Rare good news

... that's not really so great.  Gabrielle Giffords's aide Ron Barber won a special election to serve out her term.  This doesn't change the balance of power in the House one whit, so it's merely emotional solace after the defeat in Wisconsin.

Emotional solace matters, though. I have a strong feeling of doom about 2012, and I know that foolish adoption of the Teapublican agenda would be disastrous for America. A win, even a small, brief one such as this one by a Blue Dog, replacing another Blue Dog, is still a win, especially in a place as wild and woolly as Arizona.

So what's next?

Fiscal priorities

Deficit! Deficit! Deficit!

(whisper, whisper)

We can't raise taxes on the wealthy!

When it comes to cutting benefits for poor and middle-class seniors, or cutting the pay of our military personnel while forcing our veterans to pay more of their own health care costs — much of which likely resulted from illness due to their service in two long wars — what we hear from Washington elites is the great need for “shared sacrifice” to bring down the deficit. Yet, when debating the idea of allowing taxes on millionaires (and here it might be good to remember that two-thirds of the members of Congress are themselves millionaires) to return to what they were under Bill Clinton, it is all “damn the deficit we can’t let the wealthy suffer during this economic downturn!”

The insincere so-called deficit hawks won't actually speak the pseudo-quote at the end of the block quote, but their actions speak very loudly. They are not willing to raise taxes, even on the wealthy, the very same people who have gained every significant advantage written into tax law over the past thirty years, the very same people who gained virtually all of the financial bailouts, the very same people whose incomes have skyrocketed while everyone else's have stagnated.

Conservative Democrats are not on your side any more than the whole lot of Republicans are.

The road to serfdom

Unemployment is for the little people:

[A] large part of Congress — large enough to block any action on jobs — cares a lot about taxes on the richest 1 percent of the population, but very little about the plight of Americans who can’t find work.

If the American polity were the least bit rational, the unemployed would be marching with pitchforks against their vassals. Krugman says:

[W]hile Americans are indeed angry, their anger is unfocused.

Paul is wrong about this. The anger of Americans is focused. It's just focused on the wrong people.

The right answers - sufficient stimulus, direct jobs programs, help for people who are not already millionaires - are almost all liberal answers, and no one in the White House is willing to even make the case against the rigid NO of Republicans and the tepid, captious no of Blue Dawg Democrats.

This is not going to end well.

Too little, too late

Nearly a year ago, Paul Krugman said that the $800 billion stimulus wouldn't fill the gap in aggregate demand. His colleagues are catching up.

Optimistic assumptions in turn contributed to producing a package that if anything is too small, analysts say. “The economy was weaker than we thought at the time, so maybe in retrospect we could have used a little bit more and little bit more front-loaded,” said Joel Prakken, chairman of Macroeconomic Advisers, another financial analysis group, in St. Louis.

Now, finally, there's an expert consensus that we ought to reup for more. Yeah, experts and another half a trillion dollars would buy us the stimulus we needed in the first place. Unfortunately, the Republicans and the Senate Blue Dog Democrats are immune to experts and would rather have Hoovervilles than fix the problem.

Actually, the Republicans gain as America loses, and they're o.k. with that. The Blue Dog Dems? What do they get? Do they put keeping their own jobs ahead of keeping millions of their constituents employed? Or are they just not very smart? Only if the stimulus succeeds wildly are they likely to retain their seats, yet they dither like a bunch of pullets headed for the plucker.

Not about the deficit

Republicans and Blue Dog Democrats who object to the House health care bill care about something other than deficit reduction:

The plan will cost more over the next decade than the $900 billion limit Obama had set, but a combination of spending reductions and tax increases will more than offset those costs, so the plan would ultimately reduce the deficit by $104 billion by 2019, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office. The proposal would impose a 5.4 percent income tax surcharge on individuals making more than $500,000 and families earning more than $1 million.

Hmm. Wonder what that might be...

Conceding South Carolina

South Carolina Republicans are gleeful because they're going to save "Joe" Wilson's seat in Congress. Whoop-de-doo.

Democrats don't need another Blue Dog , and that district is not going to elect even a moderate.

Censuring "Joe" casts in high relief the difference between Democrats and Republicans, and that helps Democrats. Helping South Carolina Republicans, who were going to win everything that matters in the Palmetto bug state, is a small price to pay.

Another orphan of a bankrupt culture

Universal access is not the only problem America faces regarding health care. It's breaking us.

Galloping individual bankruptcies from medical costs are incontrovertible. Nearly one of every 100 Americans will be in a family that declares bankruptcy this year alone because it can't afford treatment. Republicans and Blue Dog Democrats don't care.

Medical costs next will bankrupt the country. We now pay waaay more than any other country for our medical care. Our government's per capita expenditures top those of every other country on earth except Norway and Luxembourg. Then we add on an even greater amount of private expenditures. For mediocre outcomes.

These cost problems cannot be solved by an individual mandate in the absence of a public option. Even a public option is only a tepid half-measure that might lead to what's really needed - single-payer.