Oligarchs hate that financial transactions tax, and they have senior administration officials in high places to protect their wealth from any tax, no matter how small.

The White House wants you to believe that the American Jobs Act is loaded up with bipartisan solutions once preferred by Republicans. And to some extent, that’s true. But there are a number of Easter eggs in here, policy ideas that originated with liberal policy groups. The White House may be touting the bipartisan bona fides on the top line. They may have frozen out the liberal policy shops for years. But when the time comes to save their bacon with jobs programs, they come back to the liberal wonks.

The Beltway Consensus is that we can only use government to create jobs if we stay inside three constraints:
1. We can’t tax the rich.
2. Any structural change to the economy must not affect the profitability of any corporate person.
3. Government can only create jobs by giving money to corporate persons in the hope they will hire people.
Can I have a side of ignorance with that stupid?

In a world supposedly governed by 11 dimensional chess, we find unusually straight forward advice directed at the Obama Administration on how to react to the dismal unemployment numbers.

If we fixed things like levees and energy plants, we’d also be more resilient to things like earthquakes and climate change. Mind you, if Republicans found out about that, it’d be enough reason to defund it. So we’ll just keep that part a secret between us.

Bernstein used to be Joe Biden ‘s chief economist, and was involved in most of the economic policymaking of the first Obama term. He’s moved out of government and back to the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities, where among other things he’s become a dirty hippie blogger.

Jared Bernstein’s new blog reads like the exploding diarrhea of common sense ideas that were quashed within the Obama White House.

The Wall Street Journal scoops that Jared Bernstein, Joe Biden’s chief economist and the one person on the economic team seen as reliably liberal, will leave the White House soon.

The President held an undisclosed meeting with liberal economists before a press conference where he blamed the “sanctimonious” left for their purity in the tax debate. The meeting included Paul Krugman, Joseph Stiglitz, Jeffrey Sachs, Alan Blinder and Robert Reich. It sounds pretty fascinating.

Krugman did not respond to a request to discuss the meeting, but he did write an op-ed today that at least came close to a response. The op-ed, much like the snippet above, talked about the enduring quality of free market fundamentalism, and that the reason these zombie ideas stay in the discourse is that people like the President try to accommodate them instead of refuting them.

Too often we’ve seen the White House grab for a compromise they can tout because it has “bipartisan support.” While I don’t think Zandi’s proposal actually has that in Congress – Republicans want permanent tax cuts, not temporary ones – it’s good that, so far, the Administration wants no part of the deal.