Boehner attacks stimulus again

The White House should blow him out of the water. The data is irrefutable. The stimulus created millions of jobs. Not enough, to be sure. (And I do blame the White House for the fact that the stimulus wasn't enough - they were told it wasn't enough, but refused to even try for more.) But to say that the stimulus didn't work at all, is an outright lie. It shows the minority leader to be a liar, or a moron. Read More......

Biden's chief economic adviser: 'John Boehner wants a lot of people to lose their jobs'

From Jared Bernstein on the White House blog:

John Boehner wants a lot of people to lose their jobs.

We were awfully surprised to hear Rep. Boehner come out for killing jobs en masse in his own state and district by stopping the Recovery Act on last Sunday’s news shows.

Though we’re sure he didn’t know it, the Congressman is advocating to kill the expansion of the Butler County Community Health Center and bring some of the twenty-five highway projects across the district to a grinding halt. Across the state of Ohio, he said that approximately 4 million working families should get an unexpected cut in their paycheck as the Making Work Pay tax credit disappears, unemployed workers should go without unemployment benefits, and major Ohio road projects like the US-33 Nelsonville Bypass project and the Cleveland Innerbelt Modernization project should be stalled or stopped. Oh, and some of the more than 100 clean energy Recovery projects employing workers across the state should be shut down.

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Told ya so (stimulus version)

Hey kids, guess what? Seems the growing conventional wisdom is that the administration f'd up by not trying to pass a larger stimulus, and now Dems are screwed as a result. From Greg Sargent at Plum Line:

In the wake of today's disappointing jobs numbers, a bunch of people around the Web have been lamenting that Dems will take it on the chin for the bad economy even while Republicans have done everything they can to block Dems from implementing their solutions.

That's true. But there's another layer of perversity to consider here that makes the situation even worse: The sputtering recovery is actually making it tougher politically over time for Dems to take new steps to solve the problem. The sluggish recovery has undermined public confidence in the Dems' general approach to solving the problem, making Dems more reluctant to attempt the next round of ambitious solutions. That, in turn, insures that the jobs numbers remain grim. And so on.

As Josh Marshall notes today, it's getting tougher to avoid the conclusion that Dems erred badly by not passing a larger stimulus package:

[I]t was always clear there was only going to be one real bite at this apple. And it just wasn't enough. Why the White House predicted a max out at 8.5% unemployment I'll never know since that was not only a politically unhelpful number, it was also deeply unrealistic. I suspect a lot of Democrats are going to go down to defeat because of it.

What makes this even worse is the perverse dynamic I noted above. Republicans have pursued a very deliberate strategy to feed public pessimism about Big Government's ability to lift us out of the doldrums, pointing to the sputtering recovery as proof that the Dems underlying philosophy has been discredited.

The result is that it's even less likely that Dems will risk taking "another bite at this apple," as Josh puts it.

I do seem to recall being upbraided at the White House a few months back by top VP economic adviser Jared Bernstein for this blog having repeatedly criticized the administration's handling of the stimulus (the size of it, the contents of it (tax cuts!), and the selling of it before and after passage). And now it seems, we were right. And Stiglitz was right. And Krugman was right. Krugman outright predicted everything that was going to happen, politically and economically - and no one at the White House wanted to listen to the DFH with the Nobel prize (either of them). I take you back to Paul Krugman, January of 2009:

This really does look like a plan that falls well short of what advocates of strong stimulus were hoping for — and it seems as if that was done in order to win Republican votes. Yet even if the plan gets the hoped-for 80 votes in the Senate, which seems doubtful, responsibility for the plan’s perceived failure, if it’s spun that way, will be placed on Democrats.

I see the following scenario: a weak stimulus plan, perhaps even weaker than what we’re talking about now, is crafted to win those extra GOP votes. The plan limits the rise in unemployment, but things are still pretty bad, with the rate peaking at something like 9 percent and coming down only slowly. And then Mitch McConnell says “See, government spending doesn’t work.”

Let’s hope I’ve got this wrong.

And the only head that seems to have rolled as a result is the person who argued for a larger stimulus, and lost: Christine Romer. Read More......

White House economic adviser, Romer, to leave

Christina Romer, chairwoman of the President's Council of Economic Advisers, is leaving. Which is ironic, since she was the only one in the White House who seemed to understand, at the time, that we needed a larger stimulus than the one the President asked for. From Krugman:

For me, the really interesting [of Ryan Lizza's article] passage was this one:

The most important question facing Obama that day was how large the stimulus should be. Since the election, as the economy continued to worsen, the consensus among economists kept rising. A hundred-billion-dollar stimulus had seemed prudent earlier in the year. Congress now appeared receptive to something on the order of five hundred billion. Joseph Stiglitz, the Nobel laureate, was calling for a trillion. Romer had run simulations of the effects of stimulus packages of varying sizes: six hundred billion dollars, eight hundred billion dollars, and $1.2 trillion. The best estimate for the output gap was some two trillion dollars over 2009 and 2010. Because of the multiplier effect, filling that gap didn’t require two trillion dollars of government spending, but Romer’s analysis, deeply informed by her work on the Depression, suggested that the package should probably be more than $1.2 trillion. The memo to Obama, however, detailed only two packages: a five-hundred-and-fifty-billion-dollar stimulus and an eight-hundred-and-ninety-billion-dollar stimulus. Summers did not include Romer’s $1.2-trillion projection. The memo argued that the stimulus should not be used to fill the entire output gap; rather, it was “an insurance package against catastrophic failure.” At the meeting, according to one participant, “there was no serious discussion to going above a trillion dollars.”

So Christy Romer’s math looked similar to mine: even given what we knew last December, the straight economics said that we should have a stimulus much bigger than the Obama administration’s initial proposal. And given what happened to that proposal in the Senate — we actually ended up with only about $600 billion of actual stimulus — what we eventually got was half of what seemed appropriate in December.

Once, again, before folks at the White House say "$800bn (really $600bn, as Krugman points out), is all we could get politically," let me remind you - $500bn was Congress' opening offer in the negotiation. You don't just cave at the beginning of the negotiation because the other guy says "no." You especially don't cave when the life and death of the entire country's economy is in the balance. You tell the other guy, "if you won't do what's necessary to save the country from going into a second Great Depression, we'll go to the American people and tell them."

But the White House didn't do that. They caved. At the beginning of the negotiation. Then they caved again, giving 35% of the remaining stimulus to near useless tax cuts. And now we have 10% unemployment, the public disapproves of the President, and we're in danger of losing the House in the fall elections. This isn't an academic point that we all need to 'get over.' Rather, the White House screwed up, and we're all in deep shit as a result. And now the only person in the White House who seems to have understood what was needed, is leaving. And the people who got us into this mess, are staying.

That's why we keep bitching. Because history is going to keep repeating itself until the White House learns how to play the game, Read More......

GOP Whip Cantor says stimulus has not created jobs - it has, to the tune of several million, per CBO

Cantor via ThinkProgress:

[W]e have seen the stimulus dollars that have been spent have not produced jobs. The stimulus was designed to lower the unemployment rate, to keep it from going over 8 percent. We know nationally now, it still hovers around 10 percent; here in our area, it’s 7 1/2 percent. So, obviously, government spending money doesn’t create jobs.

Cantor is too smart to know that what he just said isn't true. First off, CBO already said the stimulus created and/or saved millions of jobs. Second, the fact that unemployment remains at 10% does not mean the stimulus did not create jobs. Unemployment might have been at 12% without the stimulus, for example. Did the stimulus create enough jobs? No. Simply because it wasn't big enough. But to suggest it hasn't created any is a lie.

The fact that the GOP House Whip is still saying that the stimulus hasn't created any jobs, well, it's bad. The White House should come down on Cantor like a ton of bricks. Tell him to come to the White House tomorrow, and you'll have the cameras there, and he can explain to the American people exactly how the stimulus hasn't created any jobs, when CBO says it's created millions, when other GOP members of Congress have held press conferences with companies whose jobs have been saved/created by the stimulus.

Do what the GOP would do. Burn Cantor so bad that neither he, nor any other Republican, dare use this talking point ever again. Read More......

Confidence in Obama reaches new low in ABC/Wash Post poll

Wash Post:

Public confidence in President Obama has hit a new low, according to the latest Washington Post-ABC News poll. Four months before midterm elections that will define the second half of his term, nearly six in 10 voters say they lack faith in the president to make the right decisions for the country, and a clear majority once again disapproves of how he is dealing with the economy.

I do think the President has finally realized that he needs to fight, at least use fighting words, which is a step forward. But the albatross around his neck is the economy, and specifically, the unemployment rate. That rate is directly attributable to the President's decision not to push for a full stimulus, but rather cut the stimulus in half and then give 35% away to the GOP in the form of useless tax cuts. The result is exactly what Krugman and Stiglitz predicated at the time: high unemployment and a limping recovery, mixed with a threat of a double dip recession.

It may seem like beating a dead horse to note that we're in this current mess because the President screwed up, but until he shows that he's learned his lesson, and is willing to fight for things, from the beginning, and full-bore, it's worth repeating. Bad decisions have consequences, and they tend to come back and bite you in the ass. Read More......

Ryan Grim: 'Mayberry Machiavellis: Obama Political Team Handcuffing Recovery'

Ryan Grim at the Huffington Post argues what a lot of us have been saying: The White House's decision to embrace deficit reduction over economic stimulus is wrong-headed politically and economically. And I know they're going to claim that they haven't embraced one over the other, but here's the rub: Even President Obama, expert as he is at embracing all sides of a conflict, can't square increased spending and cutting it back at the same time. That message might fool the people, but it doesn't fool the economy.

Under the leadership of President George W. Bush, science, empirical evidence and expert advice struggled to be heard above the din of politics. It's one thing to prioritize politics over good policy; it's quite another to let bad politics drive the agenda. But that's what the Bush administration did during its Terry Schiavo era and his congressional majorities paid the price.

Today, a new band of Mayberry Machiavellis has gained control, counseling President Obama to ignore the advice of his economic team and press forward with deficit reduction ahead of job creation.

Academics Benjamin Page and Lawrence Jacobs, in the recent paper, "Understanding Public Opinion on Deficits and Social Security," have identified an additional reason that the deficit continues to rank high in polls as a prominent concern. "The 'most important problem' question responds heavily to whatever is being emphasized in the media, apparently because many respondents interpret it as asking what other people consider important," they write. "They look to the media for evidence. So a well-organized and well-funded campaign against deficits (like the one led by Peter Peterson) can grab the attention of pundits and politicians, win coverage in the media, and produce a temporary spike in responses that deficits constitute our 'most important problem.'"

The more that the president highlights deficit concerns, the more concerned the public gets, and the more his advisers warn him that the public is concerned.

The Obama political team's focus on the deficit raises the question: Just who is this hypothetical midterm voter who was leading to the GOP because of deficit concerns, but will vote Democratic if only Congress trims a spending bill from, say, $250 billion down to $80 billion? Most voters -- and most reporters, for that matter -- can't guess within a few hundred billion what the budget deficit is, and would struggle to put a dollar figure on the latest jobs-bill proposal. So how is it, then, that a voter would cheer saving a few billion dollars by cutting off COBRA subsidies?

Despite all of that spending, unemployment has hovered around ten percent, leading voters to assume and leaving Republicans to argue that the stimulus didn't work. The reality is that it did save or create hundreds of thousands of jobs, if not millions, but was too small -- as economists warned at the time -- to fill the economic hole left by the housing collapse and financial crisis.

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Krugman on how screwed up it is not to pass new unemployment benefits

Interestingly, as Krugman notes, unemployment benefits are a form of stimulus.

Paul Krugman:

When the economy is booming, and lack of sufficient willing workers is limiting growth, generous unemployment benefits may keep employment lower than it would have been otherwise. But as you may have noticed, right now the economy isn’t booming — again, there are five unemployed workers for every job opening. Cutting off benefits to the unemployed will make them even more desperate for work — but they can’t take jobs that aren’t there.

Wait: there’s more. One main reason there aren’t enough jobs right now is weak consumer demand. Helping the unemployed, by putting money in the pockets of people who badly need it, helps support consumer spending. That’s why the Congressional Budget Office rates aid to the unemployed as a highly cost-effective form of economic stimulus. And unlike, say, large infrastructure projects, aid to the unemployed creates jobs quickly — while allowing that aid to lapse, which is what is happening right now, is a recipe for even weaker job growth, not in the distant future but over the next few months.

But won’t extending unemployment benefits worsen the budget deficit? Yes, slightly — but as I and others have been arguing at length, penny-pinching in the midst of a severely depressed economy is no way to deal with our long-run budget problems. And penny-pinching at the expense of the unemployed is cruel as well as misguided.

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Ian Welsh on the Afghan War as stimulus

Nice catch by Ian Welsh regarding Michael Steele, Obama, and Afghanistan. He begins (my emphasis):

Michael Steele’s comments on Afghanistan remind me of my favorite definition of a gaffe: “saying the truth in the worst way possible.”

To whit, Steele said that Afghanistan is a war of Obama’s choosing, and that everyone who’s occupied Afghanistan has come to grief over it.  Now one can quibble a bit over the details of who came to grief and who didn’t, but basically he’s right.  Afghanistan went badly for the Russians and the British, most recently.  There’s a reason Afghanistan is called the “graveyard of Empires” and if the US isn’t careful it’ll be the graveyard of the US empire.

Likewise, yes, this is a war of choice for Obama.  He could have done his review, said “hey, there are almost no al-Q’aeda fighters in Afghanistan anymore, so we won, let’s go home.”  He could have said “fighting in Afghanistan is seriously destabilizing Pakistan, which is far more important than Afghanistan, so let’s go home.”  He could have said “yes, if we leave, some al-Q’aeda camps might spring up but we can always bomb them and anyway there are plenty of failed states where al-Q’aeda can set up camps and we can’t occupy all of them.”

Ian then makes a second point I'll bet many of us hadn't considered (again, my emphasis):

Now here’s a truth that Steele didn’t tell.  Obama has to stay in Afghanistan because war spending is one of the only reliable forms of stimulus he has.  The economy is in bad shape, and it needs that stimulus.  Since he can’t get a new large stimulus through Congress that means he MUST keep the Afghan war going if he doesn’t want an economic disaster, which would then lead to an electoral disaster. . . . Instead of hiring tens of thousands of teachers, building a high speed rail network across the country, refitting every building to be energy efficient and doing a massive solar and wind build-out to reduce dependence on oil, well, the US would rather turn Afghans and Pakistanis into a fine red mist.

A fine red mist designed to keep the "good guys" in office, as Ian points out.

I hadn't considered our many unfunded permanent wars as stimulus, but that's obviously the case — just as WWII was the stimulus that kicked the U.S. out of the self-imposed 1937 slump. Sad, but true. Good catch.

GP Read More......

Obama urges Europe not to drop stimulus, but hasn't he dropped it himself?

I remain confused as to what the Obama administration actually thinks about the current need and efficacy of stimulus spending. Last year, they were, frankly, more interested in getting any bill passed than in getting the right bill passed (that's why the White House never pushed for more than $800bn or so, and it's why they gave away 35% of the bill to near-useless tax cuts). Then, earlier this year, after relentless "the deficit is going to kill us all!" drubbing from the Republicans, the President reversed course and started embracing "deficit reduction" just at the time that economists were saying we needed a second stimulus to make up for the fact that the first one was half the size (or less) of what it needed to be.

So, what is the President now doing lecturing Europe about how they shouldn't drop their own stimulus measures?

Now, I'm sure the White House will argue that they never abandoned the current stimulus measures, they simply gave up on any future stimulus legislation. Fair enough. But, as is often the case, the President's nuance is lost on the public, and often has the opposite effect of what the White House says was intended. From the NYT:

President Obama signaled on Friday that countries in Europe should not withdraw their extraordinary spending programs too quickly.

In a public letter to other leaders of the Group of 20 nations in advance of a summit meeting in Toronto next week, Mr. Obama wrote, “Our highest priority in Toronto must be to safeguard and strengthen the recovery.”

There's more:

The United States is trying to pare its own substantial deficit. Mr. Obama reiterated a pledge to cut the deficit, now about 10 percent of gross domestic product, in half by the 2013 fiscal year, and to 3 percent of G.D.P. by the 2015 fiscal year, a level he said would “stabilize the debt-to-G.D.P. ratio at an acceptable level” by then.

But American officials are concerned that fiscal retrenchment by too many countries at once could imperil the global recovery.

Mr. Obama warned of the risks of a double-dip recession, which most economists consider unlikely but not impossible.

“In fact, should confidence in the strength of our recoveries diminish, we should be prepared to respond again as quickly and as forcefully as needed to avoid a slowdown in economic activity,” he wrote.

Do as we say not as we do?

President Obama is arguing that, should the economy take a turn for the worse, we should all be prepared to pass more stimulus? Good luck with that. The President already killed nearly any chance at passing a second bill by signing on to the deficit-reduction brigade earlier this year, rather than taking the Republicans on, blaming Bush for the majority of the deficit, and explaining to the public that the Democrats just saved their asses from another Great Depression by passing the first stimulus bill - and that if more was needed, he sure as hell was going to move full steam ahead with more.

The President is still trying to have his cake and eat it too - be for deficit reduction and stimulus at the same time. It doesn't work - and in fact, they cancel each other out. Rather than playing semantic gymnastics, the President ought to pick a side and defend it. His desire to be all things to all people is screwing things up yet again. Read More......

Insufficiently stimulated

I wonder if Ezra will get yelled at too. Somehow I doubt it.

Ezra Klein:

[F]or stimulus, a dollar that's spent, say, building a museum about Woodstock is as good as a dollar spent building a bridge to get people to a museum about Woodstock. From a stimulus perspective, waste happens when a dollar is saved rather than spent, as that dollar doesn't immediately stimulate the economy. That's why tax cuts are often ineffective: If you give a middle-class worker a tax break at a time when he's not unable to pay the bills but is trying to replenish his gutted 401(k), he'll save it. And that, from the stimulus's perspective, is waste.

One of the failures of the stimulus was that it included an enormous amount of tax breaks. Roughly a third of the total, in fact. And some of those breaks, like the $70 billion AMT patch, were not effective stimulus under any definition of the term. But they were there to get votes, and to show Obama was being bipartisan in his construction (though in Jon Alter's book "The Promise," Obama says that giving these breaks up-front rather than negotiating with the Republicans for them was a massive mistake). The problem is that they made the stimulus less effective than it could've been, and that made it easier for Republicans to attack down the road.

As we've written before, the stimulus wasn't big enough, the President knew it, but for some unknown reason he caved out the gate and agreed to a much less stimulating bill than was necessary.

(There's the argument that the President "knew" he couldn't get the votes by asking for a larger bill. Really? Did he try? The nation was on the verge of another Great Depression and there was one antidote, the stimulus bill. Did the President make an Oval Office address explaining this to the country, demanding that all 535 members of Congress join him in supporting the full legislation to stave off complete economic collapse? No he didn't. He simply did a vote count, saw that he didn't yet have the votes for the full stimulus that was needed, so he caved and didn't try to get them at all.)

Then he caved on the tax cuts, cutting the stimulative aspects of the bill even further, so that the bill ended up being about 25% of what it needed to be to make up the $2 trillion of GDP lost in the could-have-been-depression.

Let's not forget, this wasn't just another proposal. It was a proposal meant to stop another Great Depression. Who caves out the gate on how much you know will be needed to stave off that Depression? Calling it a mistake is putting it lightly. Every single Democrat is paying for that mistake, in terms of the higher unemployment rate they're having to defend going into re-election. Read More......

White House is pushing for more don't-call-it-stimulus money

Not very much, though. Only $50bn. Remember, as Krugman pointed out a year and a half ago, the economic crisis wiped out about $2 trillion of future GDP. The stimulus bill was around $800bn (and 35% of it was relatively useless tax cuts). That leaves another $1.2 trillion lacking. $50bn won't make much of a dent. Though it may help some states in particular, since the money is apparently targeted at states and cities. Read More......

Krugman was right about the stimulus not being enough

Jed Lewison at DailyKos reminds us of Paul Krugman's words of January 6, 2009:

This really does look like a [stimulus] plan that falls well short of what advocates of strong stimulus were hoping for — and it seems as if that was done in order to win Republican votes. Yet even if the plan gets the hoped-for 80 votes in the Senate, which seems doubtful, responsibility for the plan’s perceived failure, if it’s spun that way, will be placed on Democrats.

I see the following scenario: a weak stimulus plan, perhaps even weaker than what we’re talking about now, is crafted to win those extra GOP votes. The plan limits the rise in unemployment, but things are still pretty bad, with the rate peaking at something like 9 percent and coming down only slowly. And then Mitch McConnell says “See, government spending doesn’t work.”

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What's more important, the deficit or unemployment

A pair of dueling articles that show, I think, the tension between cutting the deficit and reviving the economy. It's never been terribly clear that it was wise to shift the focus away from the economy and on to the deficit until the economy has recovered (and that won't be for years). Unemployment is still near 10%, and just as Krugman and Stiglitz predicted, it isn't moving down very quickly in part because the stimulus was too small. Shifting attention away from unemployment, and towards deficit reduction, is all the more perilous because cutting the budget is, per se, an anti-stimulus.

I've never heard of a politician losing an election because the deficit was too high. I've heard of lots losing because of high unemployment. Read More......

Krugman revises his opinion on what's motivating the G20 economic ministers

A quick follow-up to yesterday's post about Paul Krugman and the "mad" G20 ministers. In a series of posts, Krugman has lately noted with dismay that the G20 economic ministers have publicly called for budget austerity in Europe, similar to what the deficit hawks here are calling for.

His view is that budget austerity now will kill the infant recovery, and he doesn't understand why the economic ministers are asking for it. His attempt at an explanation — they're crazy. That's it — the whole of his explanation. They're "mad." (For the full Krugman on this, see "Madmen in Authority").

Krugman now appears to have changed his mind. Madness is no longer the answer. In a new post, he offers that economists who are aggressively advising this course of action are motivated by … ready? … a fit of misplaced morality. Krugman:

What’s going on here? I don’t think you can resort to class-warfare arguments. What I think is happening is that we’re seeing the deep seductiveness, for many economists (and others), of taking what sounds like a tough-minded position in favor of inflicting pain on the economy — and the people who make up that economy.

Keynes knew all about this. Writing about the peculiar appeal of classical economics even in a world in which it had manifestly failed, he argued

That it reached conclusions quite different from what the ordinary uninstructed person would expect, added, I suppose, to its intellectual prestige. That its teaching, translated into practice, was austere and often unpalatable, lent it virtue.

Maybe. Krugman concludes:

[W]hat’s so striking is that in all three cases I’ve cited you had highly trained economists — that is, people who have spent their whole lives arguing in terms of carefully laid out models — making arguments that aren’t backed by any model I can see.

And may I say, I think that by giving in to the seductiveness of calls for pain, some of my colleagues are doing a lot of damage; at a time when we really need clarity of thought, they’re adding to the intellectual murk instead. [my emphasis]

Or maybe not. Consider — world-class academic economists, people who serve up reasons for those in power to act in certain ways, are now offering noticeably un-academic arguments why Europe should jump on the Pete Peterson bandwagon and stop feeding the new-born recovery, just when the recovery needs its next drink of milk. And the reason is — virtue?

Instead of settling for inexplicable reasons, let's look at a much more likely one — our old friend power. If big-time G20 economists are violating their oath of office (so to speak) to serve Shinola to their superiors and call it Wheetabix, they're not doing it on their own. The pressure can only be coming from one of two sources:

• The G20 ministers themselves, who want this analysis served to them; or


• The Pete Peterson Marching Band and Firing Squad, which wants to export the suffering to Europe as well.

Krugman is clearly struggling here, and I don't fault him. But his struggles are instructive. Again, he's asking the right question, and on the pages of the NY Times at that. But I think his blind spot is in not recognizing that the Venn diagram that maps "Those Who Are Hot-Shot Academics" and "Those Who Suck Up To Power" is not two separate circles. There's a huge overlap.

Just one indicator of that overlap: How often have you heard corporate necropolises (sorry, "multi-building cubicle warehouse spaces") called "campuses"? And how many university campuses have corporate "campuses" on them? Owners and owned.

This is just an observation — I still have no answers as to where the push is coming from, or why. What's in it for the G20 ministers if they kill the recovery? But the push is on indeed — thanks, Paul, for saying so — and the American disease is starting to metastasize.

As Krugman suggests, this will not end well — here or in Europe.

GP Read More......

CBO: Stimulus created up to 3.4m jobs, boosted GDP by up to 4.6%

I wish it would have been larger, but it's now categorically true that the stimulus created jobs. The GOP, and their leaders, Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck, have been definitively proven wrong. Reuters:

The massive U.S. stimulus package put up to 3.4 million people to work and boosted GDP by up to 4.6 percent in the first three months of 2010, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office said on Tuesday.

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'If he was a Republican, we would hear a never-ending drumbeat of news stories about markets voting in favor of the president'

Bloomberg:

One year after U.S stocks hit their post-financial-crisis low on March 9, 2009, the benchmark Standard & Poor’s 500 Index has risen more than 68 percent, and it’s up more than 41 percent since Obama took office. Credit spreads have narrowed. Commodity prices have surged. Housing prices have stabilized.

“We’ve had a phenomenal run in asset classes across the board,” said Dan Greenhaus, chief economic strategist for Miller Tabak & Co. in New York. “If he was a Republican, we would hear a never-ending drumbeat of news stories about markets voting in favor of the president.”

[M]onthly job losses have abated, from 779,000 during the month Obama took office to 36,000 last month. Corporate profits have grown; among 491 companies in the S&P; 500 that reported fourth-quarter earnings, profits rose 180 percent from a year ago, according to Bloomberg data. Durable goods orders in January were up 9.3 percent from a year earlier. Inflation is tame, and long-term interest rates remain low.

The U.S. may add as many as 300,000 jobs in March, the most in four years, David Greenlaw, chief fixed-income economist at Morgan Stanley in New York, said in a Bloomberg Radio interview.

Zandi said the economic rebound is largely a result of the policies of the White House and Federal Reserve. He cited the bank bailout, the Fed’s low-interest-rate policy and support for credit markets, and the Obama administration’s stimulus plan, bank stress tests and backing of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

“When you take it all together, the response was massive and unprecedented and ultimately successful,” Zandi said.

This is rather compelling evidence that the administration brought us back from the brink. No, people won't entirely believe it until they see their own bottom line improving - but, if Democrats did a better job reminding people of how dire things were a year ago, how we were on the verge of another Great Depression, and how Republicans were claiming that there was no economic crisis at all, I think voters would be more appreciative of the gains we've made to date. Read More......

Stimulus created 2,000 jobs in New Hampshire

From the conservative NH paper, the Union Leader:

New Hampshire has used its $708 million in federal stimulus funding to create more than 2,000 jobs, pay for scores of road projects, upgrade health centers, fund research projects at universities and provide public schools with computers and supplies.

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Shouldn't stimulus money for green technology benefit Americans?

Why is this even a debate? The stimulus money is American taxpayer money that is being used to help build the US economy. Last year when countries around the world (joined by the GOP) complained about "buy American" clauses, not a single one of those countries wasn't doing the exact same thing at home. Comparing it to the isolationist policies after the Great Depression is too extreme. When you look at the high growth potential (and lack of job growth in the US) green technology is an area that the US needs to promote. China is investing heavily in this area as are most industrialized countries.

Joined by Sens. Robert P. Casey Jr. (Pa.), Sherrod Brown (Ohio) and Jon Tester (Mont.), Schumer said at a news conference that the Obama administration has ignored concerns about foreign involvement in the clean-energy program and should halt funding until Congress can pass legislation to deal with the problem.

Schumer and the other lawmakers focused particular criticism at Cielo Wind Power of Austin, which has said it may apply for up to $450 million in stimulus funding for a massive wind farm that would be powered by turbines built in China.

"It is a no-brainer that stimulus funds should only go to projects that create jobs in the United States rather than overseas," Schumer said. "These wind projects have a lot of merit, but the manufacturing should be happening here, not in China."

Of course the GOP teabaggers are against this. They don't see anything wrong with the environment as they suck from the teet of Big Oil. Of course, once these businesses are generating money, the GOP will be first in line to take credit for them and ask for campaign contributions. Read More......

Bunning drops filibuster, benefits bill passes 78-19

GOP Senator Bunning has dropped his filibuster, finally. The final vote to pass the bill was 78-19, a rather extraordinary margin, suggesting that Republicans were not pleased with Bunning's ongoing charade.

It seems to be beyond the ability of political reporters to wrap their minds around it, but there was an important matter of principle involved in opposing GOP Senator Jim Bunning's filibuster of unemployment payments. Reporters can't see beyond the political optics of the situation - clearly good for Democrats - but there is an economic principle that was reason enough not to cave to Bunning's temper tantrum.

The bill that Bunning was filibustering extended the provisions of the stimulus package for another month to fund various transportation bills, unemployment benefits, COBRA, etc. What Bunning wanted to do is pay for this extension with taxes or spending cuts taken out of... the stimulus bill!

In other words, he was trying to eliminate the stimulus effects of this spending. Deficit spending is what a stimulus IS. If we fully offset stimulus spending then WE DONT HAVE A STIMULUS!!! So what Senator Bunning was trying to do was undermine the very ability of the govenment to stimulate the economy, and thus undermine economic recovery itself.

The Republicans were wrong when they wanted to do this in the 1930's and they are still wrong today. Channelling Herbert Hoover is not a good way to run our economy. Read More......