Barack Obama

Just The Facts: Republicans Falsely Claim Obama Seeks Biggest Tax Hike In History

Brian Beutler | September 29, 2011, 11:19AM

President Barack Obama

After President Obama unveiled his jobs and deficit reduction plans, he took to the road to draw a contrast between himself and the Republican politicians who want to end his political career. Obama's proposes to spend money now on hiring people and cutting taxes temporarily to spur further job growth, and pay for it in just over a year, in large part by raising taxes on wealthy Americans.

The Republican vision -- phasing out safety net programs like Medicare in order to maintain low tax rates on the same group of affluent people -- is far less popular. So in their own tried and true way, Republicans recast Obama's plan for "shared sacrifice" as "the largest tax increase in history."

What a difference! But also untrue.

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Nancy Pelosi

Pelosi: Super Committee Doing A Disservice If It Doesn't Consider Employment Impact Of Its Deficit Plan

Brian Beutler | September 22, 2011, 3:16PM

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA)

Members of the Super Committee might be reluctant. But House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) -- who's a close ally of three Democrats on the panel -- says they would be doing a disservice to advance deficit reducing legislation without knowing its impact on economic growth.

"What the possibility is, of taking every initiative and passing it through the CBO for its job creating potential I think is a great idea," Pelosi said at her weekly Capitol briefing Thursday. "I don't know why anybody would want to make a judgment without that evaluation, especially at this time."

Pelosi noted that Democrats insisted that the panel focus on employment -- and the committee's rules reflect that to some extent.

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Super Committee

Super Committee GOP Unconvinced By CBO Chief On Jobs, Austerity

Brian Beutler | September 15, 2011, 6:10AM

Rep Dave Camp (R-MI) and House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH)

So did CBO Director Doug Elmendorf make any headway convincing Super Committee Republicans that a). the economy needs a short term boost of near term spending and tax cuts, and b). that the country shouldn't dive headlong, and unnecessarily, into austerity?

If Dave Camp is any indication, the answer is no.

The Michigan Republican, and chair of the House Ways and Means Committee said he disagreed with Elmendorf's cautionary testimony.

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Super Committee

Super Committee Riven By Major Divide Over Basic Facts

Brian Beutler | September 14, 2011, 5:59AM

Rep. Jeb Hensarling (R-TX)

Political debates over deficits and debt are always marked by obfuscation and technicality. The numbers are huge and frightening, the terms obscure and technical, and the simple, fundamental point of the argument gets buried underneath this avalanche of panic and esoterica.

But for a brief moment Tuesday, under questioning from Sen. Max Baucus (D-MT), Congress' top economic analyst made it perfectly clear to everybody who was listening.

"I think really the fundamental question for you is not how we got here, but where you want the country to go, what role do you and your colleagues want the government to play in the economy and the society?" said Doug Elmendorf, who heads the Congressional Budget Office. He was addressing the six Democrats and six Republicans on the new joint deficit committee, and for three hours he did his best not to get buried under the same avalanche.

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CBO

CHART OF THE DAY: Austerity Is A Bad Idea That Republicans Love

Brian Beutler | September 13, 2011, 3:36PM

An unemployed man.

During Tuesday's joint Super Committee hearing on the origin and drivers of U.S. debt, Republicans were eager, as they are in many settings, to portray the country as on the brink of a genuine debt crisis -- and to argue that the most effective remedies to a debt crisis are spending cuts, not tax increases.

This sounds like bland political pabulum, and in some ways it is. But it's also a huge reveal. If we're not in a fiscal crisis, and we thus have years of running room ahead of us to make appropriate, and non-drastic policy changes, then there's no immediate imperative to make the dramatic changes to Medicare and other popular government safety net programs Republicans want to see.

Here's how CBO director Doug Elmendorf responded when Sen. Rob Portman (R-OH) nudged him about the relative merits of cutting spending (i.e. rolling back government services) as part of a national austerity program.

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Super Committee

CBO Chief Gives De Facto Boost To Obama Jobs Plan

Brian Beutler | September 13, 2011, 2:36PM

CBO Director Doug Elmendorf

The Congressional Budget Office would be stepping out of bounds if it endorsed specific legislation or even hazy policy objectives. But it's hard to read CBO chief Doug Elmendorf's testimony to the joint deficit Super Committee Tuesday as anything other than a de facto endorsement of President Obama's broad strategy to boost the economy: legislation that spends money to hire people and reduces payroll taxes in the near-term, and that reduces deficits by even greater amounts in the middle and end of the decade.

"If policymakers want to achieve both a short-term economic boost and long-term fiscal sustainability the combination of policies that would be most effective according to our analysis would be changes in taxes and spending that would widen the deficit today, but narrow it in the coming decade," Elmendorf told the panel's 12 Democrats and Republicans. "The combination of fiscal policies that would be most effective would be policies that cut taxes or increase spending in the near-term, but over the medium and longer-term move in the opposite direction."

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Barack Obama

Obama Sends The 'American Jobs Act' To Congress

Thomas Lane | September 12, 2011, 11:36AM

President Obama urges Congress to pass the American Jobs Act in an address today from the Rose Garden.

Standing before a varied assembly of American workers from the public and private sectors, President Barack Obama announced Monday morning that he is now sending the text of the "American Jobs Act" to Congress.

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Barack Obama

Obama's Job Package To Top $350B

Susan Crabtree | September 8, 2011, 5:37PM

President Barack Obama

Details and excerpts of President Obama's plan to spur job creation and economic growth began to leak out Thursday evening ahead of Obama's joint address to Congress scheduled for 7:30 p.m.

"The people of this country work hard to meet their responsibilities," Obama plans to say, according to brief excerpts of the speech. "The question tonight is whether we'll meet ours. The question is whether, in the face of an ongoing national crisis, we can stop the political circus and actually do something to help the economy; whether we can restore some of the fairness and security that has defined this nation since our beginning."

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Jobs

Cantor Demurs On Whether Super Committee Should Focus On Jobs

Brian Beutler | September 7, 2011, 3:32PM

House Minority Whip Eric Cantor (R-VA)

President Obama wants Congress to pass his jobs plan, and Democrats think the new deficit Super Committee is the appropriate venue for those initiatives. If creating jobs costs money in the near term, the Committee could simply offset those cuts with additional long-term deficit savings, beyond the $1.2 trillion floor required by the debt ceiling law.

But Republicans aren't sold. I asked House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-VA) whether this would be an appropriate course of action for the Joint Committee -- new jobs spending now, more deficit cuts later. He demurred.

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Economy

Is The GOP Backing Off The Claim That Cutting Spending Creates Economic Growth?

Brian Beutler | September 7, 2011, 1:55PM

GOP Leaders

House Republicans have been successful at forcing significant cuts to the federal budget over the last nine months, but it hasn't translated into the economic expansion they promised. "Cut and grow" they called it, but so far there's been a lot of "cut" and not much "grow."

Here's House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-VA), echoing the vast majority of Republicans, in February: "[W]e must cut government spending to bring down the deficit and the debt because if you look at the current levels of debt, added what's required to fund future deficits, you're going to have a crowding out of private capital. If you do, businesses will not grow, and you will overall retard that economic growth. You will bring on inflation, erode the value of the dollar and create an economic environment where you are going to reduce consumer spending power and ultimately the standard of living in America."

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Barack Obama

Obama's Biggest Challenge Thursday, One Of His Own Making

Brian Beutler | September 7, 2011, 9:10AM

President Barack Obama

Barack Obama will face a daunting challenge Thursday evening when he attempts to focus the government's attention away from consolidating the federal budget, and back on to immediate job creation. Here's a partial list of hurdles: Republicans oppose all new spending, unless it's offset by cuts to key federal programs; they oppose most of the specific spending measures that experts say would create jobs; many Democrats, scared of their own shadows, won't support anything that doesn't have bipartisan support; the public has soured on Keynesian spending policies, and particularly the word "stimulus"; and the White House, quite understandably, doesn't want to be left fighting for a policy that voters oppose from the outset.

To put things in starker relief, no less than his presidency and the economic fate of millions of Americans is at stake.

That's a tall order -- but it is, in part, one of Obama's own making.

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Debt

McConnell: Obama Jobs Plan Will Be 'Same Failed Approach'

Brian Beutler | September 7, 2011, 6:05AM

Mitch McConnell (R-KY)

Congress returned to Washington on Tuesday, which gave Republicans their first national whack at President Obama since public anger over the debt limit fight boiled over, and details of his jobs plan started to leak, and he nixed a forthcoming pollution regulation at the behest of Republicans and conservative business interests.

Who better to wield the truncheon than Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY), who perhaps unwittingly affirmed a recent, widely cited critique of the GOP, written by a 30 year Republican Capitol Hill vet.

"[E]very one of us, I'm sure, is aware of the fact that many Americans are not only frustrated with the state of our economy, but also with the state of their government," McConnell said on the Senate floor. "I don't think any one of us is under any illusion that the American people were particularly eager to see us come back."

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Jobs

What The Media Won't -- Or Can't -- Tell You About The Jobs Crisis

Brian Beutler | September 6, 2011, 6:10AM

An unemployed man.

Everyone knows the unemployment rate is painfully high and not falling. Friday's monthly jobs report from the Department of Labor put a cruel point on this fact: In August, job gains in the private sector were entirely offset by job losses in the public sector, netting precisely zero new payrolls for the month.

Zero is a striking number in this context, but it's also a bit misleading. For instance, private sector job creation appeared artificially lower than it should have because 45,000 Verizon workers were on strike when the survey was taken. What happened in August has been happening for months, as policy makers allow federal spending to fall and, thus, for government jobs to disappear, placing a significant drag on overall growth.

Experts disagree to some extent over the precise measures lawmakers should take to stanch this bleeding -- but overwhelmingly they agree it can be stanched. Their recommendations give the lie to the idea -- pushed by conservatives and adopted by some Democrats -- that government is growing out of control and deficits need to be addressed urgently. And yet nearly all major news outlets ignore, or bury this fact -- indeed, most reports of this month's jobs figures place no emphasis on the contraction of the public sector, and the implications thereof.

Here's a sample.

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Unemployment

White House: Unemployment Will Average 9 Percent In Election Year

Brian Beutler | September 1, 2011, 2:10PM

Jack Lew, Director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB).

President Obama's mid-session budget review confirms what most private and government projections have recently concluded -- that the economy is considerably weaker than earlier forecasts held, and won't fully recover from the Great Recession for years.

Most troubling, both for the country and for Obama politically, is that near-term unemployment is expected to remain significantly higher than expected, averaging 9 percent in fiscal year 2012.

Obama's budget office initially calculated its economic forecast based upon data available through June. Even that data presaged an 8.8 percent average unemployment rate in 2011 and an 8.3 percent average rate next year. But the mid-session review got delayed, and when the Office of Management and Budget revised it to incorporate the data through the end of August, the picture became much gloomier. Unemployment will average 9.1 percent this year, and 9.0 percent next year, OMB concluded, and won't dip below 7 percent until 2015 at the earliest.

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