this is an adventure

Friday releases are fun. CBO study shows new budget will “nearly double the cumulative deficit over the next decade to $9.3 trillion.” Obama has promised to halve the annual deficit in four years, but this year’s deficit will reach $1.8T, four times record set last year and “$400 billion more than projected two months ago.”

There’s lots of “marveling at potential” of Obama’s tech leverage, not a lot of “knowing how it’s going to work.” The practice of “melding of street-level community organizing and new media tools to advance his policy agenda” is just not something that’s been tried successfully. Online social networking isn’t offline for a reason, usually.

Dodd is getting unfairly blamed for AIG-gate – it’s the White House that’s at fault, when their “economic officials swooped into congressional negotiations last month insisting that Dodd alter his own executive compensation proposal…so as not to restrict existing bonus contracts.” But who expects someone at the other end of Pennsylvania Ave to claim ownership?

Michael Lewis dismisses the AIG furor as hype, and worse, hype that’s resulted in terrible knee-jerk policy from Capitol Hill: “if the government insists on punishing those valuable employees they will understandably leave, and leave behind a company even less viable than it is, and less likely to give the taxpayer back his money.”