At least one good thing has come out of the dismal May jobs numbers released last week: the president's re-election team has decided to make acknowledging the shaky state of the real economy part of its campaign message.
First, the now-familiar numbers: the economy added a net total of 54,000 jobs in May, around 100,000 fewer than had been expected. This comes on the heels of the equally dismal 1.8 percent first quarter GDP growth rate. What's more, the jobs numbers for March and April were revised downward by 39,000. Unfortunately, it's too late to revise upwards the intensity of the Obama administration's response to the jobs crisis over the past two years.
Instead, the White House wasted precious time pointing at ghostly green shoots, and joining the leaders of both parties in shifting the nation's focus from jobs creation to deficit cutting -- willfully ignoring the suffering going on across the country.
But now the numbers are so bad -- and November 2012 so close -- that the Obama campaign has decided it must, as Politico's Carrie Budoff Brown and Glenn Thrush put it, "temper some of the Morning-in-America optimism he'd hoped to run on."
This is truly shocking. Not that the president's team realizes its "Morning-in-America" parade is getting rained on, but that marching under that banner was ever considered in the first place. Even if the jobs numbers had come in as expected, at 150,000 -- or even if they'd come in higher than expected at, say, 200,000, and stayed there for several months, we're nowhere near Morning in America. Unfortunately, too much of the country appears to be closer to a Permanent Midnight.
As our Business Editor Peter Goodman puts it, the conditions underlying these numbers are "already familiar beyond the realm of professional economists and policymakers." This is what most Americans, Goodman writes, "know in their bones, not from government reports and the abstract musings of economists, but from the everyday fears that accompany glancing at their checkbooks and their latest credit card bills: There is no relief in sight. No one in a position to influence this depressing picture is expending real energy to improve it, and least of all inside the White House, where leadership is imperative."
Instead, the White House embraced the GOP message that the deficit is a bigger problem than jobs, kneecapping its ability to push for additional ways of stimulating the economy. And now the president and his team wanly claim there's not much they can do. But what they don't mention is how complicit they were in creating the conditions that have left them with not much to do. They gave away all the ammo and now plead helplessness because of... a lack of ammo.
The conventional wisdom is that "there is no appetite in Congress" for additional stimulus measures. But, in fact, members of Congress have an appetite for whatever their constituents have an appetite for. And for months, the American people have been hearing the president agree with the GOP that the deficit is the biggest problem in the country. Had the White House told the truth -- that the lack of jobs and anemic economic growth are far greater threats to the country -- people would be a lot more open to job creation proposals.
Instead the president, even on the heels of the latest round of depressing numbers, is oddly passive. "This economy took a big hit," he said Friday. "It is just like if you had a bad illness, if you got hit by a truck, it's going to take a while for you to mend."
Being hit by a truck is not a bad metaphor -- but he left something out. If you get hit by a truck, you are taken to a hospital for major interventions. When you are wheeled through the emergency room doors on a gurney, people react; they move purposefully and quickly; machines are brought out; desperate measures are taken. But that's not at all what happened with the economy. Instead, the economy got hit by a truck, was wheeled into the ER, and those in charge largely left the patient to heal on his own while they went into a back room to talk about the long-term building plan for the hospital. And, every now and again, they come out to tell the patient: "Remember, you were hit by a truck. It's going to take a while to mend."
You know what might help speed along the mending? Surgery.
At least now the specter of 2012 is forcing them to focus on the patient. Jared Bernstein, formerly the chief economic adviser to Vice President Biden, writes in The Huffington Post that the administration should pivot -- and pivot fast: "Based on new information," Bernstein suggests the White House tell the nation, "we are now pivoting from targeting deficits to targeting jobs!"
He recommends using one of the tools still at the administration's disposal: a payroll tax holiday. He favors the one drawn up by Alice Rivlin and Pete Domenici because "it's of significant magnitude, the first name of the commission that proposed it is 'bipartisan,' it cuts labor costs to employers and boosts paychecks of workers, who will spend the money, generating useful second round effects."
For his part, Paul Krugman suggests "W.P.A.-type programs putting the unemployed to work doing useful things like repairing roads," or a "serious program of mortgage modification."
The latter is especially important, since, as the New York Times noted recently, unemployment -- not subprime loans -- is now the main driver of foreclosures. Unfortunately, the administration's HAMP program was set up mainly to help those who took out subprime loans, and as such has not been particularly effective at addressing the ongoing housing disaster.
Here again, the administration is finally seeming to acknowledge the problem, but without acknowledging its role in allowing it to fester. As HuffPost's Zach Carter and Jennifer Bendery reported last week, the president, in a closed-door meeting with House Democrats, warned them that the housing crisis could take the economy even further down, leading one House Democrat to complain that Obama "said housing was the main thing dragging down the economy, with Geithner nodding solemnly like they'd done everything humanly possible for the last 27 months to fix the housing market."
For the administration to be credible in putting forth a jobs vision for the future it has to credibly acknowledge what's happened in the past. And its plan will have to go beyond simply blaming its predecessors. "It could have been worse!" is not much of a battle cry. To continue Obama's metaphor, it would be like the doctor telling you, "Hey, I know we haven't done much to help you, but at least we kept the really bad doctors from messing you up even more."
Democratic pollster Stan Greenberg recently released a report in which he warned the administration that, as HuffPost's Mark Blumenthal put it, "backward-looking campaign messages about who is to blame for the recession or whether the recovery efforts are succeeding are doomed to failure." What voters want, according to Greenberg, are real solutions that "ask the richest to pay their fair share of taxes," invest in "education and innovation" and "confront the power of money and the lobbyists." As he puts it: "There is a real economy out there that's not changing."
And yet there was soon-to-be-departing Austan Goolsbee, on ABC's This Week, claiming that the latest jobs numbers don't mean much because they're "highly variable." That may be, but the misery caused by this economy has been rock steady. To borrow a turn of phrase that's been in the news of late, no matter what variability there has been in the economic numbers, we can "say with certitude" that this economy stinks.
That's why it's not enough for the president to assure us "it's going to take a while to mend." The administration's inaction on jobs, and its utter surrender to the Republicans on the deficit, has created a vacuum -- one that allows Mitt Romney to go to New Hampshire and, without offering a plan of his own, claim that Obama has "failed America" and not be laughed out of the state.
Sure, it's a hollow claim. But if the position of The Person Who Is Supposed to Care About Jobs is left empty, the American people are going to find someone to fill it.
Follow Arianna Huffington on Twitter: www.twitter.com/ariannahuff
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 |
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| Obama | Romney | |
|---|---|---|
| Electoral Votes (270 to win) |
332 | 206 |
| Obama | Romney | |
|---|---|---|
| Total | 65,899,660 | 60,932,152 |
| Percent | 51.1% | 47.2% |
| Democrats* | Republicans | |
|---|---|---|
| Current Senate | 53 | 47 |
| Seats gained or lost | +2 | -2 |
| New Total | 55 | 45 |
| Democrats | Republicans | |
|---|---|---|
| Seats won | 201 | 234 |
By refusing to defend the New Deal and the necessity of spending more during a recession to increase employment, demand, and revenues and thus cut the deficit, Obama is embracing austerity, which is bound to tank the weak economy, increase unemployment, decrease revenues, and thus *increase* the deficit. By next year, the economic damage done by budget cuts will be clear, and Obama and the Dems will pay for their big mistake of not growing the economy instead of cutting the budget. For the Repubs, austerity is a trick, a method of deconstructing the government and causing the Dems to take political responsibility for it. By negotiating, the Dems are self-destructing.
Anna, please demand strongly that Obama refuse to make any austerity deals with the predatory Repubs.
Any idea why elitist Washington is so effete and feckless?
Any reason why these ineffectual, do-nothings, are so politically cowardly that they cannot take action?
The way to increase US manufacturing is a better educated employee,American ingenuity and creativity,a favorable investment environment,productivity improvements, new products,new processes, government help with research,low interest rates and a better tax code.
What we have today is uncertainty which stops investment. The deficit and health care costs are the main problems.We all want more jobs and the hard truth is that government has very little direct and immediate impact on job creation.
Despite its undeniable and unspeakable horrors, even chattel slavery at least provided food, clothing, and shelter to those who labored to benefit the "owners".
This is 2011, this is reality, this is why the future is so bleak.
The only plus is, maybe they’d cut taxes so much, they couldn’t afford their own salaries and health benefits. (Say, I may have hit upon something, here.) In many jurisdictions, tax abatements don't produce jobs and many businesses get the benefits and then, leave. It's welfare for the business class; but "stimulus" to Main Street is considered welfare. Excuse me?!?
At least the economy is primed because we have to buy things -- from groceries to clothing. The welfare to the top chiselers is only used for them to speculate and ... well; you know the script from a review of history as well as I do.
- tax cut for companies for bringing back jobs to US
- tax cut for hiring
- flat tax for all
- senators and representatives should serve max 2 terms!
- corrupt bankers on wall street should be captured and jailed.
etc..
(a) 50000 * 0.10
(b^) 5000000 * 0.10
Now, given the cost of living, tools for personal growth to remain "competitive", cost of education, something as pesky as raising a family, etc, never mind how under-valued $50,000/yr is going to be, but how that $5,000 will mean far more to you. Especially when your work is just going to do more to benefit your employer, who isn't going to trickle anything down on you except a larger work requirement. (Meanwhile, they are buying out competition, or driving them out of business via price wars, with the obvious result that small businesses cannot compete. Want competition? Let's fix the problems and stop massaging symptoms.)
^ Calculation B is dependent on actual CEO salary - YMMV
Creating jobs is Job 1.
Look at where the money went --- the government bailed out banks, insurance companies, government workers, failed corporations, and now wants to mend such things as social security and other entitlements. Every social network of security is under attack as our government props up their wages, pensions, retirement funds corporations and even other governments.
It's time that maybe the government, prop up the real patient which is probably not a bank, insurance company or some type of government employee. Perhaps any real improvement in the economy will have to come from the bottom because no improvement has come from helping the culprits that took this economy to where it is today