Because America Has Suffered Enough...

To spare us the misery of watching Republican candidates all day today, Barack Obama gives a press conference. He's so considerate.



On Iran:

My policy is not containment, my policy is to prevent them getting a nuclear weapon.

That's my track record. Now, what's said on the campaign trail? You know, those folks don't have a lot of responsibilities. They're not Commander in Chief. And when I see the casualness with which some of these folks talk about war, I am reminded of the costs involved in war. I'm reminded of the decision that I have to make in terms of sending our young men and women into battle. And the impact it has on their lives, the impact it has on national security. The impact it has on our economy. This is not a game. There's nothing casual about it. And when I see some of these folks who have a lto of bluster and a lot of big talk. But when you actually ask them specifically what they would do, it turns out they repeat a lot of the things that we've been doing over the last three years.

It indicates to me that that’s more about politics than trying to solve a problem. Now one thing we have not done is we haven’t launched a war. If some of these folks think it’s time to launch a war then they should say so and explain to the American people exactly why they would do that and what the consequences would be. Everything else is just talk.

Take that, warmongers!

On Rush Limbaugh and the Sandra Fluke Controversy:

I don’t know what’s in Rush Limbaugh’s heart, so I’m not going to comment on the sincerity of his apology. What I can comment on is the fact that all decent folks can agree that the remarks that were made don’t have any place in the public discourse. And the reason I called Ms. Flute is because I thought about Malia and Sasha and one of the things I want them to do as they get older is to engage in issues they care about. Even ones I may not agree with them on. I want them to be able to speak their mind in a civil and thoughtful way. And I don’t want them attacked or called horrible names because they’re being good citizens. And I wanted Sandra to know that I thought her parents should be proud of her.

And that we want to send a message to all our young people that being part of a democracy involves arguments and disagreements and debate. And we want you to be engaged. And there’s a way to do it that doesn’t involve you being demeaned and insulted, particularly when you’re a private citizen.

On whether Republicans are waging a "war on women":

Women are going to make up their own mind in this election about who is advancing the issues that they care most deeply about. One of the things I’ve learned being married to Michelle, is I don’t need to tell her what it is that she thinks is important. And there are millions of strong women around the country who are going to make their own determination about a whole range of issue.

It’s not going to be narrowly focused just on contraception. It’s not going to be driven by one statement by one radio announcer. It is going to be driven by their view of what’s most likely to make sure they can help support their families, make their mortgage payments, who’s got a plan to ensure that middle class families are secure over the long term, what’s most likely to result in their kids being able to get the education they need to compete.

And I believe that Democrats have a better story to tell to women about how we’re going to solidify the middle class and grow this economy, make sure everybody has a fair shot, everybody’s doing their fair share, and we got a fair set of rules of the road that everybody has to follow. 

On immigration reform:

Well, first of all just substantively, every American should want immigration reform. We’ve got a system that’s broken. We’ve got a system in which you have millions of families here in this country who are living in the shadows, worried about deportation. You’ve got American workers that are being undercut because those undocumented workers can be hired and the minimum wage laws may not be observed; overtime laws may not be observed.

You’ve got incredibly talented people who want to start businesses in this country or to work in this country. And we should want those folks here in the United States, but right now the legal immigration system is so tangled up that it becomes very difficult for them to put down roots here. So we can be a nation of laws and a nation of immigrants. And it is not just a Hispanic issue. This is an issue for everybody. This is an American issue that we need to fix.

Now, when I came into office, I said, “I am going to push to get this done.” We didn’t get it done. And the reason we haven’t gotten it done is because what used to be a bipartisan agreement that we should fix this ended up becoming a partisan issue. I give a lot of credit to my predecessor, George Bush, and his political advisers who said, you know, “This should not be just something the Democrats support; the Republican Party is invested in this as well.”

Unfortunately, too often Republicans seemt o only be invested in exploiting immigration fears to fire up their base. That's why  polls today show that Latino voters are currently supporting President Obama by an astonishing margin of 70% compared to 13% (!) support for the GOP.

You know, it's refreshing amidst the Republican hullaballoo to take some time and watch a President who is smart, thoughtful, and humane.

Also, I love this:

Jobs Growth Since Obama Inauguration

Blog stats data tells me that a number of people are finding this site through a search for "Jobs Growth Since Obama Inauguration". That's a good thing to be searching for (both Google-wise and, you know, as a thing to want...)! Let me make that just a little bit easier for you - here's a chart that shows US jobs gained or lost through July this year:




A few points to note:

• This chart is missing a month of data - in August, the Economy gained zero jobs as a whole. To be more exact: Number of private sector jobs gained in August, 17,000. Number of public sector jobs lost in August: 17,00.
• Even if the public sector had not shed those jobs - the private job growth would not be enough to keep up with the increase in population, let alone recover from the jobs lost during the recession.
• It is in this background that President Obama has called on Congress to urgently pass the American Jobs Act. Sitting around and waiting isn't going to create those jobs. Here's a few things that will: 
• Cutting the payroll tax cut in half for 98 percent of businesses: The President’s plan will cut in half the taxes paid by businesses on their first $5 million in payroll, targeting the benefit to the 98 percent of firms that have payroll below this threshold.
• A complete payroll tax holiday for added workers or increased wages: The President’s plan will completely eliminate payroll taxes for firms that increase their payroll by adding new workers or increasing the wages of their current worker (the benefit is capped at the first $50 million in payroll increases).
• A “Returning Heroes” hiring tax credit for veterans: This provides tax credits from $5,600 to $9,600 to encourage the hiring of unemployed veterans.
• Preventing up to 280,000 teacher layoffs, while keeping cops and firefighters on the job.
• Modernizing at least 35,000 public schools across the country, supporting new science labs, Internet-ready classrooms and renovations at schools across the country, in rural and urban areas.
• Immediate investments in infrastructure and a bipartisan National Infrastructure Bank, modernizing our roads, rail, airports and waterways while putting hundreds of thousands of workers back on the job.
• A New “Project Rebuild”, which will put people to work rehabilitating homes, businesses and communities, leveraging private capital and scaling land banks and other public-private collaborations.
• Expanding access to high-speed wireless as part of a plan for freeing up the nation’s spectrum.
• A $4,000 tax credit to employers for hiring long-term unemployed workers.
• Prohibiting employers from discriminating against unemployed workers when hiring.
• Expanding job opportunities for low-income youth and adults through a fund for successful approaches for subsidized employment, innovative training programs and summer/year-round jobs for youth.
• Cutting payroll taxes in half for 160 million workers next year: The President’s plan will expand the payroll tax cut passed last year to cut workers payroll taxes in half in 2012 – providing a $1,500 tax cut to the typical American family, without negatively impacting the Social Security Trust Fund.
• Allowing more Americans to refinance their mortgages at today’s near 4 percent interest rates, which can put more than $2,000 a year in a family’s pocket.Moody's Chief Economist Mark Zandy says that the American Jobs Act will create about 1.9 Million jobs and 2% growth for the economy.
• Source: White House Fact Sheet

The White House has published loads of helpful information about how the American Jobs Act will work. For instance:

• Here you can find out what impact it would have in each state, if passed.
• Here you can find a list of Twitter office hours, when administration officials will take your questions about the proposals. (Today, David Plouffe! Tomorrow, Stephanie Cutter!)
• Here are responses to the Jobs Act from state and local officials.

The American Jobs Act uses a mix of ideas that have been supported by both parties over the years, and which economists think would be effective. Congress should pass it now.

And the President told them so.

The Facts Show (and Businessweek Agrees) Obama Plan is Working

A lot has happened this week, both locally (a great Democrats Abroad health care celebration!) and back home (Justice Stevens is retiring!) but I wanted to take a moment now to write about the economy. Specifically, the improvement in the economy.

Businessweek magazine, hardly a bastion of economic populism, has just published an interesting article about how not only are the markets recovering, but they are doing so because there appears to be a solid grounding of underlying economic improvement. And they attribute this to directly to Obama's efforts:

Little more than a year ago, financial markets were in turmoil, major auto companies were on the verge of collapse and economists such as Paul Krugman were worried about the U.S. slumbering through a Japan-like Lost Decade. While no one would claim that all the pain is past or the danger gone, the economy is growing again, jumping to a 5.6% annualized growth rate in the fourth quarter of 2009 as businesses finally restocked their inventories. The consensus view now calls for 3% growth this year, significantly higher than the 2.1 % estimate for 2010 that economists surveyed by Bloomberg News saw coming when Obama first moved into the Oval Office. The U.S. manufacturing sector has expanded for eight straight months, the Business Roundtable's measure of CEO optimism reached its highest level since early 2006, and in March the economy added 162,000 jobs—more than it had during any month in the past three years. "There is more business confidence out there," says Boeing (BA) CEO Jim McNerney. "This Administration deserves significant credit."

It is worth stepping back to consider, in cool-headed policy terms, how all of this came to be—and whether the Obama team's approach amounts to a set of successful emergency measures or a new economic philosophy: Obamanomics.

But this doesn't need to be a question of  interpretation. The facts on the ground are very clear - on almost every measure, bar unembployment - which is only just starting to recover, with our first month of positive jobs news just reported - the economic situation has grown better under Obama's presidency.

I'm going to just flagrantly steal some charts from Ezra Klein's blog, but as usual you really should read it yourself.

Here's a chart showing job growth:

And yes, the blue bits are the Obama Presidency and the Red bits are Bushville. Spotted a pattern? Hmmm....


Here's a chart showing house prices. (Hint, remember Obama was inaugurated in Jan 2009...)

Here's a chart showing the Dow Jones Industrial average under the Obama Presidency:

This is fun. I could do this all day.

Here's one showing GDP growth under Obama - remember, the first quarter of his Presidency would have been reported in April 2009, so that's the first point of measure the chart uses:

 Now, the news is not all unmixed joy. It's true that in order to achieve these results, Obama has allowed the deficit to continue to rise (worth noting that the biggest chunk of the deficit still came under Bush - but also worth noting that Obama CHOSE to let it continue going up).

Ezra, and most professional economists, argue convincingly that it was this counter-cyclical spending and the increased deficits that they caused which made it possible for the other measures to go up. They further argue

that the deficit would also have continued to go up if the economy (e.g., GDP growth) had failed to grow, since tax revenues would have continued to plummet. I find all that convincing.

There's another point as well - it's possible Obama was just plain lucky. Maybe he just happened to be inaugurated at the peak moment of the recession and it would have naturally turned around even if he had done nothing. I don't think that's the case, and there's plenty of evidence to suggest that the direct job creation and protection (a lot of firefighters and teachers were due to be laid off without the stimulus) led to real growth. But it's theoretically possible.

What I DON'T think you can now argue, even as a hypothetical, is that anything Obama and his team did in any way slowed down of prevented a recovery. So the source of the anger and economic populism that springs from much of the right appears tome (how shall I put this delicately) to spring from factors other than a purely fact-based analysis.

5.7% growth woo hoo!

Everyone keeps saying how the thing US voters care about most right now, is the economy. And rightly so - after all, we're in a jobs crisis and people are hurting.

But today we learned that the US GDP grew by 5.7% in the fourth quarter of 2009 - that's a good start even if it we still have a long way to go in translating the recovery into jobs.

The above chart tells quite a story of Obama's 1st year of economic management. (Hint, the stimus package passed near the end of Q1 2009.)

Jobs Jobs Jobs Jobs Jobs Jobs Jobs

And did I mention jobs?

Do make sure to watch this video - trust me, two minutes nineteen seconds well spent.



This is good stuff. As I reported before, it's not quite enough or as much as we'd like. But it's a damn sight better than nothing, or the less than nothing that the Republicans' "let's freeze federal spending" economic plan would have led to.

Experts Agree: "Without the Stimulus It Would Have Been Worse"

One of the really hard things about governing during a time of economic downturn is that people are understandably uninterested in being told taht things are bad, but they could have been so much worse.

Heck, it's an argument I hate making. People that I love are hurting, badly, in this economy - people that I love are worse off financially than they have ever been in their lives. So it's not very comforting to know that, while bad, things were very nearly much, much worse.

Uncomforting though this truth may be, however... it is true.

Mark Zandi, chief economist of Moody's Economy.com and an occasional adviser to lawmakers from both parties, said, "[T]he stimulus is doing what it was supposed to do -- it is contributing to ending the recession." Zandi added that without the recovery bill, the "G.D.P. would still be negative and unemployment would be firmly over 11 percent. And there are a little over 1.1 million more jobs out there as of October than would have been out there without the stimulus."

For example, remember that a great deal of the stimulus money went directly to states to fund programs that they would have otherwise had to cut because of the downturn in their tax revenues.

"Programs" sound clinical, though - the types of things states were need to cut back on were teachers, firefighters and police. Let's say your small town loses one firefighter, one teacher, and one police officer. OK, now you've got three peopele out of work - that's three people who won't be buying much stuff in your town now. Direct effect = bad.

But the loss of that teacher means slightly larger class sizes for all the other kids. There's a proven correlation between class sizes and student performance - that means an entire school's worth of kids are slightly worse off in ways that will harm their future.

One fewer police officer on the street means the PD needs to reorganise their shifts - slightly more of each officer's time is now focussed on emergency callouts, for instance, and slightly less on patroling. Areas that aren't patrolled can become more welcoming for a small number of criminal elements.

Let's not even talk about what happens if the fire department is down one many (possible consequences = detroyed property and lost lives).

Long term indirect effects = even worse.

A LOT of money was spent by the government trying to forestall the worst effects of the recession. But in the long run, in my view, this was all DEFICIT busting expenditure. It costs a lot more to fix a community once it's broken than it does to keep it from breaking in the first place. The President wasn't free to spend as much money as he would have liked in the stimulus package. But there simply is NOT ARGUMENT whatsoever based on fact that says the stimulus didn't save jobs - it paid salaries of people who would otherwise have been fired.

Unfortunately, an awful lot of people who deserve a hell of a lot better got badly burned anyway. It's heartbreaking.

The Way We Live Now

Half a million jobs lost in a single month is considered... relatively good news.

The United States economy lost 539,000 jobs in April, the government reported on Friday, a sign that the relentless pace of job losses was starting to level off slightly but was still nowhere near ending.

A year ago, the loss of more than half a million jobs in a single month would have seemed like a disaster for the economy. On Friday, experts were calling it an improvement.

Heaven help us.

Department of Good Ideas

Want to stimulate the economy by spending government money? Also concerned that the automobile industry is moribund, and trying to ward off bankrupcy for some of the country's major employers? Meanwhile, are you hoping to find ways of encouraging people to invest in more environmentally friendly items, including cars?

Why not Cash for Clunkers? I like it. Turns out this policy has increased new car sales in Germany by 21% (!) this year - with the simple mechanism of giving people government cash for trading in their old, inefficient cars with newer more energy-efficient models.

Let's hope the UK and the US will latch onto this clever plan.

Yesterday's Presentation

Yesterday I had the chance to talk to a group of business folks about Obama and the US Economy. Since I am, essentially, totally unqualified to discuss economic issues, I concentrated my talk on the recently passed stimulus package, and a few thoughts about the political dimension in which Obama (and therefore all companies seeking to offer services to the government) are currently operating.

Since a couple people have expressed an interest in the presentation, I've posted the slides below as JPEGs. The presentation would be, of course, far better with the benefit of my witty reparte, learned commentary and devastating joke - but I guess we'll just have to make do with these.

Absolutely Necessary

Obama speaks about the stimulus during his weekly youtube address, saying:

"Legislation of such magnitude deserves the scrutiny that it's received over the last month, and it will receive more in the days to come. But we can't afford to make perfect the enemy of the absolutely necessary. The scale and scope of this plan is right. And the time for action is now."



Call your senator and make sure they are supporting this vital legislation to cope with what looks to be the worst economic crisis since the Depression.

Solution to Our Economic Problems: Quit Your Whining

So you've probably heard about this already - McCain's top economic advisor Phil Gramm has gotten himself in some hot water for his apparent belief that America's economic problems can easily be accounted for by the fact that we are a "nation of whiners."

But have you seen the video?



Ouch.

Barack had just the right response to this: merciless mockery.

Barack Obama Slams McCain on the Economy

Yesterday, Barack kicked off a two week tour of his economic message with an event in Raleigh, North Carolina. He pointed out that, "when it comes to the economy, John McCain and I have a fundamentally different vision of where to take the country. Because for all of his talk about independence, the centerpiece of John McCain's plan amounts to a full-throated endorsement of George Bush's policies."



He also says of McCain:

"On the campaign trail he is a passionate critic of government spending. And yet, he has no problem spending hundreds of billions of dollars on tax breaks for big corporations and a permanent occupation of Iraq. George Bush's policies have taken us from a projected $5.6 trillion surplus at the end of the Clinton administration to massive deficits and nearly 4 trillion in new debt today. We were promised a fiscal conservative. Instead we got the most fiscally irresponsible administration in history. And now John McCain wants to give us another one."