The dirty secret of Ayn Rand's philosophy is that it not only feels contempt toward the state but toward the vast majority of humanity as well. As even some libertarians have uncomfortably noted, Ms. Rand's contempt for The People was so strong that she felt many of them deserved death for taking advantage of government-funded public transportation. This sort of moral calculus helps us to understand why Rand's followers are less about supporting individual liberty and more about promoting the rights of the economic elite to pummel the less fortunate (a.k.a., the "looters") even further into the ground.

All of these delightful qualities are on display in Nick Gillespie's recent remarks on the evils of Social Security:

How much, when, and in what form one should provide for retirement is highly individual--and is properly left to the individual's free judgment and action. Social Security deprives the young of this freedom, and thus makes them less able to plan for the future, less able to provide for their retirements, less able to buy homes, less able to enjoy their most vital years, less able to invest in themselves. And yet Social Security's advocates continue to push it as moral. Why?

The answer lies in the program's ideal of "universal coverage"--the idea that, as a recent New York Times editorial preached, "all old people must have the dignity of financial security"--regardless of how irresponsibly they have acted. On this premise, since some would not save adequately on their own, everyone must be forced into some sort of "guaranteed" collective plan--no matter how irrational. Observe that Social Security's wholesale harm to those who would use their income responsibly is justified in the name of those who would not. The rational and responsible are shackled and throttled for the sake of the irrational and irresponsible.

And here we see the charming influence of Ms. Rand on one of libertarianism's most prominent "thinkers." Gillespie takes the same framework set up by Ms. Rand that divides the world into two camps: The productive economic supermen who pursue monetary gain as a matter of rational self-interest and the mooching, looting, thieving underclass that is always trying to tear down the magnificent work of our Galtian overlords.

What I've always found especially weird about Rand is how she frames economic success as a matter of moral virtue. That is, the only virtue that exists in the world is the pursuit of monetary gain through the maximizing of one's natural talents and abilities. Or as John Galt himself put it in the opening of the Atlas Shrugged trailer, the ideal person is someone who "works for himself and [does] not let others feed off the profits of his energy."

The trouble with this, of course, is that it's a ridiculous pile of bulls***. In reality a person's success has nothing to do with their inherent "morality" and a lot more to do with genetics, education and just plain luck. There are plenty of people in life who work hard and are not successful. There are plenty of people who are successful but who are then hit with a catastrophic illness that sucks up their life savings. There are people who are extremely rich who have never done one godd*** useful thing in their entire lives (Helllloooooooo, Richard Mellon Scaife!).

The point is, if someone retires rich it ain't because they're a virtuous, rational self-interested individual and if someone is broke in their old age it ain't because they're a lazy, unscrupulous "looter." And this is sort of the point of Social Security: The goal is to say, no matter how lucky or unlucky you are in the rest of your life, here's some cash to make sure you don't spend your final days freezing to death on the street (or, as I'm sure Gillespie would prefer, sewing Nike sneakers for five cents a day). This is why it's called Social Security, Nick. Because people who have matured beyond the age of three know that sometimes bad stuff happens in life that is completely out of our control.

At any rate, it's stuff like this that makes me confident that Randianism as a philosophy will never make anywhere outside of corporate boardrooms and smoke-filled libertarian dorm rooms. After all, most people will have trouble embracing a doctrine that holds all of them in hostile contempt.

One of my favorite political groups to spring up over the past year has been UK Uncut, a British grassroots campaign that arose to oppose Conservative Party budget cuts by pointing out how British companies engage in obscene levels of tax avoidance. What makes this campaign so effective is how it plays into basic notions of fairness: The Tories are asking average Britons to swallow tuition hikes and cuts to heating assistance all while gigantic companies like Vodafone get away with paying next to nothing in taxes. Johann Hari has a very important article in this month's Nation about how the group got started and how it changed the political conversation in the UK. I highly recommend giving it a read.

At any rate, UK Uncut this month is now turning their attention to an extremely worthy target: Britain's financial institutions:

Protest movement UK Uncut is to target British banks as part of a wave of fresh demonstrations next week.

The group, which has mounted dozens of demos at high street stores which it accuses of evading tax in recent months, wants to help focus public attention on the cost of recent bank bailouts at the start of the coming 'bonus season'.

[...]

The first day of action is expected on 19 February. Activist Daniel Garvin told the Guardian: 'The idea this time is not to shut these places down but to open up high street banks, occupying them and using them for things that may be more useful for the community.'

Now this is something I'd like to see replicated in the good ol' Yoo Ess of Ay!

And there's good news for us on that front, since WikiLeaks has promised to release damaging information on Bank of America sometime this year. Bank of America is an absolute perfect target for an American counterpart to UK Uncut. Why? Let us count the ways:

• BofA is a gigantic Frankenstein's monster of other financial institutions and is a perfect symbol for just how dangerous banks can be when they get too large and powerful.

• As the proud owner of infamous subprime lender Countrywide, BofA is up to its neck in the foreclosure fraud scandal.

• Bank of America was one of the biggest users of the Federal Reserve's emergency discount window during the financial crisis, as the bank went to the Fed trough nearly every day for nearly half a year.

So let's see: A gigantic bank that has a history of gobbling up other big financial institutions, that is instrumental in kicking Americans out of their homes and (best of all!) ran to the Fed for help every chance it got! Can you imagine a better target? And unlike Goldman Sachs, BofA has highly visible branches in major cities throughout the U.S.

So here's what I propose: During tax season, when the Tea Parties will be out in full force shrieking about gubmint socialism, we launch nationwide protests against Bank of America branches that mimic the disruptive tactics that UK Uncut has so cleverly employed thus far. If we make a big enough stink at enough BofA branches across America, it will give our illustrious press corps a new shiny object to play with that doesn't involve powdered wigs and tricorner hats.

So what say you, MoveOn and other liberal groups? I'll use my megaphone to promote you if y'all want to help organize?

In the LA Times, Barbara Ehrenreich writes about one of my favorite topics: Namely, things that do and do not get Americans upset and angry. This is the key section:

Threaten the Greeks with job losses and benefit cuts and they tie up Athens, but take away Americans' jobs, 401(k)s, even their homes, and they pretty much roll over. Tell British students that their tuition is about to go up and they take to the streets; American students just amp up their doses of Prozac. [...]

[B]ut when the eminent social scientist Frances Fox Piven brought it up at the end of December in an essay titled "Mobilizing the Jobless," all hell broke loose. An editor of Glenn Beck's website, theblaze.com, posted a piece sporting the specious headline "Frances Fox Piven Rings in the New Year by Calling for Violent Revolution," and, just two weeks before the Tucson shootings, the death threats started flying. Many of the most provocative comments have been removed from the site's comment section, but at one time they included such charming posts as: "Bring it on biotch [sic]. we're armed to the teeth."

Readers of this blog are obviously quite familiar with this sort of behavior. But as Ehrenreich sharply notes, 'twas not always thus:

During the depression of 1892 to 1896, unemployed workers marched to Washington by the thousands in what was then the largest mass protest this country had seen. In 1932, even more jobless people -- 25,000 -- staged what was, at that time, the largest march on Washington, demanding public works jobs and a hike in the inheritance tax. From the '60s to the '80s, Americans marched again and again -- peacefully, nonviolently and by the hundreds of thousands -- for civil rights, women's rights, gay rights, economic justice and against wars. In fact, this has been a major focus of Piven's scholarly work over the years — the American tradition of protest and resistance to economic injustice -- and it's a big enough subject to keep hundreds of academics busy for life.

I would argue a coupla reasons for this: First, the abandonment of organized labor by much of the Democratic Party and some segments of the too-obsessed-with-identity-politics professional left has placed a real rift between liberals and many blue-collar folks who now feel no one represents them. As Sen. Jim Webb put it last year after the Dems' election debacling:

People look up say, what's the difference between these two parties? Neither of them is really going to take on Wall Street. If they don't have the guts to take them on, and they've got all these other programs that exclude me, well to hell with them. I'm going to vote for the other people who can at least satisfy me on other issues, like abortion.

This is sadly true. But the other aspect of this story is equally depressing: As a culture we've internalized Atlas Shrugged and have learned to view rich people as our morally superior overlords.

I'll never forget the moment I realized that our entire country was suffering from a collective mental disorder. It happened when the Wall Street Journal went out and talked to some of the people who inadvertently made hedge fund manager John Paulson very, very rich because they could no longer afford payments on their houses. Essentially, Paulson, with an assist from the Fabulous Fab and Goldman Sachs, created a portfolio of horrendously crappy mortgages and then shorted it by taking out credit default swaps on it. In other words, the more people who stopped making mortgage payments and lost their homes, the better Paulson's portfolio performed.

So anyway, when the Journal asked some of these folks how they felt about Paulson growing rich from betting on their personal misfortune, here's what one of them said:

In 2006, Mr. Booket got hit by a car while riding a motorcycle from a late-night party, was unable to find much work and couldn't pay the bank. In October 2008, he lost the house to foreclosure and plans to move out by next week. He says he bears no grudge against Mr. Paulson and Goldman.

"The man came up with a scheme to get rich, and he did it," says Mr. Booket, who had refinanced his mortgage just months before the accident. "So more power to him."

Buh-guh-buh-guh-guh.

OK, let's use a sports analogy (I just love sports analogies). Imagine that LeBron James suffered a season-ending knee injury during the first game of the 2011 NBA playoffs. And imagine that someone came up to him afterward and said, "Well, LeBron, there is some upside to your misfortune. A retired doctor who is now a full-time investor has spent the last three years watching the stress you've been putting on your knee with awkward pivots and he took out billions in credit default swaps because he thought it wouldn't be long before you suffered a catastrophic injury. And now that your ACL and MCL have blown out, he's stinking rich! Doesn't that make you feel better?"

Do you think LeBron would actually give the guy credit and say, "More power to him?" HAAAAAAIIIIILLLLL NOOOOOOOOO.

We live in a bizarre and depraved culture when it comes to money, my friends.

So it looks as though Facebook plans to go public sometime next year, thus rendering irrelevant any questions about whether it can have Goldman sell its shares to other investors and still remain a private entity. On the other hand, as William Cohan notes in his New York Times column, Goldman's investment in Facebook certainly seems to be a violation of the "Volcker Rule," which you may remember as the (murky, loophole-ridden) part of the financial reform bill that bars banks with access to the Fed's discount window from proprietary trading. The goal of the rule was to basically force banks to make a choice: They could either have access to free money from the Fed during times of crisis or they could run a gambling casino, but they couldn't do both. Cohan comments:

Despite the high price of its investment, Goldman sees in Facebook a business bonanza, a nearly perfect nugget of investment-banking opportunities. First, Goldman’s cost of capital is close to zero — as a bank holding company, it can borrow from the Federal Reserve at negligible interest rates — so any capital gain it makes on its venture in Facebook will be sheer profit. Second, Goldman has almost certainly locked up the role of lead manager of the inevitable Facebook initial public offering.

Fees for underwriting public offerings are generally about 7 percent of the value of the stock sold. Facebook could easily sell $2 billion of stock or more, generating fees to Goldman and the other underwriters of at least $140 million. The other benefit for Goldman in leading the public offering — aside from major bragging rights — is that it can use its marketing, sales and distribution muscle to make sure the value of Facebook at the time of the offering exceeds the $50 billion valuation at which Goldman invested.

Goldman has also won from Facebook the right to offer an additional $1.5 billion of the company’s stock to its private-wealth clients. According to The Times, Goldman will be creating a “special purpose vehicle” to sell the stock to its wealthy clients and then will charge them a 4 percent initial fee plus 5 percent of any profits.

As anyone who knows the history of the Internets knows, betting on hot websites to stay hugely successful over more than a few years -- Geocities! MySpace! Friendster! -- is a dubious venture. But as Cohan notes, there's not much risk and a lot of reward for Goldman for investing in Facebook since it can borrow money from the Fed at extremely low rates. So if Facebook does indeed go the way of Pets.com, it's no big deal since Goldman can run to Daddy Fed for more free money.

Anyone else see a wee bit of moral hazard in this scenario?

Felix Salmon also explores this issue a bit. And for some amusement, check out the Wall Street Journal's comparison of Goldman's Facebook investment pitch with a similar pitch from the deposed ruler of Nigeria.

Onto some daily news!

• Jobless claims for the past month are at the lowest they've been in nearly two-and-a-half years. If you want to make a case that the real economy (versus just the stock market) is improving, this is some pretty good evidence. But even if tomorrow's jobs figure comes in around the +297,000 figure the ADP reported this week, we've still got a long way to go. Since so many people have been out of work for so long, it's going to be very difficult for many of them to find jobs. It would be nice if our government decided to simply hire people to build critical infrastructure like it did in the 1930s, but apparently we have to rely on the benevolence of our corporate masters instead of doing things to directly fix problems. Welcome to modern America.

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If I could pick one idea to purge from the American psyche, it would be the idea that rich people are special, magical wealth leprechauns who must be allowed to pursue their interests without hindrance lest the entire economy collapse. The reason this elitist Randroid idea is particularly noxious is because it results in things like this being taken seriously:

If mark-to-market accounting is to blame for the current financial crisis, then the National Weather Service is to blame for Hurricane Katrina; if it hadn’t told us the hurricane hit New Orleans, the city would never have flooded.

This is the logic the bankers are using, and they are getting sympathetic ears in Congress. The bankers have gotten two members of Congress to introduce a bill to establish a new body that could suspend accounting rules for financial institutions.

Edward L. Yingling, the president of the American Bankers Association, says the proposal addresses “systemic risks that accounting standards can have on the economy.”

Steve Forbes, the publisher and erstwhile presidential candidate, goes even further. “Mark-to-market accounting is the principal reason why our financial system is in a meltdown,” he wrote in a Wall Street Journal op-ed piece.

They say the problem, in short, is not that the banks acted irresponsibly in creating financial instruments that blew up, or in making loans that could never be repaid. It is that someone is forcing them to fess up. If only the banks could pretend the assets were valuable, then the system would be safe.

Mark-to-market accounting isn't a perfect way to keep books -- in bubble times, for instance, it makes financial institutions look much financially stronger than they really are -- but it beats what Forbes wants, which is the right to just make crap up. Lookit:

But put aside for a moment the absurdity of trying to price assets in a disrupted or non-existent market, of not distinguishing between distress prices and "normal" prices. Regulatory capital by its definition should take the long view when it comes to valuation; day-to-day fluctuations shouldn't matter. Assets should be kept on the books at the price they were obtained, as long as the assets haven't actually been impaired.

Ah, if only Milo Mindderbinder had thought of this when he was going bust from investing in all that chocolate-covered cotton! Instead of panicking and trying to unload it at bargain prices, he could have simply insisted that it was worth precisely what he'd originally paid for it and then the Syndicate would still be up and running!

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Jon Cohn notes that the GOP's game of chicken on whether to raise the debt ceiling is pretty goddamn insane:

And the alternative—failing to increase the debt ceiling? What precise effects would that have? This isn't my area of expertise, but my colleague Alex Hart knows a thing or two about it. Here's what he wrote last week:

Recent history provides a sense of just how scary this would be. “The reason the markets calmed down [during the financial crisis] is that we took [the banks’] toxic assets and handed the financial institutions Treasurys,” says Kevin Hassett, a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. “If we’re in a default situation, the Treasurys themselves are the toxic assets, and it’s not clear what we can hand anybody to calm them down.”

The sad thing is, Graham seems to grasp this: In the same interview, he notes that default could be catastrophic. But that's not stopping him from making his demands. And that's particularly disheartening, since he is supposed to be one of the more reasonable members of the Republican Senate caucus.

And this is precisely why the Democrats should (but certainly won't) call the GOP's bluff on the debt ceiling. Look, the Masters of the Universe have parked a lot of cash in treasuries over the past few years since t-bills are traditionally one of the safest investments around during times of extreme uncertainty. If the GOP puts the United States into serious risk of defaulting, the Masters of the Universe stand to lose a lot of money as the treasuries they've purchased become as toxic as Greek or Irish debt. This is why the GOP's Wall Street overlords will never, repeat never, tolerate them playing around seriously with raising the debt ceiling and it's why the GOP will cave if Obama and the Democrats stick to their guns (which they won't, incidentally, as many of them actually will welcome the GOP giving them political cover to slash Social Security and other key programs).

But would the GOPers really risk losing countless sums of money for their masters if they created a sovereign debt crisis? Sorta doubt it. And it's worth letting them try simply to watch them slink away in defeat.

Onto more economic news!

• Felix Salmon depressingly notes how Larry Summers will likely be replaced by yet another rich person with strong ties to Wall Street:

  From today’s WaPo report it seems that the shortlist to replace Larry Summers at the NEC has been whittled down to three men — Gene Sperling, Roger Altman, and Richard Levin. [...]

  [T]hey’re all multi-millionaires with close ties to Wall Street. None more than Altman, of course, who has his own bank. But Levin is on the board of American Express, which paid him $181,362 in 2009, and where he has shares and “share equivalent units” worth $539,000. Which might not be a huge sum compared to the $1.5 million or so that he’s earning at Yale, but is still more than enough to make him a denizen of Wall Street rather than Main Street.

  Finally there’s Sperling, who in some ways is the worst of the three when it comes to grubbing money from Wall Street. The other two have well-defined and easily-understood jobs; Sperling, by contrast, signed up with the Harry Walker Agency and started giving speeches to anybody with cash, including not only Citigroup but even Allen Stanford. He also wrote a monthly 900-word column for Bloomberg for $137,500 a year, which works out at about $13 per word. Then he started “advising” Goldman Sachs on its charitable giving, which advice came very expensively indeed:

  Goldman Sachs paid Sperling $887,727 for advice on its charitable giving. That made the bank his highest-paying employer. Even Geithner’s chief of staff Patterson, who was a full-time lobbyist at the firm, did not make as much as Sperling did on a part-time basis. Patterson reported earning $637,492 from Goldman Sachs [in 2008].

  Well, peachy. If there's one thing America needs, it's a another person who used to be on Goldman's payroll making key economic policy recommendations.

  Brad DeLong gives it the old college try and insists that Sperling is actually a liberal, but to me this isn't even about standard left-right ideology anymore but about whether people have bought into the idea that the Great Wall Street Casino is a sustainable economic model. Sperling could be a perfectly nice guy who really wants to help people get affordable health care and good education, but as long as he thinks Wall Street's Ponziconomy is the best way to generate wealth in this country, he should have no business influencing national economic policy.

• On a more positive note, there has been some legit good economic news over the last couple of weeks. Initial jobless claims dipped below 400,000 for the first time since 2008 last week and we got word yesterday that manufacturing is picking up steam:

  Manufacturing activity expanded for a 17th month in a row in December, rising to the highest level in seven months, a purchasing managers' group said Monday.

  The Institute for Supply Management's index for manufacturing activity ticked up to 57 in December. That's the highest reading since May and up from 56.6 in November.

  The reading came in slightly lower than the 57.3 level expected by a Briefing.com consensus of economists. Any reading of more than 50 indicates expansion in the sector, and the index has remained above this mark for 17 consecutive months.

  For the first time in forever, you can see real-life green shoots for the economy. Of course, several things could quickly derail any recovery this year (see: refusing to raise the debt ceiling) so let's keep our fingers crossed.

• And for what it's worth, the fake economy is also doing well right now, with the Dow closing in on 11,700. This doesn't mean anything to the millions of people who can't find a job, but the media seem to think it's the most important economic metric EV-ARRRR so there you go.

What else is happening, peeps?

Good mornin'! Let's get started:

• Republicans on the financial crisis investigation commission reached new levels of insanity yesterday when they chose to adopt a blame-it-on-ACORN narrative to the causes of the financial crisis:

  The four Republicans appointed to the commission investigating the root causes of the financial crisis plan to bypass the bipartisan panel and release their own report Wednesday, according to people familiar with the commission's work.

  The Republicans, led by the commission's vice chairman, former congressman and chair of the House Ways and Means Committee Bill Thomas, will likely focus their report on the explosive growth of subprime mortgages and the heavy role played by the federal government in pushing mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to purchase and insure them. They'll also likely focus on the Community Reinvestment Act, a 1977 law that encourages banks to lend to underserved communities, these people said.

  The Republicans' report is expected to conclude that government policy helped inflate the housing bubble and that prices weren't expected to crash because the government pushed homeownership so aggressively.

  This cute little narrative -- which I called the "We didn't want to give houses to all those swarthy poor people, the government made us, WAAAAAAAH!" narrative -- has absolutely no basis in reality. This chart from Barry Ritholz tells you everything you need to know (click to enlarge):

  

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Happy Wednesday, campers! Mitt Romney yesterday engaged in a pathetic pander to Dittohead Nation by honoring their time-honored tradition of trashing the unemployed. Let's take a look at what our pal Mittens had to say:

The system is also not designed for a flexible economy like ours in which some employees move from job to job for short periods, and are therefore ineligible for unemployment compensation when they are faced with a protracted spell without work.

To remedy such problems we need a very different model, perhaps establishing individual unemployment savings accounts over which employees would exercise direct control when they lose their jobs, or putting in place financial incentives for employers to hire and train the long-term unemployed. One thing is certain: While we cannot rebuild our flawed system overnight, we are surely not required to borrow the funds to pay for it. In spending $56.5 billion to extend benefits, the deal is sacrificing the bedrock Republican principle that new expenditures be paid for with offsetting budget cuts.

That last sentence is the most hilarious pile of horses*** I've read in a long, long time. Let's go through some of the wonderful Republican initiatives over the past decade and see if they were offset by budget cuts:

• The cost of extending the Bush tax cuts for the rich for the next two years will be $79 billion, or more than $20 billion more than the cost of extending unemployment benefits. Mittens sees no need to pay for these.

• The Iraq war has cost us close to $750 billion. Did the GOP try to offset those costs with tax increases or budget cuts? Pffffffft!

• And then there's TARP, the $700 billion bank bailout that had no guarantee of seeing any return on investment. Again, did the GOP insist on making cuts or raising taxes to pay for this? Nope.

So in Romney's world, government spending is only reckless if it benefits people who have lost their jobs. If it involves pointless wars, bank bailouts or tax cuts for Paris Hilton, though, it doesn't need to be offset by anything since all of those things are free. Why anyone takes this clown seriously -- or why Useless, Eh? Today felt the need to print his scribblings without the least bit of fact checking -- is beyond me.

Let's look at the rest of today's economic news:

• First, some happy news:

  New government data released Tuesday bolstered retailers' hopes that consumers are shaking off the recession and pulling out their wallets just in time for the most critical sales months of the year.

  The Commerce Department reported a 0.8 percent increase in retail sales in November from the previous month, with big gains at clothing stores, sporting goods chains and department stores. It also revised its estimate for October upward, from a 1.2 percent gain to 1.7 percent.

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David Broder, who might be the only person who votes for Obama in 2012, explains to us why the deal on tax cuts is super-swell:

Also, the $900 billion this deal will add to the national debt increases the pressure on Obama and Congress to undertake the kind of tough-love budgetary changes outlined by the presidential commission on deficits.

Y'hear that? Giving billions of dollars to the rich will be a good thing because it will force us to focus more on cutting Social Security! I mean, you cannot make this stuff up. This is almost as good as the Dean's previous musings about rebooting the American economy by starting a war with Iran.

Here are some more goodies:

The divorce from the Pelosi Democrats has been brewing for a long time, but it came visibly into view when so many House members whined about the tax-and-budget deal with the Republicans.

If this wasn't a Sister Souljah moment, it was at least comparable to Bill Clinton's decision to sign the 1996 welfare reform bill passed by a Republican Congress - a step that sank Bob Dole's presidential campaign before it really began.

Obama's tax cut compromise will shower the rich with more money. Clinton's welfare reform bill tore up key pieces of the social safety net. You're starting to get a picture of what Broder's vision of "bipartisanship" looks like: People from both parties coming together to help the rich at the expense of everyone else.

As much as people like Broder love to position themselves as The Adults in the Room, they will happily throw fiscal responsibility out the window if it interferes with their ideological hobby horses of giving more money to rich people and starting wars. When they talk about making "tough choices" what they're really referring to is slashing spending on programs that have benefited the American middle class for generations so that Paris Hilton can afford a new pool. This headline from ABC captures the dynamic perfectly:

Sen. Conrad: Extend All Tax Cuts; Time to Get 'Serious' About Deficit

Of course, as anyone who can perform basic arithmetic knows, the first thing you should do to "get serious" about the deficit is to let all of the Bush tax cuts expire. But Conrad (who is begging, begging, begging for a primary challenge btw) and his ilk won't do that because they aren't serious about the deficit. Rather, they're serious about slashing whatever remains of our tattered safety net and unleashing a glorious age of neo-Social Darwinism.

Ain't politics grand?

Anyway, on to some of yesterday's key economic news:

• Tim Carney notes that former Obama administration officials are predictably strolling through the Washington-to-Wall-Street revolving door:

  Obama budget chief Peter Orszag is now a VP at Citigroup, where his new bosses praise the "tremendous amount of knowledge as well as key private sector and government experience" he will bring, and the Financial Times hears he will be in a position "dealing with clients and top government officials."

  Greg Craig, Obama's former White House counsel is at Goldman Sachs.

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If the last week has taught us anything it's that nobody in Washington actually gives a damn about the deficit. That's because a bipartisan consensus has emerged that we need to spend hundreds of billions of dollars per year to extend the Bush tax cuts. If these tax rates are kept in place over the next decade they'll add around $4 trillion to the national debt.

The bond markets have noticed this, for what it's worth. The yield on the 10-year t-bill closed at 3.27% today, although as Krugman notes this is still very low from a historical perspective. All the same, let's remember that when I started this here feature a mere two weeks ago the yield on the 10-year t-bill stood at 2.8%. And you can bet that if such a quick rise in bond yields over a two-week period had occurred because Obama decided to triple unemployment compensation or lower the retirement age or just write a $383 billion check to Mumia, the shrieking from the Washington Post editorial page would have be deafening. But because it involves tax cuts for rich people they give it a big thumbs up.

So we've learned that nobody actually cares about the deficit. Which is just as well since it's daft to enact deficit reduction during such horrible economic conditions. But it would be nice if we could all stop pretending, wouldn't it?

In other news:

• So who's going to benefit the most from the Obama tax deal? Do you even have to ask?

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