The various lists of things Obama could and should do won’t get very far until the President acknowledges the views he’s accepted and listened to fall woefully short of what the country’s problems need.

In early 2009, the Administration proposed to put the banks through “stress tests” to see how they’d survive more adverse scenarios. So why didn’t the economic team also have a test in case their own recovery plans proved to be insufficient?

These are hopeful days. The four horsemen of the establishment look like they are leaving the White House. Peter Orszag, who apparently was the most conservative of them all (and who just lobbied for more tax cuts for the rich), has left his position as head of the Office of Management and Budget. Larry Summers is leaving his position as director of National Economic Council. Rahm Emanuel might be out by October. And Tim Geithner is also rumored to be leaving after the election.

Laurence Kotlikoff has been making waves by using “inter-generational accounting” and CBO and IMF data, to compute a fiscal gap of $202 Trillion in present value. He concludes that this gap shows that the US is “bankrupt” as of now. Evidently, publications like Bloomberg take this sort of thing seriously since they publish it. But Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) economists, think it’s nonsense, due to the inapplicability of inter-generational accounting to Governments sovereign in their own currency.

Mike Norman, an MMT economist with a very good blog, got the chance to comment on Kotlikoff’s views, and also some nonsense of Tim Geither’s and President Obama’s, at RT.com.

No Politician Left Behind: Letter to the Maverick—Arizona Now Outlaws Hats

Further discussion of jobs reports versus reality of the Un and Underemployed.

Get this, the government entities, which are currently wringing their hands and saying they can’t persuade banks to write down principal amounts in mortgage modification, had absolutely zero qualms about setting up mortgage securitizations and creating foreclosure mills.

Contrast of economic cheerleaders Geithner and Bernanke versus the reality faced by long term un and underemployed workers

If you want to see what half of a Great Depression (a.k.a. a “Great Recession” looks like, take a look at this graph of the extent and duration of unemployment for each of the last six recessions.

I can’t quite determine what the Times’s business columnist Andrew Ross Sorkin is trying to tell us about the Bush/NY Fed 2008 backdoor bank bailout via A.I.G. But the evidence he cites seems to support the “backdoor” theory more than ever.