Tag: stimulus
5 Reasons Barack Obama Doesn’t Get The Credit He Deserves

5 Reasons Barack Obama Doesn’t Get The Credit He Deserves

The greatest compliment Barack Obama ever got from the right was their complete unwillingness to accept reality.

The stock market nearing new highs? Bubble! Jobless claims at a 43-year low? The numbers must be fake! Twenty million more Americans with health insurance? Obamacare can’t possibly be helping anyone because I know a guy who knows someone’s doctor who said…

While many on the left have been disappointed by the president’s “incrementalism,” the Obama administration has engineered tremendous change since 2009 — even as a conservative Supreme Court spent much of 2010 tearing up campaign finance law while the president was forced to reduce the massive deficit he’d inherited from George W. Bush, who inherited a surplus.

Though the president’s approval rating has been edging up, he’s not likely to reach the heights Bill Clinton or Ronald Reagan did in their final days in office, nor see anything like the depths that George W. Bush or Richard Nixon earned as they prepared for their last helicopter flight of shame out of the White House.

But there is a strong case to be made for President Obama being one of most consequential presidents ever.

And it’s not just because of the symbolic value of his being our first African American president, nor because he avoided a Great Depression, nor even just because every solar panel, Tesla and wind turbine you’ll ever see — and you’ll see a ton — came about much quicker as a result of Obama’s stimulus. These are all achievements that will endure regardless what happens in November.

“He just flew above it all,” Jim Nelson wrote in GQ. “And, luckily, he took most of us with him. He was the Leader not only of our country but of our mood and disposition, which is harder to rule.”

Why is it so hard to see that now?

  1. Negative partisanship.
    Democrats have won the popular vote in five of the six most recent presidential elections. In 2012, Obama became the first president elected twice with more than 51 percent of the popular vote. Yet Republicans handily won the popular vote, and eventually both houses of Congress, in both 2010 and 2014, forging one the largest conservative majorities since the Great Depression. This phenomenon has been described by political scientists Alan I. Abramowitz and Steven Webster as “negative partisanship,” which means that almost every race has become nationalized and 90 percent of voters participate in straight-ticket voting. While Donald Trump’s candidacy has thus far been so polarizing that it could disrupt this trend, “A growing number of Americans have been voting against the opposing party rather than for their own party,” Abramowitz and Webster explain. Republican voters have no interest in seeing anything Obama does as a success, and others, including myself, tend to see what he’s achieved as substantively positive. However, given George W. Bush’s messy last year and the corporate capture of our “Winner-Take-All” political system, even some on the left are dismayed by how much work remains to be done, and how little seems possible in our divided government.
  2. An activated left that recognizes the very real crises of inequality and endless war.
    When the Congressional Budget Office released “Trends in the Distribution of Household Income Between 1979 and 2007” in October of 2011, its recognition of the massive transfer of wealth that had taken place in America helped launch the Occupy movement. But when economist Emmanuel Saez found that most of the economic recovery was going to the richest one percent through 2013, it set off a wave of despondency on the left. We’re yet to see if new taxes on the rich, combined with the greatest anti-inequality measure since the Earned Income Tax — Obamacare — have affected this trend, which began with the anti-tax, anti-regulation, pro-financialization policies that marked the Reagan Revolution. There are encouraging signs that Medicaid expansion is helping to move some the working poor out of debt, but the lack of a public option in the Affordable Care Act is still seen as a massive betrayal of the left and has fed Bernie Sanders’ push for a fully-realized Scandinavian-style safety net. Likewise, Obama’s remarkable victory in 2008 campaigning against the Iraq War sparked hopes for a new era of diplomacy, which has been somewhat realized through the Iran deal and the Paris Climate Change agreement. But the United States’ never-ending involvement in Afghanistan, our return to Iraq, and our abetting of the bombing of Yemen have left what remains of America’s anti-war movement demoralized. Syria is a never-ending humanitarian disaster that some critic say proves Obama over-learned the lessons of Iraq. On the other hand, Libya reveals the challenges that come from interventionism in which the exit strategy is to exit immediately. These are very real, vexing challenges that Obama’s successor must face. And conservatives believe they have the solution — which is to do nearly the same things that got us into these messes.
  3. A conservative electorate insulated from reality by a new media landscape that relies on conflict and derision.
    In conservative media, Obama’s failures as a candidate and human being have been obvious since the moment he took office, and Republican voters took the hint. His disapproval rating among GOP voters has been in the high 70s since the end of his first year of office and it’s now in the high 80s, even as we’re seeing his best numbers from independent voters since he was re-elected. Regular audiences of Fox News and AM radio either don’t know that that deficit has been cut by two-thirds, or that unemployment claims recently hit a 43-year low — or they just refuse to believe it.
  4. Obama’s accomplishments feel like stuff we should have done decades ago.
    On Earth Day, the Department of Transportation announced that all future transportation plans must take into account carbon pollution, a minor but significant achievement that left many Americans thinking, “Why the hell weren’t we doing that already?” When Obama came into office, he did more to fight climate change in a few weeks (with a massive stimulus) than all other presidents had in more than two hundred years. Sure, the Clinton administration took important environmental steps in the 1990s. But they were nearly all abandoned and reversed by George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, as they ignored the international consensus on climate science that had emerged long before Al Gore’s popularization of it in the mid 2000s. Similarly, the advancement of LGBTQ rights have happened so quickly that it’s hard to remember what a crucial victory the ending “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” was. Now marriage equality, which the administration fought for through litigation,  is already taken for granted. These huge paradigm shifts all seem inevitable now because they should have happened decades ago. But anyone who lived through 2000-2008 can tell you how quickly achievements that seem irreversible can be washed away by a flood of caprice.
  5. His legacy depends so much on who succeeds him.
    The Affordable Care Act, Wall Street reform, making federal income taxes more progressive, a global climate change agreement, and the removal of nearly all of Iran’s uranium rank among Obama’s greatest accomplishments. And they could all disappear, or at least shrink into irrelevancy, with one election and a few pieces of legislation. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which has saved Americans billions of dollars by enforcing the fine print on consumer financial regulations, would never see the second year of a Republican administration. Neither would many of the regulatory positions required to make Dodd-Frank’s reforms work. The survival of these crucial victories depends on the next president. The sudden Supreme Court vacancy left by Antonin Scalia, similarly, will be decided in one way or another by the 2016 election. If it becomes clear Republicans have no chance of succeeding him, Obama will get his third appointment and a chance at leaving America with a left-leaning Court for the first time since the early 1970s. If not, a Republican president will have their chance to replace Scalia and then possibly Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer, which will leave America with the most conservative Court since before World War II. Then the right’s agenda of reversing the Obama presidency will be expanded to wipe out the historic achievements of Lyndon Johnson and Franklin Roosevelt. Like the rest of American politics, Obama’s legacy sits at a crossroads, waiting for voters to render their verdict.

Photo: U.S. President Barack Obama toasts with Argentina’s President Mauricio Macri during a state dinner in the Centro Cultural Kirchner as part of President Obama’s two-day visit to Argentina, in Buenos Aires March 23, 2016. REUTERS/Carlos Barria

The Great Big Fight Over Bernie Sanders’s Economics

The Great Big Fight Over Bernie Sanders’s Economics

The liberal policy wonks have their sights set on Bernie Sanders.

After Professor Gerald Friedman of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst published an analysis of Sanders’s economic proposals, projecting unprecedented levels of economic growth under a Sanders administration, he received plenty of flack for his numbers. He says — as do many other economists who’ve taken a look at his draft paper, “What would Sanders do? Estimating the economic impact of Sanders programs” — that the criticism is largely based on his results, not his methods:

“It’s interesting that I’m being criticized by people like Paul Krugman and the ‘Gang of Four.’ I used fairly standard economic modeling,” he said in an interview, referring to the letter posted by four former chairs of the Council of Economic Advisors (CEA). “Their criticisms are more of the outcomes of my analysis than the process by which I got them.”

Sanders, who has previously come under scrutiny for his apparent lack of foreign policy advisors, has been rebuked by many economists these past few weeks for the math used to support his economic proposals. In their open letter to Sanders, the former CEA chairs, all of who served under Barack Obama and Bill Clinton, said Sanders’s stimulus-minded plan “exceed even the most grandiose predictions by Republicans about the impact of their tax cut proposals.”

“We are concerned to see the Sanders campaign citing extreme claims by Gerald Friedman about the effect of Senator Sanders’s economic plan—claims that cannot be supported by the economic evidence,” the letter stated. In an interview with the Washington Post, Austan Goolsbee, one of the signatories of the letter, said his critique was of Friedman’s lack of “real economic data” — “To be clear, our letter wasn’t a critique of his study,” Goolsbee wrote. “It was a plea that we not invent a Vermont version of voodoo economics.”

Bernie Sanders’ policy director, in turn, told NPR that the CEA Chairs who signed the letter are “the establishment of the establishment.”

A few days ago, Paul Krugman piled on, saying of Friedman’s job growth numbers: “For wonks like me, it is, frankly, horrifying.”

Friedman’s write-up of the outcomes of Sanders’ plan does in fact sound ambitious: a 5.3 percent GDP growth rate, a $22,000 increase in median household income, replacing a huge debt with “a growing surplus,” and more than $15 trillion in new revenue — a financial transaction tax, carbon tax, ending fossil fuel subsidies, and much more.

The crux of this inter-economics spat, however, is just that: the economics. As Mother Jones’s Kevin Drum pointed out last week, these aren’t necessarily value judgments. You can be for Sanders’ proposals (many of these liberal economists have advocated for them for their entire professional lives) and against the numbers Friedman used to support them. Then again, Drum recently re-visited his skepticism.

For his part, Friedman says the disagreement is a common one in economic circles: how much can government spending stimulate the economy?

“[My critics] say that unemployment is low — the number they’re looking at is called the U1 unemployment rate — and say that spending to stimulate government growth may ultimately fuel inflation,” he said. “I and others see people who have retired, or have stopped looking for jobs, or are working as greeters at Walmart or something, and think that increased spending would help people like that to get back into the labor market. Of course, there are economists in the Chicago school [an infamously conservative economic ideology] that say that the economy is always at full employment and that government spending won’t change that.”

Ezra Klein reminded readers recently that, at this point in the campaign, policy proposals are more like chess moves: candidates anticipate the political battles they will face if elected, and they make proposals aimed at triangulating political attacks.

“And, hell, let’s just be honest: All this policy talk is just a way to pass the time between now and the election. It doesn’t matter how strong Bernie Sanders’s single-payer health care plan is — it’s not going to pass, just like Donald Trump isn’t going to get Mexico to pay for a wall and Hillary Clinton isn’t going to get universal pre-K past a Republican Congress and Ted Cruz isn’t going to set up a value-added tax.

It’s obvious that debating the details of campaign proposals is, on some level, fantasy football for wonks. Events will intercede, bureaucracies will weigh in, Congress will balk, promises will be broken. Remember when Barack Obama ran for president opposing an individual mandate and then flip-flopped and supported one? So what’s the point of paying attention to any of this at all?”

Klein’s answer is the obvious one, to anyone following this campaign: Bernie Sanders actually believes this stuff. And his refusal so far to surround himself with more “establishment” economists — whatever that means, given most “establishment” analyses completely underestimated the impact of the Great Recession — is a decision that deserves its own discussion.

Sanders’s mind, apparently, is not easily changed: Ralph Nader, one of Sanders’ few prospective political allies with any sort of name recognition, told U.S. News “[t]here’s a problem with getting good ideas to him and strategic changes and tactical advice … But that’s part of his charm: I haven’t had a call returned or a letter answered in 15 years.” Nader continued: “He’s really a lone ranger, and that’s a drawback when you run for president because I’m not the only one he’s not returning calls to.”

Understandably, Gerald Friedman is not happy about the skepticism with which his work as been received. And neither are his supporters, a growing group of economists and other academics who point out that, for all of the hubbub over Friedman’s numbers, his critics haven’t crunched their own.

“It is not fair or honest to claim that Professor Friedman’s methods are extreme,” writes James K. Galbraith, economics and government professor at the University of Texas at Austin, in a letter to Friedman and Sander’s critics. “On the contrary, with respect to forecasting method, they are largely mainstream. Nor is it fair or honest to imply that you have given Professor Friedman’s paper a rigorous review. You have not.”

Plenty of others have actually taken their own dives into the data: Narayana Kocherlakota, professor at the University of Rochester and former president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, wrote that historical trends suggest that Friedman’s projections — specifically, the enormous growth in GDP and worker productivity — are at least possible. Mark Thoma of the University of Oregon has suggested something similar. And so has Matthew Klein, writing for the Financial Times.

Their arguments in support of Friedman’s analysis reveal the uncertainties inherent even in thorough economic research: it’s difficult to project how overall worker productivity will be affected by rapid changes in government spending. It’s even more difficult to tell how much of the changes in GDP growth after the recession were due to a recovering housing market or the dysfunctional process by which our federal government cobbles together budgets. And it’s even more difficult than that to determine how labor markets will respond to things like universal healthcare or a radically different tax code.

Suffice it to say: Sanders’ economics — just like every other politician’s — are aspirational.

Photo: Bernie Sanders addresses supporters at his caucus night rally in Des Moines, Iowa February 1, 2016. REUTERS/Mark Kauzlarich 

5 Hidden Ways Obama Has Transformed America For The Better

5 Hidden Ways Obama Has Transformed America For The Better

Judge President Obama’s results by how desperate Republicans are to reverse them.

And if you still aren’t certain how transformative the 44th president’s policies and actions have been in transforming the American economy, read Michael Grunwald’s new Politico Magazine mini-opus “The Nation He Built.” As in his 2012 book The New New Deal, which revealed the story and impact of the Stimulus, Grunwald digs in and finds the scope and depth of the advances of the last seven years have again surprised even him.

What the American people don’t know about this presidency is a big part of the hidden story. For instance, only 1 of 10 Americans are aware the Stimulus gave middle class workers an almost secret tax cut when the economy needed it the most, and the massive deficit savings could add decades to the life of Medicare. Obama’s accomplishments — beyond preventing a greater depression, insuring 17 million and leading us into the Obamaboom, our longest private-sector job expansion ever — are complex, purposely subtle, and almost impossible to convey in a 30-second ad.

As soon as he took office, Obama refused to be the president who just prevented a greater depression.

“He wanted to do stuff, not just avoid stuff,” Grunwald writes. “He wanted to be a Ronald Reagan of the left.”

To do this he committed his advisors to focus on policies that worked and told them to leave the politics to him. This approach has enabled him to enact the kind of change that has tilted government back toward advocating for people in a way comparable to the way Reagan shifted the scales towards the rich and their favorite people — corporations . While no one thing he’s enacted has been as paradigm-shifting as lowering the top tax rate from 70 to 28 percent, or the creation of Medicare and Medicaid, the sum of his feats may end up as equally revolutionary — and possibly could even end up saving the planet from the worst of the climate crisis.

On the other hand, Obama’s failure to sell his accomplishments could end up costing him much of his legacy, should a Republican sweep into office determined to uninsure millions, unleash Wall Street’s most destructive instincts, and supersize carbon pollution.

The historic nature of Obama’s presidency and even his election are now so politicized that attempting to explicate them risks seeming oblivious to the real economic troubles that still vex us, or alienating liberals who despise incrementalism, or feeding the angst of the hard right that takes even his existence as an insult.

But if there’s ever a time to stop and appreciate the singular presidency we’re all living through, it’s now. Here are five hidden successes that Mike Grunwald has revealed.

1. Kicking the big banks out of the student loan business.
This first success is the most forgotten because it was buried in the same bill that gave us the Affordable Care Act. By taking over the student loan program and kicking out Sallie Mae and other private lenders who raked in enormous fees without the risk such loans usually entail, it was the only “government takeover” Obama actually signed into law. “The bill then diverted the budget savings into a $36 billion expansion of Pell Grants for low-income undergraduates, plus an unheralded but extraordinary student-debt relief effort that is now quietly transferring the burden of college loans from struggling borrowers to taxpayers,” Grunwald writes.

2. Shrinking health care cost inflation and saving us billions.
A big complaint from from the left during the passage of the Affordable Care Act was that the law doesn’t regulate the health industry sufficiently to contain costs. Industry profits and insurance offerings were closely regulated — eliminating, for instance, co-pays for “quit-smoking programs, birth control pills, certain cancer screenings and other preventive care” — but the bill leaned more on trying to control the growth of health care spending by including “every cost-control idea in circulation.” Yet the result has been better than the law’s proponents expected. “Health care is still getting more expensive, but since 2010, the growth rate has slowed so drastically that the Congressional Budget Office has slashed its projection for government health spending in 2020 by $175 billion,” Grunwald writes. “That’s enough to fund the Navy for a year, or the EPA for two decades.” This is the kind of reform that makes traditional Medicare sustainable, which is exactly why Republicans in Congress just voted to repeal it again.

3. Taking on two of our leading causes of preventable death.
You probably know about the Administration’s efforts — led by the First Lady — to take on childhood obesity directly with school lunches and more indirectly by trying to create a culture of nutrition and exercise. But one major victory the Obama Administration scored in a decades-long effort to prioritize health over profits was the FDA taking over the regulation of the tobacco industry. “I remember President Bill Clinton crusading for the Food and Drug Administration to regulate tobacco, but I somehow missed that Obama finally made it happen,” Grunwald writes.

4. Clamping down on too-big-to-fail banks and putting government to work for consumers.
Just as many on the left will forever compare Obamacare unfavorably to single-payer, many wanted to see the big banks broken up. Instead, the president went with policies that are almost impossible to explain without drool-inducing PowerPoints but have achieved many of the goals that progressives hoped to see from reform. Grunwald says that “the bottom line is that financial behemoths no longer enjoy much of a ‘too-big-to-fail subsidy.'” But even more importantly, there is now an independent government agency designed to protect the borrowers who suffered the most during the financial crisis. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, Grunwald writes, “is most influential new regulatory agency since the EPA, already collecting more than $10 billion in fines from financial players that used to enjoy relative impunity.” And guess what would be one of the very first thing Republicans would eliminate.

5. Transforming the way we produce energy.
There’s no issue that divides the two political parties more than the need to fight climate change: One wants to reduce carbon pollution while the other wants to increase it. For seven years, Obama has driven us toward reduction. First, there was the Stimulus, which “transformed the U.S. clean-energy sector, blasting an astonishing $90 billion into renewables and other long-neglected green priorities, while birthing a new research agency called ARPA-E.” Then through regulation where with just one rule he’s backed, “for commercial air conditioners, will singlehandedly reduce U.S. energy use by 1 percent.” By thrusting us to the point that renewables can compete with its dirtier alternatives on cost alone, this most important advancement of the Obama era may be one change that may irreversible. But be assured, that any Republican president would do his best to set us back on highway to climate catastrophe.

U.S. President Barack Obama smiles as he holds his end of the year news conference at the White House in Washington December 18, 2015. REUTERS/Carlos Barria

5 Policies That Republicans Loved (Until Obama Did, Too)

5 Policies That Republicans Loved (Until Obama Did, Too)

Texas Senator Ted Cruz (Peter Stevens/Flickr)

Photo: Peter Stevens via Flickr

On Friday, Texas senator and likely 2016 presidential candidate Ted Cruz (R-TX) took some heat when Mother Jonesreported that the right-wing Republican once offered a resolute defense of the 2009 stimulus law that he now derides as an archetypal government overreach. As a private-practice lawyer representing the Texas Retired Teachers Association, Cruz declared that stimulus money “will directly impact the [Texas] economy…and will directly further the greater purpose of economic recovery for America.” But today, he considers the law to be a failure.

Cruz is far from the first Republican to change his mind on an issue championed by the White House. Here are five policies that high-profile Republicans loved — until President Obama came along.

Obamacare

Photo: SEIU International via Flickr

Photo: SEIU International via Flickr

Since before it even became law, Republicans have decried the Affordable Care Act as a job-killing, freedom-crushing abomination. But the right wasn’t always so vehemently opposed to the law’s underlying ideas, like the health care exchanges, the individual mandate, and Medicaid expansion. In fact, they were developed by the conservative Heritage Foundation think tank, and favored by many Republican politicians.

As recently as 2008, former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney considered his health care law — which was largely the inspiration for Obama’s — to be “the ultimate conservative plan,” and a “model” for the rest of the nation. But with Obama in the White House, that didn’t last.

Common Core

Photo: Gage Skidmore via Flickr

Photo: Gage Skidmore via Flickr

Today, Republicans widely agree that the Common Core education standards are a hostile, oppressive government takeover of the education system. Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal has compared Common Core to “centralized planning” in the Soviet Union. Senator Mike Lee (R-UT) derides it as “the Obamacare of education.” Senator Cruz has vowed to repeal it (even though it’s not a law passed by Congress). State Representative Charles Van Zant (R-FL) warns that it will “attract every one of your children to become as homosexual as they possibly can.”

But before Republicans began associating the new educational guidelines with the Obama administration (and, by extension, gay communism), they were quite fond of them. After all, Common Core takes after George W. Bush’s education policy, was introduced by the bipartisan National Governors Association, and at one point was adopted by 46 states. Even the aforementioned Jindal, now a leader of the anti-Common Core push, once defended it by promising that his state would not “move one inch off more rigorous and higher standards for our kids.”

Cap And Trade

Photo: Robert S. Donovan via Flickr

Photo: Robert S. Donovan via Flickr

Before Barack Obama became president, public officials broadly agreed that climate change was a real problem that required a serious policy response. Newt Gingrich even sat on a couch with Nancy Pelosi to talk about it.

Many Republicans agreed that cap and trade, which was developed by a “strange alliance of free-market Republicans and renegade environmentalists,” was the solution that combined the most economic and environmental benefits. In fact, almost every Republican candidate in 2012 backed the plan — until they decided to run against Obama, at which point they reflexively turned against it.

Today, carbon limits remain unpopular on the right, where they are falsely considered to be a job-killing abomination.

Deficit Spending

Photo: Gage Skidmore via Flickr

Photo: Gage Skidmore via Flickr

When President Obama released his 2016 budget plan, congressional Republicans reacted as they often do to his proposals: by attacking it for failing to close the budget deficit.

“While Washington is still racking up debt, this budget doesn’t even try to balance the books,” House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy complained. “In fact, despite the best efforts of Republicans over the past four years to rein in spending and cut the deficit, this budget would erase all those gains over the 10-year budget horizon by increasing the deficit and adding even more to the debt. Our children and grandchildren can’t afford such recklessness.”

But back during the Bush administration, McCarthy and his fellow Republicans didn’t seem to mind budgets that never balanced; that’s why they voted for deficit-busting plans like the Bush tax cuts or the Iraq War, among many others.

Indeed, the Republican Party’s pre-Obama attitude towards balancing the budget can be best summed up by former vice president Dick Cheney: “Deficits don’t matter.” There’s a pretty good case that he was right — but don’t expect any Republican to make the argument while Obama is in the White House.

Immigration Reform

Florida Senator Marco Rubio addresses CPAC 2014 (Gage Skidmore/Flickr)

Photo: Gage Skidmore via Flickr

For years, many Republicans have agreed that the United States desperately needs to reform its immigration laws. In 2013, the Senate even passed a rare bipartisan bill which would strengthen border security and establish a pathway to citizenship for the millions of undocumented immigrants who are already in the country. In other words, it closely mirrored President Obama’s goals. And that became a major problem for many Republicans. For example, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) voted against the 2013 bill despite having supported similar measures in 1986 and 2006.

But no Republican illustrates President Obama’s effect on the GOP better than Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL). Rubio helped craft the 2013 bill in the first place, arguing that the issue is a question of human rights. But a year later, he had abandoned his plans — because “the Obama administration has ‘undermined’ negotiations by not defunding his signature health care law.”