After the health care reform victory, Obama is out again fund-raising for the Democratic party in anticipation of the coming mid-term elections.* Jackie Calmes writes:

But Democrats grumble that in raising money for them, as for himself, Mr. Obama prohibits donations from lobbyists and political action committees, long the fund-raising base for both parties.

"We make up for it with the large number of new donors that we brought into the process," said Dan Pfeiffer, the White House communications director. "And we have a grass-roots fund-raising capacity that is certainly unprecedented."

The grass roots have been stingier, however, than in 2008, which Democrats attribute to the economic downturn, the delays in winning changes in health care and the fact Mr. Obama is not on the ballot. But passage of the health insurance law, Mr. Pfeiffer said, "excited the grass-roots supporters the way that nothing else has."

In the most recent quarter, unlike the previous one, the Democratic National Committee outraised the Republican National Committee.

Krugman isn't happy.

Some Democrats worry that the new jobs bill is too expensive. With unemployment at 10%, that's crazy.

Republicans have been pounding Democrats on the deficit issue -- a line of attack that infuriates Democrats, who quickly note that former President George W. Bush entered office with a federal surplus and left with a substantial debt that the Obama administration inherited and then added to with its own economic recovery initiatives.

Lengthy, infuriating, thought-provoking op-ed by the a hedge fund manager who has access to the President's economic advisors:

I recently posed this question to one of the president’s senior economic advisers. He answered that the government is different from financial institutions because it can print money, and statistically the United States is not as bad off as some other countries. For an investor, these responses do not inspire confidence.

He went on to say that the government needs to focus on jobs now, because without an economic recovery, the rest does not matter. It’s a valid point, but an insufficient excuse for holding off on addressing the long-term structural deficit. If we are going to spend more now, it is imperative that we lay out a credible plan to avoid falling into a debt trap. Even using the administration’s optimistic 10-year forecast, it is clear that we will have problematic deficits for the next decade, which ends just as our commitments to baby boomers accelerate.

Not if we continue to fix the health care system and raise taxes on people like David Einhorn. At least he says that we should get rid of the official credit rating agencies and admits the financial industry is fighting change:

Congress has a rare opportunity in the current regulatory reform effort to eliminate the rating system. For now, it does not appear interested in taking sufficiently aggressive action. The big banks and bond buyers have told Congress they want to continue the current system.

Dean Baker says:

He tells readers that. "lower official inflation means higher reported real G.D.P., higher reported real income and higher reported productivity." Actually, this is not true insofar as asset prices are the cause of understated inflation. Asset prices do not affect GDP or productivity measures. It is remarkable that Einhorn apparently does not know this.

Einhorn also complains that his assessment of the understatement of inflation:

"doesn’t even take into account inflation we ignore by using a basket of goods that don’t match the real-world cost of living. (For example, health care costs are one-sixth of G.D.P. but only one-sixteenth of the price index, and rising income and payroll taxes do not count as inflation at all.)"

Actually, the government has a wide variety of inflation measures, many of which do include the full weight of health care expenditures. They all show the same thing as the consumer price index: inflation is very low and falling. In short, Mr. Einhorn either has no clue about government data, or he is deliberately trying to mislead readers.

There are signs the economy is improving but it could still easily stumble. But at least there are good signs.
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* Here in Illinois, the White House has sent Education Secretary Artie Duncan and Deputy Chief of Staff Jim Messina to help Giannoulias, the former banker and state treasurer of Greek ancestry. (Update: A day after this post Lynn Sweet reports in the Sun Times that David Plouffe will attend a grass roots fundraiser in Chicago on June 30th.)