Tag Archives: Barack Obama

What’s all the fuss? It’s only metadata.

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Glenn Greenwald in the Guardian:

The National Security Agency is currently collecting the telephone records of millions of US customers of Verizon, one of America’s largest telecoms providers, under a top secret court order issued in April.

The order, a copy of which has been obtained by the Guardian, requires Verizon on an “ongoing, daily basis” to give the NSA information on all telephone calls in its systems, both within the US and between the US and other countries.

The document shows for the first time that under the Obama administration the communication records of millions of US citizens are being collected indiscriminately and in bulk – regardless of whether they are suspected of any wrongdoing.

The secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (Fisa) granted the order to the FBI on April 25, giving the government unlimited authority to obtain the data for a specified three-month period ending on July 19.

Under the terms of the blanket order, the numbers of both parties on a call are handed over, as is location data, call duration, unique identifiers, and the time and duration of all calls. The contents of the conversation itself are not covered.

So, if you’re a Verizon customer, your government knows who you called, where you were when you called them, where they were and how long you spoke with them. (To clarify, there are two surveillance programs in the news:  an named NSA program where phone records of Americans are the target of the surveillance and PRISM, also an NSA program, where on-line communications of foreigners are the target of surveillance.   Domestic surveillance is the big issue as far as I’m concerned.)  But, hey, no biggee because they didn’t record the actual conversation and there are checks in place to prevent abuse, right?   No reason to be uncomfortable with the fact that any calls you made to Tea-Party-sympathizer cousin or Occupy-Wall-Street-sympathizer brother-in-law are part of some government database, right?   Like I said, it’s only metadata and there are checks in place to prevent abuse.  Just listen to the president (after all, he’s listening to you…):

“If people can’t trust not only the executive branch but also don’t trust Congress and don’t trust federal judges to make sure that we’re abiding by the Constitution and due process and rule of law, then we’re going to have some problems here.”

– Pres. Barack Obama, 7 June 2013

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Call it like you see it

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Charlie Pierce:

I am not entirely dismissive of the notion that the president has not done all he can with the powers (persuasive and otherwise) bestowed upon him by virtue of his having been elected president, you know, twice already. I believe he has not done enough to break the power of weaponized lunacy in the other party and weaponized cowardice in his own, and his fealty to the Wall Street crowd leaves me absolutely cold. But it’s getting to the point where, if another pundit tells me that the president’s primary failure is that he hasn’t been able to persuade congressional vandals to drop their spray-paint cans and back slowly away from the subway car of government, I might start sending Rahm Emanuel a card every year on Political Carnivores Day.

Me too.

President Obama’s budget proposal

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The President has released his budget proposal for Fiscal Year 2014.  The President’s proposal as well as multiple others are summarized in graphical form here.  (It’s a nice graphic.  The overall length of the bar indicates spending.  The projected deficit/surplus is indicated by the position of the bar.)

Robert Greenstein of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP) has a good summary of Obama’s proposal here.   An excerpt:

The budget contains a mix of spending cuts and revenue increases that would replace the sequestration cuts and achieve the important goal of stabilizing the debt over the next decade…  The budget is designed to protect the still-weak economy from the effects of premature deficit reduction — by both including short-term investments to address infrastructure needs and by phasing in some of the deficit reduction measures that would replace sequestration in order to allow the economy to continue its recovery…

That would be a welcome change from the current budget path.  The Congressional Budget Office estimates that if sequestration remains in effect, it will cost the economy 750,000 jobs by the end of this year.

As it stands, the package makes tough policy choices while largely adhering to the principle… that deficit reduction should not increase poverty or inequality.  Nevertheless, the budget’s substantial spending cuts, both in entitlements and discretionary programs, would have real-world consequences for millions of individuals and families….

Politically speaking, I had thought that the White House should not put these concessions in its budget, as distinguished from offering them in bipartisan negotiations if and when Republicans agreed to dedicate substantial savings from curbing tax credits, deductions, and other preferences (known as “tax expenditures”) to deficit reduction.

There’s the thing, Obama came to the table with what would be an acceptable compromise proposal.   The Republicans aren’t going to compromise with him.  Boehner and McConnell’s statements last year that they’d want Chained CPI as a condition for considering tax increases?  Just words.  Boehner and McConnell are disingenuous shits.  They weren’t ever going to consider tax increases.  Why on Earth does Obama lead with a compromise position that will be summarily rejected?  What does he think that’s going to accomplish?  I am at a loss to understand…

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The Inadequacy of the Obama Administration

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Lots to say and I’ll update this in the future but let me put down a few initial thoughts…

Earlier today I was directed to a column which suggests that Obama’s Chained CPI offer is just a ploy to show that the Republicans are unreasonable and uninterested in negotiating, i.e., he didn’t make the offer with any expectation that they’d accept it.  (See here for some arguments on why Chained CPI indexing is poor public policy.)  I’m not buying that it’s an Obama ploy to make the GOP look unreasonable.  If that were his goal there’s no shortage of existing evidence to make the case.

President Obama is who he is.  What do Pres. Obama’s statements and non-statements re Social Security tell us about him?  Well, let’s consider this chart:

taxableminimum_chart_1-2-2013_2

“What’s that?” you ask.  (I found it on the Urban Institute’s website.)  Continue reading →

State of the Union

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From the archives, 13 February 2013 –

Jeff Madrick on the president’s policies and his State of the Union Address:

… the president’s State of the Union address last night offered an admirable if weak laundry list of proposals. …

… Obama proposed a high-quality system of pre-kindergarten education in partnership with the states. He also talked about infrastructure spending (though only of enacting a previous proposal), and mentioned in passing that cutting spending during sequestration could hurt the economy. His tone was so quiet on the latter issue that I doubt the public understood its importance. It ought to have been his focus.

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Weekly Digest – January 20, 2013

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100th post!!!

Economics

“The Joint Committee on Taxation (JCT) and Congressional Budget Office estimate that making permanent all of the Bush tax cuts would have cost $3.4 trillion over 2013-2022…JCT estimates show that [the American Taxpayer Relief Act of 2012] makes all but $624 billion of those $3.4 trillion in tax cuts permanent.   It thus makes permanent 82 percent of the Bush tax cuts, while letting 18 percent expire.”

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Pres. Obama on the Debt Ceiling

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As reported by the NY Times:

“[The Republicans] will not collect a ransom in exchange for not crashing the American economy,” Mr. Obama vowed in the East Room, a week before his second inauguration. “The financial well-being of the American people is not leverage to be used. The full faith and credit of the United States of America is not a bargaining chip.”

That’s the right position.  Let’s hope he has the backbone to not back down.

Minting the coin needs to be an option.

Weekly Digest – January 6, 2013

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Fiscal Cliff Deal

I Do Not Understand the Obama Administration, Brad DeLong.

The big reason to make a deal before January 1, 2013 was that detonating the “austerity bomb” would impose 3.5% of fiscal contraction on the U.S. economy in 2013, and send the U.S. into renewed recession. It was worth making a good-enough deal–sensible long-run revenue increases and tax cuts to close the long-run fiscal gap plus enough short-term fiscal stimulus to make the net fiscal impetus +1.0% of GDP–in order to avoid renewed recession.

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Fiscal Cliff Status Update: 31 December 2012, 2000 hrs

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Jared Bernstein (with emphasis added):

From what I’m picking up in the ether (and from Ez Klein’s tweets and from here) it sounds like a deal is forming to avoid the cliff…

[details of the deal]

…So, here’s my first blush response to this deal.  The thing that worried me most in the endgame is that the WH would be so intent on a deal that they’d lock in too few revenues with no path back to the revenue well, and that they’d leave the debt ceiling hanging out there.  Remember, the ultimate goal of Repubicans here is still to “starve the beast”–to shrink government by hacking away at both sides of its ledger–receipts and outlays.

Those fears will be realized unless the President really and truly refuses to negotiate on the debt ceiling and is willing to blow past those who would stage a strategic default.  If he is not, and if this cliff deal passes, then I fear the WH may have squandered its hard won leverage.

So, for the 729th time, if the deal stinks then walk away.  Go over the Cliff and start negotiating – from a position of strength – in January.  No deal is better than a shitty deal.  Any questions?