The $4 trillion budget President Barack Obama sent Congress on Monday is his blueprint for reviving “middle class opportunity.” Liberals are thrilled by the redistributive thrust of the president’s budget — it would hit affluent Americans with a battery of new tax hikes, totaling $2 trillion over the next decade, and use the proceeds to finance substantial tax cuts for low and middle income families.

However, this has, of course, scandalized tax-averse congressional Republicans, who echo House Ways and Means Chairman Paul Ryan in denouncing the Obama budget as an exercise in “envy economics.”

Given the partisan stalemate in Washington, many pundits therefore view the White House budget as a purely political statement intended to frame the 2016 presidential debate. Next, the GOP Congress will produce a conservative alternative, and each side will spend the next two years accusing the other of waging class warfare.

Except that the federal government actually does need a budget, especially one that reinforces the economy’s gathering momentum. The one thing both parties seem to agree on is that reversing middle class stagnation is the nation’s top priority. What America needs more than anything else is a long stretch of robust economic growth, something we have not seen since the 1990s, when both the growth and unemployment rates averaged about 4 percent a year.

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Economic calamity begets radical politics. America’s worst financial panic and recession since the 1930s gave birth to the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street movements. Now Occupy seems to be fizzling out, but in Week 2 of a government shutdown, it is looking more likely that Tea Party Republicans could plunge the nation gratuitously into a new economic emergency.

The GOP’s surrender to fiscal anarchism is bad for the country. But it does give President Obama and his party an opportunity to seize the high ground on jobs and economic growth — the issue uppermost in Americans’ minds. For that to happen, however, Democrats will need to abandon their ritual business-bashing, embrace the productive forces in U.S. society and honor companies that are investing in America’s future.

Why? Because the nation’s job drought is really an investment drought. With gridlock in Washington and financial troubles at the state and local level, real government spending on productive assets from highways and bridges to computer equipment is down by half compared with the average level of the 2000s.

Private sector investment is doing better but still falls well short of what the country needs to generate “breadwinner” jobs and raise middle-class wages. Although corporate profits have rebounded lustily, many companies are still hoarding cash — about $2 trillion worth — or spending it on stock buy-backs. U.S. business investment, outside of housing, is still 20% below its long-term trend.

Continue reading at USA Today.

The government of the United States of America is closed for business today, courtesy of the Republican Party. It’s a national embarrassment, like a scene from the Marx Brothers’ classic 1933 satire “Duck Soup,” only without the anarchic humor.

Hail Freedonia!

Who produced today’s farce? Was it the Tea Party hotheads, 50 or so House Republicans who love ideological combat but hate governing? Or was it Sen. Ted Cruz, perhaps the most cunning demagogue America has produced since Joe McCarthy?

All played their discreditable parts. But the man in the director’s chair is John Boehner, who is bidding for the title of worst House speaker in U.S. history.

Why Boehner? Because he knows better, and could have prevented the shut-down. And because, as America’s third-ranking constitutional officer, after the President and vice president, he is supposed to serve America’s interests — not the febrile demands of his party’s most rabid partisans. That’s Eric Cantor’s job.
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Read the entire piece at the New York Daily News.