Economy

Kos:

As Ford posts yet another crazy-ass quarterly loss ($8.7 billion), it makes one wonder how much better the US auto industry (and its unions) would be doing if they had let the government raise CAFE standards, huh? The government could've bailed them out of this mess.

And it makes one wonder how much better that industry would be doing if they hadn't so viciously opposed Bill and Hillary Clinton's 1993 health care initiative. In 2004, GM spent over $5 billion in health care costs — a number that is likely significantly larger today. That's billions that would be off its balance sheet had they not opposed universal healthcare.

Lots of industries may shoot themselves in the foot, but none more so than the auto industry. It truly deserves the comeuppance it is getting (and it has gotten a healthy assist from its unions). The people who don't deserve it — of course — are its workers, who are getting screwed.

NYTimes columnist Frank Rich from last Sunday:

As it happened, "Wall-E" opened the same summer weekend as the hot-button movie of the 2004 campaign year, Michael Moore's "Fahrenheit 9/11." Ah, the good old days. Oil was $38 a barrel, our fatalities in Iraq had not hit 900, and only 57 percent of Americans thought their country was on the wrong track. (Now more than 80 percent do.) "Wall-E," a fictional film playing to a far larger audience, may touch a more universal chord in this far gloomier time.

Indeed, sitting among rapt children mostly under 12, I felt as if I'd stepped through a looking glass. This movie seemed more realistically in touch with what troubles America this year than either the substance or the players of the political food fight beyond the multiplex's walls. [...]

Mr. McCain should be required to see "Wall-E" to learn just how far adrift he is from an America whose economic fears cannot be remedied by his flip-flop embrace of the Bush tax cuts (for the wealthy) and his sham gas-tax holiday (for everyone else). Mr. Obama should see it to be reminded of just how bold his vision of change had been before he settled into a front-runner's complacency. Americans should see it to appreciate just how much things are out of joint on an Independence Day when a cartoon robot evokes America's patriotic ideals with more conviction than either of the men who would be president.

Wall Street Journal:

Stocks fizzled Wednesday, ending in bear-market territory for the first time in more than 5-1/2 years as oil jumped and fears about the financial health of General Motors mounted.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average enjoyed brief rallies in morning trading but ended down by 166.75 points at 11215.51, down 20.8% from its record close in October. Traditionally, a fall of 20% from a high is considered the definition of a bear market.

On January 22, 2001, just after Bush took office, the Dow Jones closed at 10,578.24. Yesterday it closed at 11,215.51. That's an increase of 6% in seven years.

It's been another fantastic Republican economy.

From Sara Robinson at Orcinus:

Strauss & Howe's saecular theory (which takes in the work of dozens of other historians who've proposed historical, economic, and cultural cycles in the past) postulates that the past 500 years of Anglo-American history has unfolded in a repeating cycle of roughly 80 years (it's gotten slightly longer as lifespans have increased). The events change from cycle to cycle, of course; but the essential forces of history, the priorities and personalities of recurring generational groups, and the similar consequences resulting from each phase of the cycle conspire to keep it turning back over itself through time. Certain types of events and characters emerge and converge, again and again. Things that seem impossible in one part of the cycle seem equally inevitable in others. Lessons that the passing generation once knew are forgotten, and must be learned again. (Our Roaring '20s great-grandparents could have given us an earful of caution about the '90s, for example.) For people who want to surf the waves of time and opportunity, the saecular theory has proven to be a surprisingly useful tide table. [...]

The cycle also predicts

Read the rest of this entry...

Salt Lake Tribune:

Gov. Jon Huntsman Jr. boosted the hopes of imbibers frustrated with confusing liquor laws by proposing Friday that the state do away with private club memberships to boost tourism.

The Utah Hospitality Association filed a petition Thursday to collect signatures for a statewide initiative for the 2010 ballot, that would do away with the private-club system in which people must pay fees to get a drink.

But on Friday, Huntsman's spokeswoman Lisa Roskelley said the governor is hopeful ''this could be done by legislation rather than having to wait for a vote in 2010. The governor believes this is something that needs to happen. This would be of a help to our tourism industry.''

So Huntsman is pro-education, pro-environment, and pro-drinking. He also wants the legislature to knock it off with the "message bills." About the only thing he's conservative about is lowering taxes on corporations and the rich.

I can't stop giggling about this comment from Sen. Mitch McConnell (DailyKos):

"It's pretty clear to me that the Democratic agenda is to turn us into France," the Kentucky Republican told The Washington Times in an unusually blunt interview at his office in the Capitol. "Americans may want change, but the question is, what kind of change?"

Well, let's see. France's healthcare system has been rated the best in the world (the U.S. ranked 37th). They have the 11th-highest life expectancy (the U.S. is 45th) and the 6th-lowest infant mortality rate (the U.S. is 43rd). French employees get 5 guaranteed weeks of vacation every year. (In the U.S., that number is zero.) And yet, despite having all that vacation and the burden of "socialized medicine" and only one-fifth the population of the U.S., France is the world's 6th-largest economy.

So, yeah, Democrats want to make the U.S. more like France. It wouldn't exactly be a bad thing.

Washington Post:

Offering the gloomiest assessment of personal economic progress in close to half a century, a new survey has found that most Americans think they have not made economic progress over the past five years, as their incomes have stagnated and they have increasingly borrowed money to finance their lifestyles.

As many Americans struggle with declining housing values, increasing food and energy prices and growing unemployment after a long period of flat wages, well over half of respondents said they are either losing ground economically or are stuck in the same place, according to the report released today by the Pew Research Center. Only four in 10 said they have moved forward in the past five years — a record low, Pew says, and far off the record 57 percent who in 1997 said they had moved forward in the previous five years.

• How government lowers healthcare costs (Jacob Hacker in the Washington Post)

• How to debunk a mischaracterization of what your candidate said (Charles Krauthammer in the Washington Post, demonstrating that he can think rationally when defending Republicans)
  
• Small currency outlets in Amsterdam refuse to take U.S. dollars (Reuters)
  
• After a brief dip last week, Obama takes an 8-point lead over Clinton nationally (Gallup)

A national anti-poverty advocacy group has flunked or given barely passing scores to Utah’s Republican Congressional delegation while awarding Democratic Congressman Jim Matheson an “A.”

While a recent news story indicates that as many as 28 percent of Salt Lake City children live in poverty, a report published by the Sargeant Shriver National Center on Poverty Law underscores the stark difference Democrats and Republicans take on the issue.

E.J. Dionne Jr.:

Never do I want to hear again from my conservative friends about how brilliant capitalists are, how much they deserve their seven-figure salaries and how government should keep its hands off the private economy.

The Wall Street titans have turned into a bunch of welfare clients. They are desperate to be bailed out by government from their own incompetence, and from the deregulatory regime for which they lobbied so hard. They have lost "confidence" in each other, you see, because none of these oh-so-wise captains of the universe have any idea what kinds of devalued securities sit in one another's portfolios. [...]

Enter the federal government, the institution to which the wealthy are not supposed to pay capital gains or inheritance taxes. Good God, you don't expect these people to trade in their BMWs for Saturns, do you?

Also see Pat Bagley.

Update: dday at Digby's place calls this philosophy "corporate Marxism." Ouch!