Greg Sargent wants progressives to weigh in on how the White House should respond to the expected ferocious opposition from the GOP in congress:

I got an expert to lay out a roadmap the other day. Former White House chief of staff John Podesta has also sketched out an extensive game plan. The gist of their advice: He should go full throttle on his own where possible — executive orders, rulemaking powers, and so forth. Meanwhile, he should lay down a clear vision and agenda in the full expectation that Republicans will oppose it, and use the presidential bully pulpit to wage a massive communications offensive hammering them relentlessly for their opposition and intransigence.

This is meant in the spirit of provoking debate more than anything else. It would be interesting to hear from some of our sharpest online voices: How should Obama proceed?

It should surprise anyone to learn that I largely agree with my boss and, indeed, CAP’s team of policy experts has produced a detailed examination of things the President can do in terms of what I’ve called “governing from the White House.”

Something slightly distinctive from these ideas that I would emphasize are the President’s myriad opportunities to not do anything. Scott Brown and Ron Wyden have an interesting idea about state waivers under the Affordable Care Act, and I think it’d be brilliant of the White House to do . . . absolutely nothing about this. Let Senator Brown try to build Republican support for it. Maybe he’ll succeed, maybe he’ll fail, maybe it’ll be an interesting intra-caucus fight, maybe nobody will care. Either way, the President will be doing something else and it’s someone else who’ll be associated with the legislative sausage making or the failure of the sausage to get made. Similarly, Senators Coburn and DeMint seem to be interested in provoking a fight over ethanol subsidies. The White House should . . . ignore this. With luck, they’ll succeed. Without luck, they’ll fail. But either way, the President shouldn’t get sucked into a political debate for or against ethanol subsidies.

The important thing is to understand that even though a certain number of Washington DC political professionals regard it warmly, the United States Congress is a widely (and in my view, appropriately) despised institution. The only way to get an ambitious legislative agenda passed is for the President to deeply engage with Congress, but deeply engaging with Congress is politically toxic. With John Boehner as Speaker of the House, no “ambitious legislative agenda” is ever going to pass so the White House should simply check out. Tell reporters to ask members of congress the questions about congress. Keep busy doing other stuff. Give wannabe congressional dealmakers space to make deals. Let congressional jerks go be jerks. If something terrible passes, veto it. Don’t negotiate. If you don’t want rich people’s taxes cut, don’t sign a bill that cuts don’t. Don’t hold meetings. Then go back to working on all the stuff in CAP’s report.

I was glad to see Ron Paul tell Tim Fernholz that the recent conservative crusade to end the Federal Reserve’s dual mandate is “a little bit of grandstanding.”

One thing that the media really ought to ask of the folks pushing this idea is what difference they think it would make in the current circumstances. Just run back the tape of 2008-2010 with a single mandate for price stability. What’s happened during this period is that inflation has been unusually low. And in the Fed’s latest round of economic forecasts they went from predicting future inflation that would be at the low end of the normal range to inflation that would be below the normal range. So given an inflation-only mandate, the right solution would be expansionary monetary policy. And given an inflation-and-unemployment mandate, the right solution is expansionary monetary policy.

The only policy judgment that would make a difference is if you decided that in the 1984-2006 period America was suffering from ruinously high inflation and therefore the Fed should deliberately seek to have a lower inflation rate in the future. My objection to that would be that such a policy would lead to needlessly high unemployment and elevated risks of deflation. But this isn’t a debate about the nature of the Fed’s mandate, it’s a debate about whether or not we had ruinous inflation in the 1984-2006 period. Does Jim DeMint think we did?

Lydia DePillis has an interesting piece explaining how the new IHOP in Columbia Heights managed to qualify as a small business for the purposes of a small business set-aside rule in the development where it’s located. Basically even though common sense says IHOP is a national chain, it’s in fact organized as franchises, such that the actual business renting the space is a locally owned small business that subcontracts with national IHOP.

So good for them. But the ability of an IHOP franchise to qualify as a locally owned small business highlights the fact that this distinction is somewhat arbitrary—a person musing that she’s like to see more locally owned small businesses in her neighborhood would probably be disappointed to see a McDonald’s, franchise ownership structure notwithstanding. And the widespread bias in favor of small businesses in American discourse makes little sense to me. You often hear this in terms of the fact that small businesses account for the bulk of job creation. But that’s simply because the small business sector is more unstable. Basically if you look at gross figures you see that small businesses account for most of the new jobs and most of the layoffs. It’s neither here nor there.

The other way to look at this is that growth comes primarily from new businesses which are, by definition, small when they start. But the point here is that it’s the process of becoming big that creates the growth and it’s not clear that pro-small bias actually helps this happen. What’s more, with any business you’ve got some consumer surplus and some producer surplus. With a big business, there’s the possibility that unionization can force owners to share a larger slice of the consumer surplus with the workers.

I suspect two things are going on. The main one is a belief that regulatory subsidies to small businesses come mainly at the expense of big businesses. Nobody’s going to cry for the owners and managers of large successful firms. But this is an analytical error. The majority of business income goes to salary and benefits not to profits. So the cost is borne primarily by the hypothetical extra employees of disfavored large firms, not by their owners. The other is the idea that small business profits “stay in the community” whereas a big firm vacuums them up to somewhere. This, however, is obsolete. The whole point of having established large nationwide banks is that it’s now possible to channel capital from anywhere to anywhere very quickly. The location of the financial input is irrelevant.

I know some commenters here seem to think that since libertarianism is a false doctrine it therefore follows that all instances of government regulation are good. A sounder view is that since wealthy special interests are politically powerful, we should always be on guard against efforts by the politically powerful to enrich themselves at the expense of the public. Local business owners are powerful in local politics, and seem to be gaming the system in a way that’s detrimental to working people.