to 22% for Romney and 10% for Gingrich. He comes close to one with Evangelicals as well at 48% to 20% for Romney and 12% for Gingrich. And he cracks the 50% line with voters identifying as ‘very conservative’ at 51% to 20% for Romney and 10% for Gingrich.

In 2008 Mitt Romney won Michigan with 39 percent, beating John McCain’s 30 percent. A Romney loss in Michigan at the end of the month would prove very embarrassing to the Romney campaign and cause him to struggle to regain momentum before Super Tuesday.

Of course two weeks is an eternity in this crazy GOP primary, which has been characterized by rapid erratic swings. Plenty could change before the 28th.  This is a solid start for Santorum in Michigan, but what is important is how well his lead holds up once the much better funded Romney campaign and associated SuperPACs start flooding the state with campaign ads.

White House Chief of Staff and former Budget Director Jacob Lew (photo via wikipedia)

The FY 2013 budget that the Administration will release today is, in the long run, a meaningless document in substantive terms, so I don’t want to spend that much time on it. But I was a little surprised with the pushback I received about my assessment that it reflects a shift in tone rather than policy. It’s a simple fact that the Administration has wanted a deficit deal for some time, and that this budget will build in a deficit deal. They’re going about it in a smarter way with a higher bid in the negotiations. But there’s no real change in thinking here. For some time, the Administration has wanted to spend a bit more now, and reduce the deficit in the out years. Depending on the emphasis they felt they needed, they would call to (spend a bit more now and) REDUCE THE DEFICIT or SPEND A BIT MORE NOW (and reduce the deficit later).

Nothing has changed. The big difference here is that they treat cuts agreed to in the Budget Control Act (aka the debt limit deal) as part of that “grand bargain” deal. This makes the tax side of the deal a larger going-forward percentage. It’s consistent with the Administration’s earlier contention that the only way to avoid the defense trigger cuts is to replace them with tax increases.

There are certainly positives to take away from the negotiating style here. But it’s a very similar set of proposals. Don’t take my word for it, here’s the Los Angeles Times:

President Obama will call for new spending on infrastructure, education and manufacturing research, as well as higher taxes on top earners, in a budget proposal aimed at underlining his top economic priorities as he gears up his reelection campaign [...]

The blueprint outlined pulls heavily from proposals previously put forward by the president — including his jobs bill, most of which is stalled in Congress, and his deficit reduction plan, which fizzled in the failed congressional “super committee” charged with reducing the deficit.

Officials said the budget would abide by spending caps set by Congress in the August budget deal, keeping discretionary spending levels essentially flat in fiscal 2013.

Over the decade, discretionary spending would drop from 8.7% of gross domestic product to 5%, officials said.

I’ve seen praise for the boldness of this budget proposal. I’m not sure what’s so bold. When we see the numbers, we will find it to be a very consistent proposal. You have the American Jobs Act and you have the contours of the debt limit deal and you have the deficit reduction plan from last September. In fact, the New York Times is right to say that the budget presents a challenge of how to reconcile the dueling priorities of stimulus through tax cuts and deficit reduction, although this is a rhetorical challenge more than a physical challenge, since it’s entirely possible.

“There’s pretty broad agreement that the time for austerity is not today. We need to go on a path where, over the next several years, we bring our deficit under control,” Mr. Lew said on the NBC program “Meet the Press.” “Right now we have a recovery that’s taking root, and if we were to put in austerity measures right now, it would take the economy in the wrong way.”

“The challenge,” Mr. Lew added, “is how do you do two things at the same time? How do you put money forward for things like the payroll tax holiday, for things like getting a jump-start on infrastructure, for building schools, and make the decisions for long-term deficit reduction? The president has proposed a plan that would do that.”

This is not a difficult reconciliation: you increase the deficit now to increase demand, and reduce the deficit later. That’s a fairly Keynesian viewpoint. It’s also been the same sheet in the songbook the Administration has been singing off of for the last three years. That’s really my main point.