Wednesday was a difficult day for The American Independent News Network, which is the larger entity that operates The Iowa Independent. Our chief executive and founder announced two of our sister sites would close and their content would be moved to The American Independent.
A recently introduced bill could have far-reaching impact on the U.S. sugar industry, including American Crystal Sugar, a farmer-owned cooperative that locked out 1,300 Midwest workers on Aug. 1.
The chairman for Herman Cain’s Iowa effort says the campaign “relied more on the word of farmers than Washington regulators” in deciding to run an ad containing claims the Environmental Protection Agency says are false.
The Iowa Senate will remain under the control of a slim 26-25 Democratic majority when it reconvenes in January 2012.
Despite Wednesday’s bipartisan U.S. Senate vote on a $15 billion jobs bill, Republicans on Capitol Hill have been pretty much united in their condemnation of additional deficit spending as a remedy to the nation’s entrenched jobs crisis.
“The time has come,” U.S. Rep. Spencer Bachus, R-Ala., said this week, “to stop pretending we can spend our way out of the recession.”
Enter David M. Walker, the former U.S. comptroller general and now head of the Peter G. Peterson Foundation, which advocates for balanced budgets.
Walker — teaming up with Lawrence Mishel, president of the liberal Economic Policy Institute — said this week that a temporary bump in federal spending is the solution to longer-term deficit troubles, rather than part of the problem.
“A focus on jobs now is consistent with addressing our deficit problems ahead,” Walker and Mishel wrote in Politico.
The difficulty is that many politicians and news organizations often cast deficit debates as a dichotomy: You either care about them or you don’t.
But this is rarely accurate. The fact that the two of us, who have philosophical differences on the proper role of government, find much to agree on about deficits is a testament to the importance of dropping this useless dichotomy and finally talking about deficits in a reasonable way.
The reasonable way is first to make the distinction between temporary, emergency spending designed to pull the country out of recession and auto-pilot entitlement spending that’s the true root of the nation’s long-term budget troubles.
The unlikely duo of Walker and Mishel is calling for programs that (1) target job creation specifically, (2) would build jobs quickly, and (3) wouldn’t rely on federal funds in the long run. Infrastructure funding, a hiring tax credit for businesses and an extension of unemployment benefits, they write, all meet these criteria.
The “targeted, timely and temporary” diagnosis is hardly a new one, but its reiteration now — a year after passage of the Democrats’ $787 billion stimulus bill — is good evidence that lawmakers didn’t focus enough on those parameters the first time around (as many economists have indicated).
Will lawmakers learn the lessons of the last year? Not probable in an election year when voter anger, more than economic necessity, seems likely to dictate what Congress can do.
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