What About Social Security?

This post (and the bulk of the comments), forget one big elephant in the room when tracing the steady decline of Bush's popularity since getting reelected in 2004.

Terry Schiavo, and the Iraq war certainly played a part (and a very big part) in the Spring the Spring and Summer of 2005, as it turned out. But the thing that really sent Bush's death spiral into motion was the attempt to privatize Social Security.

Bush came out of the election in 2004 assuming he had a lot more political capital than he did, and immediately wasted all that political capital on the third rail of politics, Social Security.

It was an incredibly hubristic move at the time, immediately severing any goodwill that may have come to the GOP and Bush from seniors, a group that had been a big part of why Bush got elected and reelected in the first place. It cost him. Katrina, and the Terri Schiavo matters also played their parts, but it was Social Security that got the ball rolling.

He's been in pretty steady decline ever since.

Update: Yes, I know Katrina was actually in August/September 2005. I'd really meant to say 2005 as a whole, but was thinking of the Schiavo affair when I typed Spring.

The Death of Monetary Policy.

The Fed is finding out that you can lead a maxed out credit card shopper to the mall, but you can't make him put more money on that credit card.

WASHINGTON — Policy makers at the Federal Reserve appeared almost stunned by an economy that was sinking faster than they had expected on almost every front in December, so much so that they even toyed with the idea of not announcing an official target for overnight interest rates, according to minutes of the meeting released on Tuesday.

At the meeting on Dec. 15 and 16, Fed policy makers jumped through the looking glass and slashed the benchmark federal funds rate on overnight loans between banks virtually to zero. Vowing to use “all available tools” for stimulating the economy, the Fed then outlined a radical new approach of pumping money into the economy through its own lending programs and through heavy purchases of mortgage-backed securities and possibly longer-term Treasury bonds.

Despite having already created a raft of new lending programs to financial institutions and even corporate borrowers, Fed policy makers as well as the Fed’s staff forecasters began the meeting with sharply reduced forecasts. They all expected a severe economic contraction that was likely to last through at least the first half of 2009.

“All meeting participants agreed that the economic downturn had intensified over all,” according to the minutes. The housing market was still weakening, credit conditions were tighter than ever, consumer spending had fallen for five months in a row. Even exports, which had been the one bright spot, were being hurt by a global economic slowdown.

I've been explaining this to friends since the last rate cut. Monetary policy as a tool to deal with this recession will be about as effective as prayer in solving this problem.

The cure for this economy is fiscal policy. Specifically spending. Targeted spending that creates working and middle class jobs, and puts money into the hands of those people. The more the better.

Tax cuts for the rich and tax cuts for big business won't do it. Neither will the half measures being proposed by the Obama Administration. After his first stimulus package, which appears to be a lot of business tax cuts aimed at companies that don't need them, and get too many already anyway isn't going to work, Obama will have to try something more aggressive. One only hopes the real economy hasn't cliff-dived before he realizes that this is no time for half measures. From what I've seen, I'm not optimistic.

(h/t Atrios).

Prison Bars Are a Series of Tubes

Senator Ted Stevens guilty of 7 Counts of Lying on Senate Disclosure Forms

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- Alaska Sen. Ted Stevens vowed to fight his Monday conviction on federal corruption charges, a verdict he attributed to "repeated instances of prosecutorial misconduct."

Sen. Ted Stevens leaves federal court Monday as the jury deliberated in his corruption trial.

"I will fight this unjust verdict with every ounce of energy I have," the 84-year-old Stevens, the Senate's longest-serving Republican, said in a written statement after the jury came back Monday afternoon. "I am innocent."

Stevens was convicted of seven counts of making false statements on Senate ethics forms to hide hundreds of thousands of dollars in gifts and work on his Alaska home from an oilfield contractor at the center of a corruption investigation in the state."

"This verdict is the result of the unconscionable manner in which the Justice Department lawyers conducted this trial," he said.

Actually, this verdict is the result of the unconscionable manner in which Ted Stevens abused the public trust, taking hundreds of thousands of dollars from a corrupt oil service company so they could in turn steal millions from taxpayers.

And I'm guessing Ted Stevens is innocent...of the Kennedy assassination.

This leaves Sarah Palin as about the only member of the Alaska Republican Party not to go to jail. Then again, Troopergate isn't over yet.

PS. Of course, this is excellent news for John McCain. How stupid of me not to realize it immediately.