Tim Fernholz

The incoming administration has dropped one of the more objectionable tax provisions from its propsosed economic stimulus plan. The tax break, which would have given businesses a $3,000-per-job credit, was criticized for being too challenging to administer and liable to be abused by corporations. This is a good development if it frees up more funding […]

Bob Herbert has a good column today repping an idea from our friend Dean Baker: Let’s put a small tax, around .25 percent, on the sale of financial assets like stocks, bonds or even mortgage-backed securities. The tax wouldn’t have a big effect on most people, who don’t change their portfolio often, but it could […]

It seems that yet another big-name Republican will be foregoing a senate campaign two years hence, in this case, Ohio’s own Senator George Voinovich. The others are Florida’s Mel Martinez (where Jeb Bush is declining to run), Missouri’s Kit Bond and Kansas’ Sam Brownback. Phil Singer’s analysis after Bush declined to run is still operative: […]

The transition team has just released a report that analyzes the potential effects of the stimulus package, written by incoming Council of Economic Advisors Chair Christina Romer and Vice-President-elect Biden’s Chief Economic Advisor, Jared Bernstein. Because I like you guys, I have put the report here [PDF] for your perusal. Incidentally, for progressives, Bernstein is […]

Over at Foreign Policy’s great new collection of expert blogs, one Mark Cancian, a retired Marine colonel, makes the argument in favor of “security contractors,” or, if we’re not using euphemisms, mercenaries. While pointing out that many contractors do not actively act in a force protection role outside of military bases, he also excuses those […]

I’m not the only person worried about the size of the stimulus — Paul Krugman writes a column about the topic, John Judis argues the idea better than I ever could, and now Democratic Senators are pushing for more focus on effective investment in meetings with Obama advisers. While the meeting in the Senate yesterday […]

As Ezra points out, the idea that Israel’s assault on Hamas in Gaza seems counterproductive is becoming more widespread. But the American political establishment is still missing that point. Today, the House will pass a resolution in support of Israel’s right to self-defense. No one will disputes that, I hope. But wouldn’t it be better […]

Yesterday, Barack Obama came to Democratic headquarters to introduce Virginia Governor Tim Kaine as the newest party chairman. Both men went out of their way to praise outgoing leader Howard Dean for his work at the party and his fifty-state strategy, but Dean was missing, apparently in American Samoa raising money for the local Dems […]

I’ve got a new column on the politics of passing effective stimulus legislation, as a sort of preview to today’s big Obama speech on the subject: But the bigger challenge could be crafting a stimulus bill that gets through Congress and gets the job done. Obama’s rough proposal, leaked to reporters over the past weeks, […]

Politico has a story about the media calling every Obama flub, real or imagined, his “first mistake.” Though this sort of meta-media-analysis is just a pleasant sideshow for political obsessives, the fact that each mistake becomes the president-elect’s first testifies that most of what journalists are calling mistakes are so minor or non-existent that we […]