Third Way's`Latest: More Grand Bargain Gifts We Should Give to Republicans

[chill_wind]

We`need to help Obama compromise with Republicans more so this delicious Grand Bargain dream really can come true.

Get the people back to work with more FTA, drill baby, drill! (responsibly, of course) , speed up foreclosures and get the hopeless undeserving deadbeats out of their homes for good: "Rip the bandaid off." Fast. In the spirit of American Capitalism, create immigrant citizenship lotteries and/or auction them off (let US business owners buy them: "U.S. employers, which are both flush with cash and worried about the thinness of America’s ranks of engineers and other highly skilled workers, could buy spots for would-be citizens who would help their businesses".) Repeal more federal regulation. (See The National Labor Relations Board). And much more.

All this under the aegis of getting America Back To Work (6 Ways).

From their press release page http://www.thirdway.org/in_the_news comes this Cover Story article in the National Journal. (3 pages).

On Jobs, Grand Bargains for Politicians to Get America Back to Work
Remember the unemployed? With the debt limit raised, here’s how to help them.

Updated: August 5, 2011 | 8:20 a.m.
August 4, 2011 | 5:48 p.m.

http://www.nationaljournal.com/magazine/some-possible-grand-bargains-on-jobs-and-unemployment-20110804

Just a taste:

Open and improve trade. First, because it’s the easiest. Republicans get swift passage of pending free-trade agreements with South Korea, Panama, and Colombia, along with accelerated negotiations toward a Trans-Pacific trading partnership with other Asian nations. Democrats get a diplomatically delicate—but wildly popular among voters at home—law authorizing the administration to retaliate against China for suppressing the value of its currency. Leveling the currency playing field would boost U.S. exports to China, perhaps dramatically (unless it sparks a trade war, which seems unlikely because that would be in neither country’s interest). The total package of freer, fairer trade could support more than 2 million new jobs, according to cumulative calculations from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the Economic Policy Institute.

Stabilize the housing market. Housing, the recovery’s biggest drag, has confounded the White House and Congress, and with good reason. The market is still working through a glut of foreclosures that started with homeowners who bought more than they could afford, and then spread to more-responsible borrowers who lost jobs in the financial crisis. An oversupply of cheap, repossessed homes has helped sink housing prices nationwide to their lowest levels in a decade, adjusted for inflation. Falling values have erased trillions of dollars in wealth for Americans who have kept their houses, spurring consumers to save more and spend less and robbing entrepreneurs of a tried-and-true tool—home-equity loans—for starting or expanding a small business. “You don’t have a very good shot at sustained job growth unless you address the largest factor holding it back, which is demand,” says Robert Shapiro, a former Clinton administration economic adviser who now runs the consulting firm Sonecon. “You can’t get demand going until housing prices stabilize.”

Therein lies another possible bargain: Obama and Republicans could agree to try a double-barreled attempt to get foreclosure rates back to historically normal levels. They could reverse the administration’s recent efforts to slow the foreclosure process for delinquent borrowers and, instead, take steps to shuttle the most-troubled home­owners—the ones who borrowed beyond their means—out of their houses and into rental units as fast as possible. Keith Hennessey, a former economic adviser to President George W. Bush, compares that effort to removing a Band-Aid: “Policies for several years now—including under the administration I worked for—have focused on trying to keep people in their homes,” says Hennessey, now a research fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution. “That stretches out the problem,” pulling the bandage off slowly. Maybe now, he says, it’s time to “rip it off really fast. Stop trying to help keep people who can’t afford to be in their homes stay in their homes.”

(snip)

Drill, responsibly, drill. Obama has tried an expanded oil-exploration bargain before, but the massive spill in the Gulf of Mexico scuttled it. BP’s summerlong gusher last year exposed serious flaws in how the government polices deepwater drilling, including an insufficient corps of safety regulators and an embarrassing failure to anticipate that new technologies to drill several thousand feet below the ocean surface might also bring new risks. While the Interior Department revamped its oversight procedures, permits for Gulf drilling slowed and, with them, job-creation potential.