I ask because I'm pretty skeptical of the advice of anyone who claims to be pro-union and pro-labor while also supporting open borders. The two are irreconcilable.

Also keep in mind that we're going to need to peel of many moderate Republicans for bipartisan legislation to pass with a large majority, such as HCI reform. This really isn't the time to obsess over Lieberman or enforcing party loyalty.

The best thing would be to diminish Lieberman by this public spanking. In regards to his committees, who cares? I don't honestly think he's going to screw up HLS. Nor do I see his defection during the Presidential campaign inspiring anyone else as an example.

All this is a lot to do about nothing imo.

Credit for the 90s tech boom goes to the post WWII environment of college-educated, upper to middle-class, garage-tinkerers and geeks. By yhr millions they came from good families and went to universities like MIT, Stanford, Berkeley, etc. where they were exposed to early mainframe computers, genetics labs, usually built for science research, often with Government and private grants. The best then went to work in technology labs like XEROX PARC, BELL Labs, NASA JPL, etc. And the very best founded the US companies that created the tech boom, often piggybacking on technology invented by the government, such as the internet created by DARPA.

(same story for biotech)

For example, simply living in the US and being able to enjoy the benefits of our culture and the beautiful landscape. Sure, one can move to Dubai with Cheney, or parts of China are developed, but who really wants to? Not me. Look at the SMOG during the Beijing Olympics. Couldn't even see the sun most days. What's the value of clean air and who wants to live in an environmental catastrophe? You couldn't pay me enough.

Most of us will recognize living in a place as good as the US comes with responsibilities to leave it as good as we found it.

That means infrastructure, healthy communities, maintaining oppurtunity and mobility, a sense of liberal freedoms and social coherence. It's morally irresponsible to live in the US and enjoy the benefits of this society while looting it and not putting anything back. Running sweatshops in the developing world and dumping toxins into their environment, while living in the US and enjoying our quality of life, and then feigning surprise when the eventual blowback occurs, whether it's literally pollution blown around the globe, or militants bolstered by the festering global poverty and humility.

You should keep in mind that the troubles in Japan weren't actually that bad for most Japanese. This is a country that maintained universal healthcare, a high life expectancy, high job security, single earner homes, excellent infrastructure, low crime, etc, all throughout its "crisis."

By objective quality of life measures Japan is doing pretty good, and has been throughout the 80's and 90s, and still manages to manufacture and export while also maintaining cutting edge technology.

We'd be lucky to have Japan's problems.

Greenspan is a dyed in the wool laissez faire market fundamentalist. By his own admission he didn't think he could do anything to stop bubbles, and has admitted in hindsight his model was flawed.

You're essentially saying that keeping a full tank of gas in your car will ensure you accelerate to speeds at which you lose control and go off a cliff. Well sure, if for personal reasons you've removed the brakes, steering wheel, and guard rail, while blindfolding the driver and administering him speed-balls, yeah that very well could happen.

We'll never be able to compete with unskilled or low skilled factory work done in china or elsewhere without labor standards and some quality of life protectionist measures to ensure we're not decimating our society while building China's up.

Sure, one can open a factory in China. But who really wants to live there? And can most Chinese afford to buy the goods made there? No. So the US will have a tech advantage for a generation or so at least.

We'd be fools not to enact some limited protectionist measures. Right now we're just giving it away.

Yes Bush's policies with Greenspan inflated the housing bubble. But it wasn't the "ownership society" that was to blame, it was the deregulation fundamentalism which entirely trusted deregulated markets to channel increased money into the right places and have a positive social impact without any leadership or regulation from government. As we know, that's not what happened.

The problem wasn't the "ownership society" policy goal. The problem was a delusional belief we'd get there via laissez faire.

To be perfectly clear, lower rates simply means that loans can be issued at a lower rate of return. (duh)

A low rate of return isn't inherently bad. Asserting low rates = "misinvestment" or citing Ludwig von Mises, is just goofy Libertarian/Austrian school goofballery.

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For example of a perfectly good low return investment, take micro-lending in poor communities. It does an enormous social good in lifting people out of poverty and providing them resources towards entrepreneurship, which then allows them to be more self determining, send children to schools, etc. All of which has enormous value for society, improves literacy, decreases crime, etc.

But, you won't see large for-profit banks investing in micro-loans any time soon because the rate of return is too low for them compared with other investment opportunities given a tight monetary supply. And it's not really their bag anyways.

***

The goal of increasing monetary supply is low return investments with a high social value, such as home ownership. Timing is very important as is oversight and regulation, providing incentives to make responsible loans. Otherwise, the low rates simply result in a glut of risky high return loans, due to an abundance of money, rather than safe but low return loans as increased monetary supply intends.

Of course Ludwig von Mises wouldn't get that, nor do the Autrian School or the Chicago School. Which is why Greenspan and his fellow laissez faire ideologues made no effort to regulate while flooding cheap money into the market. And the ensuing bubble is the inevitable result.

What should have happened is for low rates to result in low APR loans for homes at realistic appraised value, where the lender actually has an interest in being repaid.

The failure was a lack of regulation and proper incentives. For example, lending institutions were allowed to operate under a "too big to fail" moral hazard, thanks to the scuttling of Glass Stegal and securitization.

Done properly with considerably more oversight and regulation, low rates would have flowed capital into housing and other real investments without creating speculative bubbles, because lenders would have been on the hook, and risky investment would have been properly firewalled.

The existing crisis isn't the result of monetary supply. It's the result of bad incentives and deregulation across the spectrum for over 30 years in a vacuum of economic leadership towards promoting US industry. The notion was government couldn't do anything right so it didn't do anything except print money and hope for the best.

The tech bubble was speculative foolishness where everyone hoped for overnight fortune in extremely risky ventures, which created an environment where even solid companies became greedy to inflate stock prices.

For example, had we deployed our internet infrastructure in the manner of South Korea, then WorldCom's fiber capacity would have been utilized and every backwater would have a high speed hookup a decade ago. Had we instituted better CAFE standards and passed on the real cost of oil, we'd be exporting hybrids and electric cars today and not be sending so much of our wealth to the ME. Had we forced cellular companies to adopt common standards, our wireless market would have grown much faster through serial competition rather than parallel competition, and we'd have maintained our wireless technology advantage rather than ceding it to Japan and W Europe. Etc etc.

Instead, we invested in Pets.com over and over, allowed our most prestigious financial institutions to underwrite and fluff them, and created an environment where even sound businesses had to cook the books to keep up.

Then when that inevitably failed, we created a new bubble in housing, again by printing more money while failing to provide leadership, oversight and regulation. It would be as if JFK gave no indication where he wanted the country to be in 10 years, printed tons of money, while secretly hoping FORD and GM would somehow get to the moon.

It hasn't been a failure of monetary supply. It's been a failure of oversight, regulation, and national leadership. All that was scuttled thanks to the religiosity of laissez faire. And let's be honest, both parties and many prominent economists share the blame, though the Chicago School and Republicans undoubtedly more so.

As Dean should know, the problem wasn't low rates and monetary supply, it was a failure to regulate or target stimulus, and a failure to recognize the deficiencies of markets.

Low rates were needed to stimulate growth, but there is no way that should have been allowed to flow into a housing ponzi scheme.

If for example a company grows and expands to add value, then it may issue new stock and dilute existing stock. If new stock is proportional to added value, then previous stock should retain value. If the growth creates additional value via efficiency, then the diluted stock will still increase in value.

We have a lot of underutilized resources in America right now. By increasing monetary supply, cutting back on inefficient programs, and targeting stimulus we're in essence issuing new stock in the US economy, targeted to people and industries capable of adding enormous value to our economy. By doing so we also increase the efficiency of our overall economy.

Just like issuing new stock to added value, done correctly it ultimately increases everyone's value.

"Money" is just paper. Chits. It has no real value. The monetary supply expands and contracts in accordance with the real value of the economy.

Real wealth already exists in our economy and is being under valued and under utilized. Unemployed workers still have skills. There is enormous wealth to be generated from investing in clean energy infrastructure. We have an entrepreneurial and technological advantage that must be utilized lest it rot on the vine. Etc.

The government isn't "spending money it doesn't have" because that would imply money has real value or that the new money is somehow less real than the old money.

It's actually just allocating money to investment opportunities and existing value that are presently being under utilized, such as energy infrastructure and unemployed skilled workers, that the markets have failed to value properly.

The fallacy is that Obama can't afford to implement his stimulus strategy without making cuts elsewhere. Not so. It's a misunderstanding of the nature of stimulus in economic crisis, monetary supply, and mistakenly presumes a zero sum environment, robbing Peter to pay Paul.

We have an elastic monetary policy for good reason. Exactly for times like this.

Stimulus in a crisis is simply put: allocating new money to exiting wealth which has been undervalued due to market failures. Such as unemployed workers for example still have their skills, they just aren't being utilized.

So no, Obama doesn't need to cut the military or anything else to pay for stimulus. The wealth already exists in our economy, it's just undervalued due to market failures.

The mistake wasn't in keeping rates low. The laissez faire mistake was the presumption markets are always optimal and rational, and resultant failure to target monetary policy into growth infrastructure or even predict the death spiral.

It's critical to understand this is pro-growth stimulus. Programs that are inefficient should be cut on that basis. But, it's unnecessary to cut the military for example to pay for healthcare.

It's not zero sum. We don't have to rob Peter to pay Paul. Pundits really need to educate themselves and stop repeating that myth as though it were a fact.

He's too old and utterly impotent even now. There's essentially zero chance he could defend himself from a Democratic challenger.

I met a young college educated woman from Alaska recent who abhorred Palin and people like her. Palin and her ilk are dead enders, in every part of the country.

Texas, and even Appalachia and Oklahoma will end up where places like CA and NY are now, it's just a matter of time.

Lieberman was on the Dem ticket in 2000. Kicking him out would be a major political story.

This is exactly the kind of fluffy story on "tone" and "optics" that pundits obsess over, which then becomes accepted wisdom and the "narrative" script the MSM follows, which ultimately has tremendous influence on public opinion.

Saying this is just "inside baseball" is totally missing the big picture.

This is exactly the time when people are wondering what the tone of the new Admin and new Congress will be.

This is exactly the type of issue pundits watch closely, which then turns into a general consensus and "narrative" coverage that ultimately filters down through the MSM to shape the opinions of most people.

I think you may have a bad case of up-is-down-syndrome.

If memory serves, you've been wrong on just about every issue I'm aware of, from candidate endorsements to policy predictions. And you're pretty hotheaded.

Maybe you should ask yourself why?

Again, if Joe has the sense to realize he's lost on FP issues, and forever more just STFU about them and limit himself to supporting other Democratic mandates, then fine. We're not trying to run the party like Gingrich or De Lay did on ideological purity because look where it got them.

But if Joe wants to continue to be a PITA and refuse to acknowledge his POV lost or refuse to respect the new CIC from his own party, that's too much.