President Obama's own instincts on how do deal with the economy seem to be somewhat better than those of his most senior advisers. At the White House jobs summit in December, he sounded less like Larry Summers or Tim Geithner and more like the man we heard on the campaign trail.

Should progressives in Congress hold their noses and vote for a badly bowdlerized health bill? Or should they vote down this bill, teach the corporate Democrats a lesson, spare the administration the voter backlash from an unpopular bill that has no public option and that raises taxes on decent worker health plans — and fight another day?

It was the best of Obama, it was the worst of Obama.

President Obama seemingly has two entirely incompatible tasks. One is to move the economy on a path toward faster recovery with increased stimulus spending. The other is to address the problem of rising deficits and the escalating long term public debt.

President Obama has announced a White House Jobs Summit for next month. At least that's the beginning of recognition that the unemployment rate is unacceptable. The measured rate is now 10.2 percent, but if you count people who have given up or who are involuntarily working part time, the real rate is over 17 percent.

What a long, strange year it's been since Election Night 2008. Whatever this administration has represented so far, it has not yet delivered change we can believe in.

As unemployment continues to rise, deficit hawks are upping their efforts to use the economic crisis as a pretext for gutting basic social programs such as Social Security and Medicare. The idea keeps surfacing for a bipartisan deficit-reduction commission, supposedly insulated from politics, which would agree to mandatory caps on spending and perhaps increased taxes as well. Social programs would take the biggest hit. Congress would then take an up or down vote on the whole package.

If the unemployment numbers keep rising into 2010, the Republicans are primed to pick up dozens of seats in the House, crippling the Obama administration's capacity to recoup in the second half of the president's first term. Obama would lose his very tenuous working majority and would confront a situation very much like the one Bill Clinton faced after the Republican gains of 1994, when he worked even more closely with Republicans in order to save his own skin. If you liked triangulation Clinton-style, wait for Rahm Emanuel's version of it.

You know how far politics has swung to the right when the most left wing guy in the room is the former chairman of the Federal Reserve. But that's what financial reform has come to.

One prime cause of the financial collapse is that financial trading markets have become speculative worlds unto themselves. Instead of adding efficiency to the real economy, they mainly add risk that the rest of us now have to pay for.
There are many ways to damp down financial speculation, but a very effective strategy is to [...]