Only in financial terms can three decades of low interest rates be described as a honeymoon for home buyers and credit card consumers. As the nation creeps out of the recession. higher interest rates are a foregone conclusion — perhaps between 1% and 1.5% annually. The good news from financial sources interviewed by the New York Times is rate hikes will not reach the 1981 pinnacle of 18.2% for home mortgages...

“A spectre is haunting Europe—the spectre of Communism.” Those were the words of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in 1848 and their predictions turned out to be highly accurate, as we all know. Now the spectre of communism is haunting America and the end of the world is near. The conservative media is mega-scared by this spectre and accuses Obama of turning the land of the free and the home of the...

In West Virginia, Coal Miners’ Slaughter by Michael Winship The high cost of energy in America was paid in human lives this week, with the deaths of more than two dozen miners in a massive explosion at the Upper Big Branch coal mine in West Virginia. It’s the worst mine disaster in a quarter of a century. Upper Big Branch is owned by Massey Energy Company, which operates 47 mines in...

My wife tells me I need to get rid of my beloved rotary engine Mazda RX-8. She makes a good case. Our three person, two driver family doesn’t need four cars. Sure, our 16 year old will get a license in a couple of weeks, but she can’t drive a stick shift, and we just got her a new car for her birthday. And, my wife points out, I almost never drive the RX-8. Then she raises the “age” issue, telling...

Ladies and gentlemen, it’s time for another episode of the fundraising follies. Today, I got a letter in the mail from Sean Hannity, soliciting funds from the Heritage Foundation. I learn from Sean that “the axis of Obama-Pelosi-and-Reid” has: Crippled our free-market economic system through the government’s takeover and control of private businnesses, punishing regulations, favoritism...

By Jason Arvak The chief of the Congressional Budget Office, Doug Elmendorf, has added to the growing chorus of protest about out-of-control spending in Washington, D.C. With trillion-dollar deficits projected for the indefinite future and under the pressure of large and growing expenditures in health care and Social Security, the numbers add up to a looming financial Armageddon that would make the financial...

This past Sunday, David Gregory cut off Christina Romer, head of Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers, when she strayed too far from reality: MR. GREGORY: You mentioned the stimulus as a huge effort by this administration to deal with people who are out of work and to deal with a recession. And yet, again, I go back to members of the president’s own party raising concerns about just how effective...

Trust in the GOPs Dearth of Experience by Tina Dupuy When Republicans warn that a policy is a job-killer – Americans should listen. If any group of lawmakers and thinkers know about killing jobs it’s the Grand Old Party. In 2008, the final year of the Bush Administration, after two terms of careless deregulation implemented with bastardized pseudo-free market battle cries, the economy lost 2.6 million...

If we’re all Americans, then why are some of us “Confederate Southern Americans“? If  we need a box on the Census form where we can check off “American” as our race — not white or black or Latino, etc. — then why was (before he issued a politically necessary apology) Bob McDonnell’s “Confederate History Month” intended only for Virginians who are white...

Time to Pay the Piper? The First Hint of a European-Style VAT by Michael Reagan Democrats in Washington haven’t wanted to be terribly forthcoming as to how they intend to pay for the new health care entitlement program and other massive spending programs being passed. It seems our national debt ceiling is now raised every few months, and the federal deficit is higher than it’s ever been — exponentially...

Buying gold is a rich man’s hedge against inflation. I am not a rich man. But, I see the television ads blanketing Fox News from Goldline and Rosland Capital trumpeting the merits of precious metal investments. For the life of me, again, speaking as a pauper, I don’t understand the concept of shipping gold commodities to my home where I can finger the metals and feel a sense of financial security....

Obama economic advisor Paul Volcker spoke yesterday at a New York Historical Society event and noted that America should consider raising taxes to curb deficits and improve our financial standing. But even more interesting is the suggestion by Volcker, a former Fed chair under Bush, that Congress should enact a value-added tax (VAT) in the style of European taxation schemes. Charles Krauthammer noted a few weeks...

One of the economy’s Terminators is back, bringing Ayn Rand and memories of mid-20th century movies with him. Preparing to testify before the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, Alan Greenspan reaffirms absolute faith in his mentor’s me-first market philosophy in “The Fountainhead” and adds a note from “Dr. Strangelove.” Asked if the meltdown disputes Rand’s theories,...

I just finished scouring some reports on economic gains and pushes as we muddle our way out of the worst recession since The Great Depression. It is no iambic pentameter that I have a sinking feeling the Obama administration is pulling my leg that the grass will be greener early next year. How much the government and its vast bureaucracies are dishing out BS to paint a happy face on the upcoming November midterm...

Today’s irresistible sports metaphor is the NCAA final, “Duke vs. Butler,” which sounds like a sequel to “Remains of the Day,” “Gosford Park” and all the upstairs-downstairs dramas juxtaposing lives of the privileged with those fated to serve them. On the eve of a confrontation between American biggies and little guys from nowhere, it’s tempting to translate that...

WASHINGTON — Toward the end of the health care battle, a beleaguered Obama staff member sent me an e-mail that ended with the words: “Sisyphus was a sissy compared to what we’ve been through!” Yes, the fight for health care seemed very much like the Greek myth: Every time the White House found itself on the verge of rolling the health care stone up the hill, some event —...

If I had to point to one news item that encapsulates why I am a liberal, progressive Democrat, and why I am not a conservative, right-wing Republican, this news item would be the one.

Dr. King’s Economic Dream Deferred by Bill Moyers and Michael Winship Forty-two years ago, on April 4, 1968, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., was assassinated, gunned down in Memphis, Tennessee. To those of us who were alive then, the images are etched in painful memory: One day, Dr. King is standing with colleagues, including Ralph Abernathy and Jesse Jackson, on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel; the next,...

From TheHill.com:

With unemployment hovering at 9.7%, Americans got some good news on Friday as the economy added 162,000 new jobs in March. Democrats trotted out their red/blue “V” graph (above) to show the improvement from Bush’s final five quarters to Obama’s first five quarters. They crowed about how the stimulus, always designed to spend and add jobs in 2010, was working and hammered Republicans for having opposed...

Why is President Barack Obama out on the hustings these days talking about health care reform and what parts of it will kick in immediately, pointing out that the media needs to write instant judgments before it’s really prudent to do so and telling a reporter that talk radio is divisive (“NO DUH”)? Perhaps because it’s because in some polls he is coming up as popularity challenged —...

We’re a little slow this morning at TMV. (It probably has something to do with a holiday weekend for many.) As a result, this subject is almost old news by now: The U.S. economy added an estimated 162,000 jobs last month, while the unemployment rate stuck stubbornly to 9.7 percent. Such is life. Reactions galore at Memeorandum, and Andrew Sullivan summarizes a couple more. Incidentally, the trend...

Bill Schorr, Cagle Cartoons This copyrighted cartoon is licensed to appear on TMV. Unauthorized reproduction prohibited. All rights reserved.

With a spate of recent polls you could say the Democrats are “at risk” politically. With the latest CNN/Opinion Research poll now enters officially into the “danger zone.” The Democrats have lost their edge on the economy: Democrats have lost their large advantage over Republicans when when Americans are asked which party would do a better job with the economy, according to a new national...

A good roundup is HERE. Note that there are policy advantages plus some political advantages in Barack Obama’s decision which — if those analyses are correct — again go against the image some started to paint of him as a hapless, naive former law professor. If some of these analyses are correct, GOPers will underestimate him at their peril.