“Undermined By Congressional Partisanship”: President Obama’s Policies Revived The Economy
The economy had already lost 4.5 million jobs before President Barack Obama took office in January 2009, with job losses that month alone surging to 818,000. Economic contraction had also accelerated, reaching a staggering 8.9 percent annualized decline in the fourth quarter of 2008—the worst in 60 years. From this downward spiral, Obama’s economic policies proved instrumental in generating and sustaining a recovery.
In February 2009, Obama enacted the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, and the pace of economic contraction and job loss immediately decelerated. As the stimulus ramped up, sustained economic growth took hold in mid-2009, and job growth resumed early in 2010—with 3.5 million jobs added since February 2010. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimates that without the Recovery Act, unemployment would have averaged roughly 10.7 percent in 2010, instead of 9.6 percent.
The Recovery Act was intended to jump-start the economy and avert a depression, not to restore full employment. The $831 billion price tag, spread over more than four years, was dwarfed by the staggering loss in economic activity caused by the bursting of the $7 trillion housing bubble. After economic growth resumed, mass unemployment and underemployment compelled more fiscal support. However, passing additional economic support through Congress proved a Herculean task.
In December 2010, the administration negotiated a payroll tax cut, continuation of emergency unemployment benefits, and targeted tax credits to sustain the delicate recovery as the stimulus began winding down. Without this boost, the economy would actually have slipped back into contraction in the first quarter of 2011.
It should be noted that the Federal Reserve also deserves credit for extraordinary measures taken to resuscitate the financial sector and facilitate recovery. But the Fed had already maxed out its key policy lever, the federal funds rate, when Obama entered office; monetary policy could not have single-handedly revived the economy.
While the economy has improved greatly under Obama’s stewardship, creating jobs for the millions of unemployed Americans who want to work remains imperative. In September 2011, Obama proposed the American Jobs Act, which would boost employment by roughly another 2 million jobs, according to numerous outside economists, including Mark Zandi.
Unfortunately, Obama’s substantive jobs agenda continues to be undermined by congressional partisanship. While more must be done to restore full employment, it is unquestionable that President Obama’s economic policies have been instrumental in ending the worst downturn since the Great Depression.
By: Andrew Fieldhouse, Economic Policy Institute, Published in U. S. News and World Report, March 13, 2012
“Republican Hostile Challenge To Women”: Romney, Santorum, And Gingrich Need A Lesson In Women’s History
Disaffected women are packing up to flee the Republican Party in the wake of the War on Women, The Washington Post reported on its front page. Meanwhile, President Obama’s re-election campaign is sending out a massive signal to energize pro-choice women and welcome them into the Democratic Party, The New York Times said on its Sunday front page.
Good, good. Women are clearly the critical constituency to choose the next president. That’s just what the Republican Party deserves for its hostile challenge to women and girls making their own decisions about their own lives. Sometimes you wonder if Republican candidates know that women actually have the right to vote. Let’s face it, neither Mitt, Rick, nor Newt is exactly a woman’s man. They are out-and-out men’s men.
Has former Gov. Mitt Romney or former Sen. Rick Santorum or former House Speaker Newt Gingrich ever read Virginia Woolf? Do they even know who Margaret Sanger is? What about the spitfire Quaker Alice Paul? She led the women suffrage movement to victory over seven or more years of struggle. This happened in 1920, like 92 years ago, gentlemen. Paul took women’s suffrage public, to the streets and to the White House gates, where the strategy was to remind President Woodrow Wilson what the right thing to do was. Paul and other suffragettes were arrested, abused, and force fed in jail. Nothing would stop them until women won the right to citizenship in our democracy.
Note: women suffrage was not given; it was taken. We women today should study pages from Paul’s book on civil disobedience, especially if the War on Women continues to close in on overturning Roe v. Wade, the cornerstone Supreme Court decision that makes reproductive rights—human rights—legal and private.
Margaret Sanger brought you and me birth control. She made up the useful phrase in the interest of saving women’s lives. As a nurse, she was outraged to see young married immigrants on the Lower East Side dying in childbirth or from botched abortions. The death of Sadie Sachs was the catalyst, she said, a 28-year-old mother who begged a doctor to tell her how to prevent another pregnancy. “Well, it can’t be done,” he answered. “I’ll tell you the only thing to do….Tell Jake to sleep on the roof.”
Months after witnessing that predicament, Sanger answered a call to the Sachs home, where she found Sadie Sachs on her deathbed, surrounded by a scene of her weeping family.
Sanger’s cause came from that personal encounter. “The sun came up and threw its reflection over the house tops. It was the dawn of a new day in my life,” she declared. “I would tell the world what was going on in the lives of these poor women.” In 1916, she opened a women’s health clinic in Brooklyn and founded the organization that became Planned Parenthood, the gleam in the eye of one spirited, determined woman. Like Roe v. Wade, it has been besieged lately, as another front in the War on Women.
Sanger’s life is an incredible mirror of her times, especially the free-thinking, defiant mood of Roaring ’20s. Like her contemporary Paul, she too got arrested and spent time in jail in 1917. Under a court order not to give a public speech, she gagged herself and stood next to the eminent historian and Harvard professor Arthur Schlesinger, Sr. as he read her words. She traveled the world to seek ways of safe birth control. Unfortunately, she subscribed to an intellectual trend called eugenics (before the Nazi era.)
Paul and Sanger would ask, what’s wrong with us, defending what’s already been done? If I were to interview them today, they would be eager to know what progress women have made. And what would I tell them—President Clinton’s Family and Medical Leave Act?
They might say to me that their endeavors went beyond the ballot and women’s health. These were vehicles to empower women to speak with their own voices and to determine their own destinies to make this more truly a democracy.
Virginia Woolf, the brilliant English novelist, essayist, and diarist, created the feminist metaphor of a room of one’s own in a manifesto on furthering women’s liberties in life. She lived in the same age as Sanger and Paul. Such a shame these three never met.
Getting back to Romney, Santorum, and Gingrich, well might we ask how much room there is for women in their Americas.
By: Jamie Stiehm, U. S. News and World Report, March 13, 2012
“Forward Economic Momentum”: Obama’s American Recovery And Reinvestment Act Has Been A Success
The short answer is yes, the economy has improved due to the policies President Obama implemented with the support of Congress.
Labor market conditions are the most important indicators of whether the economy has improved. Most people get the majority of their income from paid employment and having a good job, with decent pay and benefits including health insurance, retirement, and policies that make sure employees can also be good caregivers for their families. Most have little savings, if any, to rely on.
The labor market is moving in the right direction and this is a testament to the success of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act and other steps taken to address the Great Recession. Recent data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics shows that the private sector has added jobs every month since March 2010, with 245,000 jobs added on average over the past three months. This is a remarkable turnaround from when President Obama took office and the economy was shedding about 20,000 jobs per day.
As a result of job creation, the share of Americans with a job in February edged up to 58.6 percent, higher than it’s been since June 2010. Further, there has also been steady progress to bring unemployment down from its peak of 10.0 percent in October 2009 to 8.3 percent in February.
The Recovery Act and other programs worked because they targeted funds toward a variety of specific job-creation efforts that have been shown to have created jobs and been cost-effective. The President’s Council of Economic Advisers credits the Recovery Act with increasing employment through the second quarter of 2011 by 2.2 million to 4.2 million jobs and reducing unemployment by between 0.2 and 1.1 percent. Economists Alan Blinder and Mark Zandi estimate that the Recovery Act and other fiscal policies resulted in 2.7 million jobs, and that without them unemployment would have hit 11 percent and job losses would have totaled 10 million.
Make no mistake, there has been sure and steady progress in the economy. But, these gains would have been much stronger had conservatives not blocked efforts to invest in much-needed infrastructure and help state and local governments keep employees on the job teaching children and policing streets. The forward economic momentum continues to be at risk as Congress and state and local governments move toward an austerity agenda that will hinder, not promote, strong growth and an improved labor market.
By: Heather Boushey, Sr. Economist, Center for American Progress, Published in U. S. News and World Report, March 13, 2012
“Good Job Mitt”: Romneycare Is Making Massachusetts Healthier
In newly released research, Charles Courtemanche and Daniela Zapata ask perhaps the most important question about the Massachusetts health-care reforms: Did they improve health outcomes in Massachusetts?
The answer, which relies on self-reported health data, suggests they did. The authors document improvements in “physical health, mental health, functional limitations, joint disorders, body mass index, and moderate physical activity.” The gains were greatest for “women, minorities, near-elderly adults, and those with incomes low enough to qualify for the law’s subsidies.”
Some of those results are a bit odd. Although it’s possible to tell yourself a story about how the Massachusetts health reforms affected the body mass indexes of the newly insured, you have to stretch a bit.
But most of them make perfect sense. The reforms led to more people having insurance, which is to say more people having more opportunities to see a doctor and get early and/or regular treatment for ailments. That led to improvements in health. If that hadn’t led to improvements in health, it would be the worth of going to the doctor and getting timely medical care that would be called into question. And if going to the doctor and getting timely medical care isn’t worth doing, the Massachusetts reforms are pretty far down the list of practices and policies we need to rethink.
The researchers end by asking whether the Massachusetts reforms provide a good guide to what will happen under the Affordable Care Act. “The general strategies for obtaining nearly universal coverage in both the Massachusetts and federal laws involved the same three-pronged approach of non-group insurance market reforms, subsidies, and mandates, suggesting that the health effects should be broadly similar,” they write. “However, the federal legislation included additional costcutting measures such as Medicare cuts that could potentially mitigate the gains in health from the coverage expansions. On the other hand, baseline uninsured rates were unusually low in Massachusetts, so the coverage expansions — and corresponding health improvements — from the Affordable Care Act could potentially be greater.”
I’d add one point to their discussion: The national reforms, unlike the Massachusetts reforms, included major investments in comparative-effectiveness research, electronic health records, accountable care organizations and pay-for-quality pilots. If any or all of those initiatives pay off, they could dramatically improve our understanding of which treatments work and force the health-care system to integrate that new knowledge into everyday treatment decisions very quickly.
If that happens, medical care could become substantially more effective than it is now, which should also improve health outcomes. Quality improvements like that could, for the already insured, be the largest payoff from the Affordable Care Act.
By: Ezra Klein, The Washington Post, March 12, 2012
Why Gas Prices Aren’t Likely To Decide The 2012 Election
This morning’s Washington Post-ABC poll shows that President Obama’s poll numbers are falling in tandem with rising gas prices. Nearly two-thirds of Americans say they disapprove of how he’s handling the situation at the pump. Could gas prices end up swaying the 2012 election after all?
It’s hard to rule anything out, but evidence remains thin that gasoline will be a determining factor in November. While Americans love to grumble about expensive gasoline — and with good reason — political science research suggests that it’s not the main thing that shifts votes. Nate Silver, for one, has found that “there’s not a lot of evidence that oil prices are all that important” a factor in presidential elections. Nor do gasoline prices necessarily dictate the public’s view of the White House: Back during George W. Bush’s presidency, there was a much-linked graph showing his approval ratings climbing and dipping in lockstep with gas prices. But subsequent analysis by political scientist Brendan Nyhan showed that the correlation was just a “statistical artifact.”
The more severe worry for Obama, at this point, is that soaring gas prices could stomp on the nascent economic recovery. The way this typically happens is that pricey gasoline starts crimping the checkbooks of U.S. consumers, who then have less money to spend on other things. (In the Post-ABC poll, most respondents said they were already feeling the pinch.) That leads to slower growth. And slower growth, political scientists agree, really can sink a presidency. As Silver puts it, “higher gas prices are important to the extent that they affect things like G.D.P., inflation and unemployment. But there isn’t evidence that they matter above and beyond that.”
That said, it’s not yet clear whether oil prices actually will crush the current recovery. There’s certainly reason for concern: James Hamilton, an economist at UC San Diego, has found that most U.S. recessions since World War II have been preceded by a sharp run-up in oil prices. But, oddly enough, one person who isn’t gloomy about our current predicament is Hamilton himself. “I find myself in the unusual position,” he recently wrote, “of being less concerned about the impact of oil prices on the U.S. economy than many other analysts.” Hamilton notes that, for now, oil prices are simply moving back to 2011 levels. And price increases that simply reverse earlier declines are less harmful than historic new highs.
For instance, high oil prices have historically inflicted disproportionate harm on the U.S. economy by leading to a cut-back in sales of SUVs and other inefficient vehicles that Detroit has long specialized in. But this time around, he notes, sales are holding steady — perhaps because U.S. automakers have shifted to selling fuel-efficient models. Moreover, low natural gas prices, a warm winter, and improved fuel efficiency have helped insulate U.S. consumers from pricey oil to date. Overall energy expenditures are actually down this year. Americans have been grappling with expensive oil for several years now, and they appear to be adapting.
That should come as a quiet relief to most incumbent politicians. Because the unsatisfying reality is that there’s not a whole lot the White House or Congress can actually do to lower gasoline prices. Oil prices are skyrocketing because global crude supplies remain tight and tensions with Iran are making traders skittish about a possible conflict in a crucial oil-producing region. If Obama could figure out a way to calm down the situation with Iran, that might cause crude prices to settle back down.
But apart from that, options are limited. More domestic drilling won’t bring back $2.50-per-gallon gas, as Newt Gingrich has suggested — oil prices are dictated by the vast world market, of which U.S. production is just a small fraction. The still-in-limbo Keystone XL pipeline is just as likely to raise gasoline prices in the Midwest as anything else. Cracking down on “financial speculators,” as many Democrats have called for, isn’t particularly promising, as many oil traders simply appear to be following fundamentals. And, judging by past experience, releasing oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve won’t offer much more than very short-lived relief. Meanwhile, Americans are becoming significantly more oil efficient, but that’s a slow, painstaking process.
That won’t stop politicians from talking about the issue. And it won’t stop Americans from expressing their disapproval. But those are two very different things from swaying an election.
Update: Here’s another notable aspect of the Post-ABC poll to consider, pointed out to me by Third Way’s Josh Freed. At the moment, 63 percent of Americans say that gas prices are causing them financial hardship, with 36 percent saying the gas squeeze is causing “serious” financial hardship. (See Question 11.) But those are actually the lowest hardship numbers since May of 2008 — and, in fact, it’s virtually identical to what Americans were saying in May of 2004, six months before George W. Bush won re-election.
By: Brad Plumer, The Washington Post, March 12, 2012
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