It's coming, from behind closed doors (just like Hillary's tablets on healthcare?).
They shouldn't be doing it this way. They should be dropping hints about provisions and 'working it', right?
Anyway, you might be appalled that I could call a thing I haven't seen 'not bold enough', right?
But it stands to reason.
Remember, Obama's idea of "bold" for healthcare was ... insurance buying cooperatives.
He's surrounded himself with people who are ... well, no one seems to jump off the page as a risk-taker - not Summers, Geithner, Romer, or Goolsbee, to me. And, on these issues, it's doubtful he'd recognize "bold" himself.
Big is not "bold". Big is just necessary. Bold is something else.
THERE IS FISCAL AND THEN THERE IS FISCAL...
Here's a "bold" proposition that no one one the Obama team would put up for debate, out of fear of being called a socialist-commie-pinko-faggot.
What the economy needs right now, in a meaningful scale, is wealth transfer.
First, from lenders to borrowers, in an accelerated way, to avoid a prolonged "debt deflation", related to the glutted housing and consumer markets, largely. Lenders need to be consolidated, forcibly if necessary, and borrowers need to be wiped as clean as practicable.
Second, to combat hoarding propensities (flows to stocks) and the public's unfunded liabilities shift resources from stocks to flows and from private wealth to public wealth. For instance, they might do well to consider that proposal for lifting the cap on the social security tax, for a time. With valuations low and investment not the issue, now is a good time to raise taxes on gains. With CEOs willing to take multi-million dollar pay-days even while their companies are on the public dole, now is a good time to consider a new top marginal rate (50%?). The list goes on.
A redistribution of wealth and income can be a powerful force in a market economy, if done properly. You may not hear much about it from mainstream economists or from Obama-Biden, though.
Wednesday, December 24, 2008
Obama-Biden Plan not "Bold" Enough
