I hope that Obama can use his oratory skill to explain Keynesianism in the way that the average guy can understand and make it clear that now is the time for smart spending. If you really really want balanced budgets (if we can do it each year great) the time to have had them was was when? Oh yeah from 2003-2007. I forgot which party was running things?
http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/...
"For one thing, the election offered confirmation of something that was actually pretty obvious: some of the most self-righteous deficit hawks are actually much more concerned with using deficits as an excuse to dismantle the social safety net than with, you know, reducing deficits. Notably, David Walker decided, a week before the election, to endorse Mitt Romney — even though Romney had proposed a $5 trillion tax cut to be offset by loophole closing he declined to specify, not to mention an increase in defense spending the Pentagon said it didn’t need.........
Yet despite what should have been a major discrediting of the whole deficit-hawk establishment, the word is that Wall Street is pushing for Obama to appoint Erskine Bowles as Treasury Secretary.
Erskine Bowles? The man who, charged with producing a deficit-reduction plan, decided that a key feature of this plan should be … cuts in marginal tax rates on high incomes? The man who warned, in dire terms, of a looming fiscal crisis, with soaring US borrowing costs, within two years — almost two years ago?
Wall Street’s Bad Investment Decision
http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/...
"........having brought both itself and the rest of the world to the edge of disaster — was bailed out by taxpayers. Yet far from being grateful, top financial types were furious at Obama for occasionally hinting that some of them might have misbehaved a bit. And investment bankers — who normally lean Democratic — went overwhelmingly to the other side, pouring cash into Mitt Romney’s coffers in the no doubt correct expectation that a Romney administration would dismantle financial reform and treat their wealth with the adulation they believe to be their birthright.
But Romney lost and Obama won."
The only thing I would add to Krugman's posts is that this is the perfect time to introduce things like a Wall St. transaction tax and to remove the carried interest loophole in private equity. That is the money or performance fee the PE manager gets out of the capital gains return from an investor. This is not from the PE managers own money, it is other peoples money. That profit should be taxed at the ordinary income because the PE manager was not risking his own money.
To me these guys are less popular than (I really don't know what) but they are not popular. That may be a nice thread. Who is more popular than Wall Street? The Democrats should contrast these guys with those who will be the victim of budget cuts.