NATIONAL NEWS

New York Times: We’re Gonna Be Sorry
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/25/opinion/25friedman.html
When I first heard on Thursday that Senate Democrats were abandoning the effort to pass an energy/climate bill that would begin to cap greenhouse gases that cause global warming and promote renewable energy that could diminish our addiction to oil, I remembered something that Joe Romm, the climateprogress.org blogger, once said: The best thing about improvements in health care is that all the climate-change deniers are now going to live long enough to see how wrong they were.

Fire Dog Lake: Past Time To Get Serious
http://seminal.firedoglake.com/diary/61641
...the White House would be better advised to focus as much as possible on jobs, even at the risk of aggravating liberals and constituency groups. The president needs to speak directly and repeatedly on where we are, explaining the reality that while the recovery act did stop the freefall and generated millions of jobs, the crisis was far worse than predicted. He should be calling for more action to create jobs. Raise the ante with a bold package of measures — including direct public hiring, aid to states and localities, use the money paid back by the banks to give small business access to lower interest loans, call for an infrastructure bank to mobilize private capital to rebuild America.

STATE NEWS

Washington Post: Sen. Kent Conrad: 'The immediate threat is not the debt. It’s weak aggregate demand.'
http://voices.washingtonpost.com/ezra-klein/2010/07/sen_kent_conrad_the_immediate.html
Q- Ezra Klein: Do we need more stimulus spending?
A- Kent Conrad: As I look at this economy, while we have averted the collapse which was a very real prospect in 2008, this recovery, which was moving along pretty well until the European debt crisis, [has stalled]. I’ve talked to probably 12 CEOs in the past four days, and all of them say the same thing: When the European debt crisis hit, it just froze everything. People making decisions became reluctant to make investments. So I’m very concerned about the reality that we confront at this moment. One in every six workers is un- or underemployed. If you look back at the Recovery Act and put it in perspective, you’ll see that $787 billion is a lot of money, but the economy over those three years was roughly $40 trillion. Most economists would say if you were going to provide meaningful stimulus, you needed to be at 3 percent of GDP. That would’ve been $1.2 trillion. And the place where we did not do enough was infrastructure. Anyone who goes around America today can see, in every city and town, every state in the nation, that our infrastructure is lagging. We have gridlock in the air and on the ground. Our Metro system is having accidents because it’s not been maintained. There’s an economic cost to that. I argued strongly for $200 billion of stimulus spending for infrastructure which we didn’t get. People argued the lag would’ve been too great, but it turns out it would’ve been just the right time. It would’ve been hitting right now. So let’s go back and reconsider where we are.

Q- The fight over the most recent round of unemployment benefit extensions demonstrated pretty clearly that the Republicans are not going to vote for further stimulus that adds to the deficit. So is there thinking about stimulus that would be deficit-neutral?
A- There’s been talk about it before. That’ll intensify now. One way to do additional infrastructure without having a significant deficit impact would be through Build America bonds. That’s the program Sen. Wyden put forward to provide bonding authority for states, with assistance from the federal government in terms of tax incentives, and the bonds get paid back with interest. So the cost is a fraction of each dollar spent for infrastructure. They’ve been very successful. They’ve been oversubscribed. So strengthen that program. Expand it.

Philly Inquirer: Serious mistake to believe the stimulus failed http://www.philly.com/inquirer/opinion/20100725_Serious_mistake_to_believe_the_stimulus_failed.html
...Stimulus infrastructure spending is now kicking into high gear, and it will be a significant source of jobs through at least this time next year. And business-tax cuts have contributed to more investment and hiring.