Maybe it's effective, but the lack of depth here is also insulting. We just went through an election; I'm sick of talking points.
I have a fantasy where the US political battles fought are between a group of compassionate, well informed people with reasoned arguments that they actually understand, and a group that parrots the talking points of their leaders.
I'm such a sap.
What good is victory if no one understands what they have won?

I agree completely. Robert Reich is an intelligent and experienced economist, so he probably does understand the economy pretty well. Most of us do not understand it so well, so we latch onto the ideas of people whom we already agree with or whose framing of the issues pricks the right chemicals in our brains. Personally, trickle down sounds like rubbish to me, while giving the working class more money to spend sounds like common sense, but I couldn't hold my own against an expert who disagrees with me.

I don't know if it's a problem that most Americans don't understand economics, but if it is, this video isn't fixing it. 8 talking points that only sound good to people who already agree with them won't elevate the debate.

So, in other words, don't compromise with the republicans at all.

While I agree with his ideology, in practice, I don't believe this will work. The republicans will dig in you'll go sailing over the fiscal cliff (which might not be such a bad thing imho).

One question though: we constantly hear about how the military in the USA is huge and how their spending dwarves everyone elses and should be cut. But much and all as this sounds good in principle, aren't there quite a lot of people who are employed by this (directly and indirectly)? I think reducing the military is a laudable goal, but it needs to be done carefully, over time and with something to replace it. Tens of thousands of soldiers and marines are not suddenly going to turn into engineers and scientists.

I have a fantasy where political battles fought are between a group of compassionate, well informed people with reasoned arguments that they actually understand. But also with broadswords.....

Wow. A boggling number of logical fallacies in that piece. It reminds me why I refuse to watch political "debates".

This isn't how to understand the fiscal cliff. This is a guidebook for Democrats. I think he makes some astute political points, but I don't know more about the fiscal cliff than I did 150 seconds ago.

Yes, the US had a nice boom during the Clinton years. I'm sure the bubble that burst in 2008 was completely unrelated.

yes and also nothing to do with the 7 years of Bush running the country after that....

Although Clinton fucked up big time when he allowed the repeal of Glass-Steagall

*length=2:35

Invocations (length=2:35) cannot be called by srue because srue is not privileged - sorry.

Well they *DID* lose, so, why should Democrats compromise with them? For the record I'm not a member of any political party, and I don't even vote. Never have, never will.

They lost the presidential election, I think you'll find that the republicans still control congress.

and yay, apathy!

It's worth remembering that Democrats won 53% of the total votes cast for the house of representatives. The republicans held on thanks to aggressive Gerrymandering after the 2010 census. Whether they want to see it or not, the election was a rebuke.

Ah, Taxocrats and their laughable horseshit.

Seize all the money of the wealthy and you'd have enough to run the thugverment for 10 days. THEN WHAT, LIBS?

And there is no such thing as a "spending cut" from either side,

I'm also suspicious that this video really reflects the agendas of either the Democrats or MoveOn. It seems more likely that they are trying to get the people to push hard for these points so that any softening on these positions can be seen as a reluctant compromise.

Yes, if Clinton's presidency had ended after the dot com bubble burst, instead of during its height, history would have recorded his presidency as having a negative impact on the economy.

"To fight this recession the Fed needs more than a snapback; it needs soaring household spending to offset moribund business investment. And to do that, as Paul McCulley of Pimco put it, Alan Greenspan needs to create a housing bubble to replace the Nasdaq bubble."

Paul Krugman, 2002.

Remember "The New Economy"? particularly how new-fangled, computerized market analysis would do away with the old laws of economics altogether? That was the idea that guided US economic policy in the Clinton era.

Greenspan was a big proponent of the idea, although apparently he did at one point have his doubts. I don't know how much that ideology informed policy after the dotcom crash, and how much of it was just a desperate attempt to keep the US economy from tanking altogether, but the crisis was successfully weathered, or postponed until 2008...