Free Republic

According to a New York Times/CBS News poll, Obama has a 63 percent job approval rating and more than 75 percent of Americans are optimistic about the next four years with him as president.

Politics cannot be removed from the political process. But here, partisan politics ran roughshod over pragmatic economic policy. Token concessions (including the AMT provision) to some Republicans weakened the package. Obama is gambling that his flawed stimulus will seem to work well enough that he'll receive credit for restarting the economy -- and not be blamed for engineering a colossal waste

Congress has passed a “stimulus bill,” but Congress has failed to enact a stimulus. To understand how that is so, it is useful to re-examine some fundamental tenets of macroeconomics and Keynesian thought. Many varieties of Keynesian macroeconomists exist, and some of us believe that the the Obama administration’s outsourcing of economic decisions to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has resulted in a policy that is likely to work poorly, if at all.

Productivity, which fell in the bad recession of 1981-82 and during the Great Depression, was up 3.2% in the fourth quarter. Incomes, adjusted for the recent deflation in the CPI, are rising. And while the Keynesians among us fret about the paradox of thrift, I find the rising savings rate comforting. Higher savings is exactly what we need to repair the damage done to our economy by excess consumption fueled by easy credit. And besides, retail sales were up in January.

WASHINGTON (CNN) – A dozen House Republicans are targeted in a new House Democratic political campaign that criticizes the GOP lawmakers for opposing the $787 billion stimulus package. The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee will contact voters this week by telephone with a recorded message saying that their Republican congressman voted “against the largest tax cut in history,” and against a stimulus bill that the business friendly U.S. Chamber of Commerce supported.

The Employee Free Choice Act, or “Card Check” for short, is one of the most controversial measures Congress faces this year. The bill—first introduced in the Senate in 2007 by Ted Kennedy and co-sponsored by then-Senators Barack Obama and Joe Biden—would make it easier for workers to join unions and would tighten penalties for employers who try to stop them. Supporters such as Human Rights Watch and the NAACP say the bill provides important protections for the middle class. Opponents like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the National Restaurant Association say it increases labor costs and hurts the bottom...