Supporting President Obama's budget

I wish I had more time to research this, but Congress seems to be ready to vote on President Obama's budget next week.

On economic matters, Obama seems to have an odd sort of split personality. On the one hand, his plans to bail out financial institutions will give away billions of dollars to the irresponsible tycoons who screwed everything up so badly--while proposing a cure for their bad behavior that may be worse than the disease. On the other hand his fiscal year 2010 budget seems to be a genuinely progressive document that would make badly needed investments in health care, clean energy, education, and infrastructure.

If you would like to support the president's budget, there are several ways to do so. The Campaign for America's Future has an online form you can use to contact your senators and congressperson. (They also have a set of talking points that you can use to make an argument in support of the budget.) Or, you can go to barackobama.com to sign a pledge to support the budget. On this site, you can also click a button that will tell you where to call your representatives. Sure, here in Oklahoma we live in the reddest of the red states, and it's easy to feel that there is no point in contacting our representatives to tell them how we feel. On the other hand, they need to know that not all of their constituents are right-wing conservatives.

Predictably, Republicans and some Democrats have attacked President Obama's budget on the grounds that it would massively increase the federal deficit and make the federal government larger. My best understanding is that these are really bad arguments, as economist Ellen Frank point would point out. (The link above is to an online interview with her. Her book, The Raw Deal, is available throught the Oklahoma County Metropolitan Library System.)

To oversimplify, Frank argues that policies that keep deficits, inflation and government small tend to benefit a very small group of owners of capital and disadvantage ordinary working people and society as a whole. I think that we as a nation need to debate the conventional wisdom that says that big government and big deficits are automatically bad, and I'm frustrated that this debate seems to be largely ignored. In the future, I hope to be able to return to this discussion. I suppose I'm as skeptical of big government as the next person, but sometimes government intervention is necessary to control capitalism gone amok.