Here is a good Krugman piece about the real motives behind New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie axing the Hudson River Tunnel Project. All for political expediency, apparently.

It is also brings to light, yet again, the inconsistent Republican stance on the use of federal funds, that is, it’s almost always OK to pony up money and increase the deficit for military reasons or to go to war, but when it comes to services at home, like public transportation, no dice.

Kruman’s concluding paragraph hits the mark:

America used to be a country that thought big about the future. Major public projects, from the Erie Canal to the interstate highway system, used to be a well-understood component of our national greatness. Nowadays, however, the only big projects politicians are willing to undertake — with expense no object — seem to be wars. Funny how that works.

Cannibalize the Future – NYTimes.com.

I know this surprises no one, but as it turns out, the “Romniverse” is more like a multiverse, featuring different dimensions and political ideologies, depending on the day. Here is an interesting column along those lines:

The imagery may have been unfortunate, but Mr. Fehrnstrom’s impulse to analogize is understandable. Metaphors like these, inexact as they are, are the only way the layman can begin to grasp the strange phantom world that underpins the very fabric of not only the Romney campaign but also of Mitt Romney in general. For we have entered the age of quantum politics; and Mitt Romney is the first quantum politician.

A bit of context. Before Mitt Romney, those seeking the presidency operated under the laws of so-called classical politics, laws still followed by traditional campaigners like Newt Gingrich. Under these Newtonian principles, a candidate’s position on an issue tends to stay at rest until an outside force — the Tea Party, say, or a six-figure credit line at Tiffany — compels him to alter his stance, at a speed commensurate with the size of the force (usually large) and in inverse proportion to the depth of his beliefs (invariably negligible). This alteration, framed as a positive by the candidate, then provokes an equal but opposite reaction among his rivals. …

What does all this bode for the general election? By this point it won’t surprise you to learn the answer is, “We don’t know.” Because according to the latest theories, the “Mitt Romney” who seems poised to be the Republican nominee is but one of countless Mitt Romneys, each occupying his own cosmos, each supporting a different platform, each being compared to a different beloved children’s toy but all of them equally real, all of them equally valid and all of them running for president at the same time, in their own alternative Romnealities, somewhere in the vast Romniverse.

And all of them losing to Barack Obama.

via A Quantum Theory of Mitt Romney – NYTimes.com.

I hinted at this in my last post, and The New York Times’ Paul Krugman made note of it in his recent column, that the Occupy Wall Street crowd and the 99 percenters are actually shooting too low in their criticisms of the rich. The income of the top 0.1 percent of the working population rose 400 percent between 1979-2005, according to an earlier report from the Congressional Budget Office (adjusted for inflation), while the same statistic increased only 21 percent for those in the middle income bracket, and I suggested in the previous post that the top 0.01 percentage also make up a significant percentage of the income share. The recent report from the CBO didn’t look at income brackets higher than the top 1 percent.

Krugman elucidates the basic gravamen of the disgruntled poor and middle class against the super rich and why the latter  contribute little, other than capital gains taxes, to the public coffers or to the economic well-being of the nation:

Given this history, why do Republicans advocate further tax cuts for the very rich even as they warn about deficits and demand drastic cuts in social insurance programs?

Well, aside from shouts of “class warfare!” whenever such questions are raised, the usual answer is that the super-elite are “job creators” — that is, that they make a special contribution to the economy. So what you need to know is that this is bad economics. In fact, it would be bad economics even if America had the idealized, perfect market economy of conservative fantasies.

After all, in an idealized market economy each worker would be paid exactly what he or she contributes to the economy by choosing to work, no more and no less. And this would be equally true for workers making $30,000 a year and executives making $30 million a year. There would be no reason to consider the contributions of the $30 million folks as deserving of special treatment.

But, you say, the rich pay taxes! Indeed, they do. And they could — and should, from the point of view of the 99.9 percent — be paying substantially more in taxes, not offered even more tax breaks, despite the alleged budget crisis, because of the wonderful things they supposedly do.

Still, don’t some of the very rich get that way by producing innovations that are worth far more to the world than the income they receive? Sure, but if you look at who really makes up the 0.1 percent, it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that, by and large, the members of the super-elite are overpaid, not underpaid, for what they do.

For who are the 0.1 percent? Very few of them are Steve Jobs-type innovators; most of them are corporate bigwigs and financial wheeler-dealers. One recent analysis found that 43 percent of the super-elite are executives at nonfinancial companies, 18 percent are in finance and another 12 percent are lawyers or in real estate. And these are not, to put it mildly, professions in which there is a clear relationship between someone’s income and his economic contribution.

The failure of the deficit reduction panel this week proves that we have few, if any, true leaders in Washington. The obvious bulging expenditure in the national budget is the military, but apparently that is the sacred cow, so no matter how far the national debt sinks, and the economy, that is untouchable.

Rosanne Altshuler an economist with Rutgers University and a former member of George W. Bush’s tax reform panel, seems to have said it best:

There could be a bit of a silver lining. It forces us to come to terms with cuts in areas that have been difficult to touch — the military and Medicare. We may not like how the cuts are going to be done, but we better start dealing with the fact that cuts are going to have to be made.

That’s the kind of honest assessments that we need if the nation is going to balance the budget any time soon. Some departments that do not contribute to human well-being (Not education or health care, for example) should be cut.

If you still think that members of the Republican Party have grasp on reality or ethics, read on.

Former House Speaker and 2012 presidential candidate Newt Gingrich said Friday during a speech at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government that child labor laws are “truly stupid” and should be repealed. Yes, that’s right. Child labor laws, you know, so 8-year-olds and 10-year-olds can’t be forced or compelled to waste their childhood toiling away instead of learning, playing and doing things children should be doing with their time.

Here’s what Gingrich had to say:

Credit: CNN

It is tragic what we do in the poorest neighborhoods, entrapping children in child laws which are truly stupid. Saying to people you shouldn’t go to work before you’re 14, 16. You’re totally poor, you’re in a school that’s failing with a teacher that’s failing. …

I tried for years to have a very simple model. These schools should get rid of unionized janitors, have one master janitor, pay local students to take care of the school. The kids would actually do work; they’d have cash; they’d have pride in the schools. They’d begin the process of rising. …

Go out and talk to people who are really successful in one generation. They all started their first job at 9 to 14 years of age. They are selling newspapers, going door to door, washing cars. They were all making money at a very young age. What do we say to poor kids in poor neighborhoods? Don’t do it. Remember all the stuff about not getting a hamburger-flipping job? Worst possible advice to give the poor children.

The only job that I can think of that “children” performed in the mid-1900s was delivering papers, and those were mostly teenagers, not 9- and 10-year-olds, as Gingrich is suggesting. Before that, children were employed in the lucrative professions of chimney sweeping, factory workers and courtiers, with very foul implications in each case. Children taking on jobs before the coming of age has rarely ended well for them.

Gingrich has always been an establishment type of politician and not really one given to toeing the fringe line in the same way as modern intellectual giants like Sarah Palin, Herman Cain, Rick Perry and Michele Bachmann. Now, he appears to be solidly in the Tea Party camp. He was described by The New York Times as one of the GOPs most creative thinkers. Perhaps, but I don’t think calling for the repeal of child labor laws quite qualifies as “creative,” rather anachronistic and immoral, not to mention a bad idea from an educational and economic standpoint.

I can only come up with two explanations for why Gingrich would offer such a ridiculous proposal. First, he has never come off as an evangelical candidate, so he probably can’t win over the most ardent believers in this race. Thus, he might as well strike a sentimental tone and hearken back to the way things used to be four or five decades ago. The older among the electorate surely remember the days when teenagers, perhaps younger than 16-years-old, did deliver papers. Second, this can only be another of many strategies to move the political center so far to the right that what we mean by “center” in 2012 is vastly different than what we meant by “center” in 1994 when Gingrich led the notorious GOP takeover.

Has the electorate mindset shifted so much that a former establishment politician like Gingrich has to change is tone and amplify his speech to have a chance in 2012? I hope not, but that may well be the case. One would think that with the preponderance of fringe candidates on the GOP roster this year, an establishment guy might be able to cut a different niche for himself. But, of course, that road may only be wide enough one person: Mitt Romney.

The Bloggingheads portion of The New York Times website is running an interesting discussion between John McWhorter, with The New Republic, and Glenn Loury, with Brown University, on Herman Cain and the possible shift that he represents in politics, particularly in black America and within the GOP.

Embedding has been disabled on the video, but here’s the link:

Bloggingheads: Herman Cain’s Blackness

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In just one sentence, today’s New York Times editorial summarizes the Grand Old Party’s hypocritical vision for America that has somehow limped along for the past 30 years:

It sometimes seems as if they (Republicans) are the only ones who talk about their values, but they put forward an elitist and narrow vision that largely favors the upwardly mobile, the healthy, the native-born American and the needs of the corporation.

The editorial later adds specifics:

The Republican template has been in stark view at presidential debates lately. It is a program to wind down the government’s longstanding guarantee of health care to the elderly and the poor and incinerate the Democrats’ new promise to cover the uninsured; to abolish the Department of Education and its effort to raise national standards; to stop virtually all regulation of the environment and the financial industry; to reimpose military discrimination against gays and lesbians, deport immigrants, cut unemployment insurance and nutrition programs, raise taxes on the poor and lower them for the rich.

I continue to find it remarkable that these folks talk a lot about small-town American values, morals and having the interests of regular folks at heart when their real interests, as witnessed by their stance on tax policies, etc., are in protecting inanimate corporations and the affluent, all the while garnering support from small-town America, when GOP policies do not in the least favor the average Joe the Plumber types, if I, with a cringe, may summon that Palin shill of 2008 election lore.

The New York Times is featuring an article this week about an experimental treatment for leukemia that could show a world of promise for current or future sufferers of leukemia and hopefully other types of cancer. In the method, which was used recently on William Ludwig, 65, of Bridgeton, N.J., doctors extracted a billion of Ludwig’s T-cells, altered them to identify and attack his cancer cells and then replanted the “tweaked” cells back into his body.

After the procedure, Ludwig experienced some fever and other symptoms but after a few weeks, the fever was gone and his cancer was in remission. The treatment was said to have killed two pounds of cancer cells, and a year hence, Ludwig is still cancer free.

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New York Times columnist Paul Krugman had this to say on the morning of the 10th anniversary of 9/11:

What happened after 9/11 — and I think even people on the right know this, whether they admit it or not — was deeply shameful. The atrocity should have been a unifying event, but instead it became a wedge issue. Fake heroes like Bernie Kerik, Rudy Giuliani, and, yes, George W. Bush raced to cash in on the horror. And then the attack was used to justify an unrelated war the neocons wanted to fight, for all the wrong reasons. …

The memory of 9/11 has been irrevocably poisoned; it has become an occasion for shame. And in its heart, the nation knows it.

Former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, who played a key role in the cashing in, subsequently cancelled his subscription to The Times the same morning.

Credit: AP

Head over to The Atlantic’s website, where Joshua Green offers a pair of rich analyses of House Speaker John Boehner’s current predicament with the new Tea Party regime which betrayed its own party earlier this month by voting down Boehner’s so-called grand bargain and again Thursday night when another vote failed. See here and here for the analyses.

A seemingly helpless Boehner said this after the vote Thursday:

To the American people, I would say we tried our level best. We tried to do our best for our country, but some people still say no.

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