A lot of attention has been drawn to the official White memo authored by economist Larry Summers that shows the Obama administration purposely hid costs of Obama’s healthcare legislation and his overall agenda. Ryan Lizza at The New Yorker released the full document.

Many have waded through the document and came to an obvious conclusion.

James Pethokoukis | The Enterprise Blog (see the analysis for each point).

1. The stimulus was about implementing the Obama agenda.

2. Team Obama knows these deficits are dangerous (although it has offered no long-term plan to deal with them).

3. Obamanomics was pricier than advertised.

4. Even Washington can only spend so much money so fast.

5. Liberals can complain about the stimulus having too many tax cuts, but even Team Obama thought more spending was unrealistic.

6. Team Obama wanted to use courts to force massive mortgage principal writedowns.

7. Team Obama thought a stimulus plan of more than $1 trillion would spook financial markets and send interest rates climbing.

8. Greg Mankiw, economic adviser to Mitt Romney, was dubious about the stimulus.

9. But the Fed was a stimulus enabler.

10. IPAB was there at the very beginning.

11. The financial crisis wasn’t just Wall Street’s fault.

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For once, top Obama economic advisor Larry Summers got it right. Warning opponents of the big tax-cut deal, Summers told reporters, “Failure to pass this bill in the next couple weeks would materially increase the risk that the economy would stall out and we would have a double-dip recession.”

Too bad Mr. Summers didn’t advise the president to cut taxes across-the-board two years ago, rather than push for the misbegotten $800 billion government-spending package. That policy dismally failed to ignite a real economic recovery or to lower the unemployment rate.

But it’s never too late to promote good policy. And echoing Summers, in recent months any number of demand- and supply-side economists warned of a double-dip (or nearly so) unless the Bush 2003 tax cuts were extended. The economy would be demoralized from a rollback of incentives to work, invest, and take risks. Plus, roughly $600 billion of cash (including the alternative minimum tax) would be drained from the private sector.

Whether Obama is really changing his stripes and abandoning class-warfare, big-government spending remains to be seen. But at least he is out there defending the huge tax-cut package, which is pro-growth, along with a South Korean free-trade deal, which also is pro-growth. Certainly it’s a turn for the better for the White House.

In the wake of the tax-cut announcement, a number of Wall Street forecasters are upping their growth estimates for 2011 and beyond. The consensus seems to have lifted real GDP by nearly a full percentage point. And if the economy can grow by 3.5 to 4 percent, the likelihood of a sizable decline in unemployment literally grows stronger.

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In today’s edition of Coffee and Markets, Brad Jackson, Francis Cianfrocca and Ben Domenech talk about the latest housing numbers, controversy in Alaska’s Senate race, the decline of the Clinton political coalition, and who’s going to have Obama’s ear on economic policy with his evaporating policy team. We’ll also chat about a list of the decade’s top movie villains, which shockingly doesn’t include the ship computer from WALL-E. You’re listening to Coffee and Markets, brought to you by the New Ledger, for Friday, September 24th, 2010.

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I am not personally acquainted with John Boehner, though I laid eyes on him once. I do not really know Eric Cantor either – though we met in passing in April, 2009 when I was in DC promoting my book Soft Despotism, Democracy’s Drift. And I have never met Paul Ryan or Mike Pence.

Moreover, I am strongly inclined to fear that they will betray us in the aftermath of November. The Republicans in Congress do have a track record, after all. If the Democrats have a propensity for adding new social programs, their opponents have a no less powerful aptitude for voting to pay for them. It was not for nothing that Bob Dole was once derided as “the tax-collector of the welfare state.”

Like a man about to embark on a second marriage, I am nonetheless inclined to let hope triumph over experience and to entertain the possibility that this time it might be different. When a Democratic pundit such as The Washington Post’s Ruth Marcus charges that the Republican opposition to Obama is “irresponsible,” it really does give one hope.

The event that caused Marcus to rise up in high dudgeon was a speech that John Boehner delivered in Cleveland on Tuesday, in which he attacked the latest “stimulus” bill, called for President Obama to submit to Congress “an agressive spending reduction package,” warned against allowing tax increases to take effect that would fall heavily on small businesses, pressed for an immediate repeal of the healthcare bill provision requiring businesses to issue a 1099 every time that they spent $600 or more, and called for the President to fire Tim Geithner and Lawrence Summers. Twelve times, Marcus lamented, Boehner used the phrase “job-killing” – “as in ‘job-killing tax hikes,’ ‘job-killing bills,’ ‘job-killing agenda,’ ‘job-killing federal regulations.’” This is, she charged, “bumper-sticker politics, not a real economic plan.”

Boehner’s speech was shocking, indeed. It might lead one to think that we are in the middle of an election campaign and that the Minority Leader in the House of Representatives is intent on distilling for the voters what the party that controls both houses of Congress and the Presidency has most egregiously done wrong. It might be taken to suggest that he intends to offer voters a choice, not an echo; and though Boehner’s speech was not a plan, it does suggest that he has one.

Ruth Marcus is thoughtful and often worth reading, but when it comes to economics she is completely out of her depth.

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The Obama Administration is putting the best face on the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ (BLS) recent March 2010 jobless numbers report, touting the steady nationwide jobless number of 9.7%.  But for minorities, the news is bad and getting worse.

The really bad news is buried in the middle of the 38 page report.  The BLS data reveals an alarming and growing divergence between the number of white and the number of minorities that are unemployed.  Worse yet, it is clear that minorities, especially African Americans, are falling further behind.  If unchecked, the long term implications of that imbalance are nightmarish for the nation.

Larry Summers and others in the Administration have not yet shown much interest in the appalling unemployment rates for minorities and, instead, exude childlike enthusiasm at the nation’s overall jobless rate that held steady for the 2^nd consecutive month.

While the unemployment for white Americans averaged 9.3%, African Americans averaged 16.6%, just a little less than double the rate of white unemployment.   Hispanic Americans reported 13.3% unemployment, while recent, young veterans are averaging 14.7%.  Black men, over 20 years old, are showing 20.2% unemployment and teenaged, African Americans, ages 16-19, of both sexes, show a mind-boggling 39.3% unemployed.  Hispanic teens also report a staggering 30.3% unemployment.  The long-term repercussions of these unemployment numbers are troubling, yet the Administration is curiously silent.

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Wednesday will mark the first anniversary of the presidential inauguration of Barack Obama — who began his Presidency, as nearly all new first-term Presidents do, high in the polls. At that time, Obama’s approval ratings were, in fact, in the stratosphere. In the last twelve months, however, they have fallen further and faster than those of any President since polling began; and, and, as developments in Massachusetts suggest, his party is now in danger of suffering in November an historic defeat — which is likely to rival its fate in 1938, 1966, and 1994 if the Democrats do not, as I believe they may, do even worse. In a poll released on Thursday, the National Journal reports that half of the adults sampled responded that, if new Presidential elections were held right now, they would vote against Barack Obama, and less than a quarter of those questioned indicated that they would vote to re-elect the President. It is an appropriate time in which to pose this question: Why have Obama and his supporters fallen so far and so fast?

We must, I think, begin before the beginning. The Obama campaign was predicated on a fraud. With a skill that was breathtaking, Barack Obama managed during that campaign to signal to the left within the Democratic Party with a wink and a nod that he was their man and that he meant business — that he really intended to “transform” America. To those in the middle and on the right who are ashamed of the nation’s historic sins in matters of race, he offered absolution, and he promised that the penance that they would have to perform after leaving the confessional would not be harsh. He was not, he said, a tax-and-spend liberal.

I was not taken in. Late in 2008, after reviewing the page proofs of Soft Despotism, Democracy’s Drift, I persuaded my editor to allow me to add the following to the book:

Once again, as in the 1920s, rational administration has failed us. As on that other occasion, the Federal Reserve Board and the Department of the Treasury pursued over an extended period under more than one administration an easy-money policy bound in the end to give rise to “irrational exuberance” in the markets and to a bubble followed by a catastrophic decline in prices and a collapse of the credit markets. And, to make matters worse, we responded to this set of circumstances precisely as we did on that earlier occasion — by electing a president and choosing a Congress intent on dramatically increasing the scale and scope of the administrative state.

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With the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) expected to conclude this week a comment-seeking exercise relevant to net neutrality rules proposed last fall by Julius Genachowski, top telecommunications and tech policy observers are claiming that the FCC Chairman could be set to receive a major blow.  Not only is the momentum in the net neutrality debate increasingly shifting away from proponents, but a number of experts say the White House itself is souring on Genachowski’s plans—a major knock that could signal the death of efforts to advance net neutrality, at least for now.

Historically, net neutrality had been treated as a top policy priority by President Barack Obama, a former classmate and friend of Genachowski.  But recently, that has appeared to change.

In October, Susan Crawford, a strong supporter of net neutrality, resigned from the White House.  It has since been rumored that economic adviser Larry Summers wanted her gone due to concerns about her facilitating the tagging of Obama advisers as overly radical by virtue of her own agenda.

Numerous Democrats (including 72 in the House) have raised questions about the policy and/or spoken out against it.

In addition, multiple groups with strong connections to Democrats and progressives, including minority and women’s organizations, have begun to raise flags regarding the possible impact of net neutrality rules.

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Is the Obama administration worried about the political ramifications of its push for net neutrality?  That’s a question being asked by opponents of the policy in the wake of news that White House senior adviser Susan Crawford resigned last week.

Crawford, an adviser to Obama on technology and communications policy, is a strong proponent of net neutrality, which critics have charged would amount to a government takeover of the internet.  The policy has been the focus of widespread, bipartisan opposition in recent weeks, emanating from everyone from internet service providers to liberal-aligned groups and elected Democrats at the state and federal level.

Crawford’s resignation attracted little attention when the American Spectator noted it on Monday, the day before the 2009 election.  The results of the election have had the virtually the entirety of the U.S. media focused on Republican wins in gubernatorial races in New Jersey and Virginia, and what has been described as a “rejection” of the Obama agenda.  But observers say that Crawford’s exit may be part of that story, too: According to the Spectator, Crawford ran afoul of White House economic adviser Larry Summers, who sources say may be concerned about the political impact of net neutrality.  In its write-up, the Spectator noted that:

“[Summers] and other senior Obama officials were unaware of how radical the draft Net Neutrality regulations were when they were initially internally circulated to Obama administration officials several weeks ago.  ‘All of sudden Larry is getting calls from CEOs, Wall Street folks he talks to, Republicans and Democrats, asking him what the Administration is doing with the policies, and he isn’t sure what they’re talking about,’ says one White House aide. ‘He felt blind-sided, and Susan was one of those people who heard about it.’”

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