Rahm Emanuel Tapped as Chief of Staff

[Pangloss]

Evidence of Obama's desire for moderacy and aisle-crossing came today in the selection of Rahm Emanuel for Chief of Staff. Emanuel is a prominent member of the centrist New Democrat Coalition and one of the bigger names behind the party's move to the center and sweeping up of persuadable moderate voters that produced Obama's victory.

 

He's a House member at the moment, but was a senior adviser in the Clinton administration, and, in a fact which I'm sure will infuriate many, headed up Clinton's failed health care strategy. That will be an interesting battle, given that the issue of universal health care has become a moderate/centrist position and is no longer an extreme view, but now the question arises as to affordability given the vast deficits. In fact so dominant is the deficit issue at the moment that I expect we'll only see the health care issue addressed after the former (which is also what I think should be done). But we'll see what happens.

 

http://www.reuters.com/article/vcCandidateFeed7/idUSN0550209820081105

[npts2020]

I agree. There is no real plan that I can see for reducing the deficit and we are all being put on the hook for more money than most people can even concieve. I still fail to see why giving money to banks for lending is better than just lending the money outright. IMO Wall Street and big finance have dug a hole that might not be possible for the fed to bail them out of, it's mostly a matter of do we allow them to also suck the treasury dry in the process.

[bombus]

Like Sauron the dark lord, you think you've killed 'em but those damn neo-cons just reappear in another form. I think Obama is a truly good man, but I fear he'll be hobbled if he tries to steer away from the neo-con agenda.

[Pangloss]

You see Emanuel as a neo-conservative? Really? The architect of universal health care?

 

Gee.

[bascule]

There is no real plan that I can see for reducing the deficit

 

Obama has an awesome plan for reducing the deficit. It's called: collect more tax revenue.

[bombus]

You see Emanuel as a neo-conservative? Really? The architect of universal health care?

 

Gee.

 

If that's true - and I don't doubt you - it's very good news. However, from what I understand his foreign policy leanings are very neo-con.

Edited November 6, 2008 by bombus
multiple post merged

[Pangloss]

Can you give us any examples?

[Riogho]

Rahm Emanuel?

Neo-Con?

 

No way. This is the guy that while being a part of the New Democrat Coalition (democrats that run near the middle), he is one of the most liberal of them. He is the constructor of universal healthcare Clinton style. This is the guy that stabbed a steak while a knife repeatedly and yelled 'DEAD DEAD DEAD' after Clinton won the election. So he can get kinda antsy.

[npts2020]

Obama has an awesome plan for reducing the deficit. It's called: collect more tax revenue.

 

Eventually, it will be like squeezing blood from a rock if a major shift in the economy does not take place. We cannot continue to have petroleum based vehicle production, war, and shady investing as mainstays of our economy without collapse at some point. The problem in my lifetime has not so much been collecting enough taxes, as seeing that those taxes are put to good use. Also consumerism is all well and good but how long can you consume more than you produce? The point is that taxation doesn't really address the underlying causes of our problems.

 

Back to the thread. I look for Rahm Emanuel to be Obama's attack dog when he wants one.

[Riogho]

Have any of you not read 1984?

 

Perpetual War is good for the economy!

[bascule]

The problem in my lifetime has not so much been collecting enough taxes, as seeing that those taxes are put to good use.

 

Well apparently you haven't been paying attention for the past 8 years. We went from a nearly balanced budget to a nearly trillion dollar budget deficit. This comes after Bush gave huge tax breaks to the super-rich, not to mention saddling the government with defense spending topping one trillion dollars a year.

 

Want to spend more? You can't cut taxes at the same time.

[Pangloss]

The vast majority of that trillion dollar deficit coming under a Democratically-controlled Congress, btw. You really should stop blaming everything on Republicans. It isn't logical, and it isn't working. And it isn't what Obama is doing.

[ecoli]

Well apparently you haven't been paying attention for the past 8 years. We went from a nearly balanced budget to a nearly trillion dollar budget deficit. This comes after Bush gave huge tax breaks to the super-rich, not to mention saddling the government with defense spending topping one trillion dollars a year.

 

Want to spend more? You can't cut taxes at the same time.

While the deficit was obviously bigger under Bush than Clinton, Clinton's surplus was nothing more than some clever accounting tricks.

 

Clinton's surplus came from from selling Government security bonds to the social security administration and federal reserve, which used the fund surplus it got from the Dot-com bubble. Government spending went up but this registered as a surplus only because the debt being held by the public (as opposed to the government holdings) so it didn't register in the national debt... at least not until the dot-com bubble burst.

 

This is simply a case of shifting debt... just like we're selling treasury securities to china now. If we lose the ability to pay them back (like with social security) that 'source of income' quickly turns into debt.

 

Of course, I'm not particularly angry at democrats for this practice, since something very similar is going on and has been going on, by republicans and democrats, contributing to the current housing bubble. We're spending money we don't have and not expecting to pay for it.

[Pangloss]

Are you sure about that? I thought there was a spike in income tax revenues due to the dot-com bubble.

[npts2020]

Well apparently you haven't been paying attention for the past 8 years. We went from a nearly balanced budget to a nearly trillion dollar budget deficit. This comes after Bush gave huge tax breaks to the super-rich, not to mention saddling the government with defense spending topping one trillion dollars a year.

 

Want to spend more? You can't cut taxes at the same time.

 

Spending more will not guarantee getting any value out of the spending. How much value did we get out of the past 10-30 years of government spending? In Iraq alone The Guardian says 12 billion dollars in cash was delivered in early last year to Baghdad for distribution, of that money about 8.8 billion of it is unaccounted for. That's a single instance and IMO not unique. This doesn't even account for overcharging, graft, etc. I don't know about you but that would pay all of my taxes for more generations than I am ever likely to see. Unless we have some government-run enterprise, there will always be taxes if we expect to get anything from having a government.