I suppose I should check around to see if, as is his wont, Sen. Pat Roberts of Kansas reacted to the president’s speech by suggesting that he take a valium. House Majority Leader Eric Cantor reacted more with cowering fear, which might be explained by the fact the president’s first stop on his tour will be on Cantor’s turf today at the University of Richmond.
The independent economic consultancy Macroeconomic Advisers predicts the president’s plan would give a “significant boost” to GDP and lead to 1.3 million new jobs through 2012.
“This plan is the right thing to do right now,” Obama said. “I intend to take that message to every corner of this country. I also ask every American who agrees to lift your voice and tell the people who are gathered here tonight that you want action now. Tell Washington that doing nothing is not an option.”
Moody’s predicts 2% growth in GDP and 2 million jobs. The Economic Policy Institute is even more optimistic.
President Obama’s jobs plan, if implemented, would boost employment by around 4.3 million jobs (yes, 1.6 million of those jobs would come from continuing temporary policies that are already in place and supporting the economy today, but the new initiatives alone would generate 2.6 million jobs).
How do we judge such large figures? Here’s a benchmark: right now the gap in the U.S. labor market is around 11 million jobs when you take into account both the number of jobs we are down since the start of the recession and the number we should have gained to keep up with normal growth in the working-age population. Eleven million is the number of jobs we need — and Obama has just proposed a plan that could take a big bite out of that gap. This plan is a vital step in the direction of providing a solution that matches the scale of the ongoing crisis.
Even Krugman has temporarily stopped his grumbling. This jobs proposal is the first thing that has put the GOP on its heels since the health care and financial reforms passed. It has definitely perked up progressive morale. It gives us something to fight for and allows us to go on offense for the first time in over a year.
For me, it’s a welcome relief. How about you?
Pedal to the metal and don’t let up. Can we please come together and act like a team, just this once? If Obama can be this aggressive and to the point, there should be myriad other voices forming a chorus, chiming in right now, loud and clear, and taking it to them. Hoffa showed the way, and this is Biden’s forte.
I don’t want to say I was right last week about the insignificance of the Boehner date of the speech kerfuffle, but I was right. And it may in fact have been the plan, as I said then, to create a distraction in order to get the speech AFTER the moran debate and just before kickoff time. And when I saw the $350 billion figure I didn’t think that’s all there was. This is gamesmanship, and it will be with us all the way until next November. We’ve got a reset, let’s not blow this.
Give this lecture to the Democratic caucus. They’re the ones most likely to let the air out of the tires.
Exactly. It’s not as if their jobs depend on it—wait a minute, yes it is!
Apparently not. Read Dana Milbank’s column today in WaPo. It’s the usual hackery from Milbank, but what struck me most was a comment from Representative Steve Cohen, a white Democrat who represents a majority black district in TN (Harold Ford’s old seat). He’s already predicated the bill DOA on arrival. This man represents one of the poorest districts in the country with probably a 30% plus unemployment rate, and he can’t even muster a few words to say he’s going to fight for a jobs bill for his black constituents?! Is this what all that liberal bull sh*t about the President Obama needs to fight back was about?! Last week the CBC said the jobless need jobs; they can’t wait. Apparently they can–for the next Republican administration.
Some of his constituents need to ring Cohen up on the phone and tell him to stop analyzing or speculating, and start getting on the team and messaging. The more influential the constituent, the better.
I don’t want to hear another economic projection from any one of these motherfuckers ever again, actually.
I remember “4, maybe 4.5% gdp growth in 2011! Millions of jobs will be created!” last December.
Where are we actually? <2% growth, 9.1% unemployment, and a net job creation number for the year at a mere 870,000 with four months to go.
So you’ll forgive me for not caring what Mark Zandi has to say about it.
In truth, Zandi could not have predicted the viciousness with which newly elected Republican governors would lay off public employees. Nor the uncertainty that the whole debt ceiling debacle raised.
All of their statistical methods are limited in a political environment as unpredictable as this one.
If the bill is passed soon and if there are no undercutting effects of the joint committee on the deficit, I can see how it will produce 1.9 million jobs overall. How quickly those jobs will be created is a different matter that depends on private sector response to the program. The failure of private sector response has been a huge hurdle to the administration’s mortgage resolution programs.
Don’t make excuses. There’s no less credible profession on the planet than an economic forecaster. They’re never right about anything ever. They can only explain why they were wrong after the fact.
Appealing to their “authority” is pure PR.
I think Goldman Sachs’ people are pretty accurate, which is why they’ve been calling for more stimulus for a long time.
The are less credible because the news media for decades has not reported the limitations to their forecasts. At least political polling firms occasionally get their margin of error reported from time to time.
Because economic actors want to keep their numbers hidden, it is very difficult to get data to do the analysis that even good economic theory requires. The BLS has this problem, and it has access to aggregate figures from other agencies. The actual employment statistics released each month are bedeviled by the lack of openness on the part of employers. Most of the data is taken from reports that employers are required under law to submit to the government.
Private analysts are in a worse fix. All they have are some proprietary econometric models, which get tested against data as well as possible and then refined, and the data that is available from the government. Those proprietary models are based on long-running statistical relationship in the data. When the economy acts in a way that is different from the past data set, the error is much larger.
That said, the numbers in the American Jobs Act tell you how many jobs will be directly created by the act. Then, you estimate the multiplier effect of those jobs in creating other jobs in the economy, given the current employment situation. An old rule of thumb in business is that every additional $1 added to an economy creates an additional $6. Something like that multiplier says that 300,000 direct jobs in the bill will create 1.8 million jobs in the economy. That really is not a lot of jobs, given the current situation. But it might be enough job and income growth to cause the $3T or so that businesses have on the table (actually in treasuries) to come off the table and start being invested in expansion. Or the cost-cutting mania that has gripped business might undercut this effort with more layoffs public and private.
But taken by itself the creation of 1.8 million or so jobs makes sense for what the package will produce. The actual number of jobs in the economy a year out may be much larger or much smaller than that because of the actions of consumers, investors, exporters, and importers.
Among analysts, Zandi is pretty responsible in not tainting his estimates politically although he was an adviser to John McCain.
Yes, the assault on public sector workers in MI, WI, PA, OH, IN, TN, NJ, and IO has been astonishing. ALEC has NEVER done more to attack the middle class, and has never had more success than this year.
I’m in. It’s time to send these GOP motherfuckers to the dustbin of history. Let’s roll.
“The American Jobs Bill” is awesome messaging. Saying “pass the jobs bill” 12 times is great too. I am relived and happy about that messaging. It also is an easy transition to the GOP want the economy to fail to beat Obama narrative.
Take the sales job through the hard red districts. It is encouraging that he is starting with Cantor’s turf. But he needs to do more than set speeches. He has to undo some of the distrust that Republicans have used to keep their districts buffaloed. Places like Richmond are not impressed by Presidents showing up there, but smaller cities are — and smaller cities get better coverage from local media trying to hold on to their market share. And “I met the President” is still a good thing to have coursing through the personal networks of people who have become accustomed to being treated as if they didn’t matter.
My big worry is that the Democrats are not united on this. I want to see some surrogate support from the perennial nay-sayers of the Democratic caucus. I want them to go to the mat for their President for once instead of undercutting him. If the President is out there by himself selling this, it is easy to paint even Republican nostrums as “radical muslim socialist” policies. If a Heath Shuler or Ben Nelson, for example, fights for it there is a different narrative.
Yep. I had several friends who got to shake his hand after his speech in Detroit a couple of days ago, and they were extremely excited about it. I don’t even know how many emails / text messages / facebook posts I saw about it. It was nice. Obama is a great speaker, but he’s also great in person to person contact, and if he can get that side of himself out there on this jobs bill, we just might start to turn this thing around yet.
Poor white folks voting against their own economic interests predates this President and this Congress. It’s a deeply embedded mind set, and there is NOTHING President Obama can do to change that, at least not by himself. BTW, there are plenty of black folks in Richmond that can put Bobby Scott on notice. He was talking big sh*t last week with the rest of the CBC. Where is he at now? Is he going to help push this jobs bill to help improve sky high unemployment in his district or plan for the upcoming multi million dollar CBC week long gala here in DC the week of September 21? I’ll be happy to post pictures of them wining and dining at the Blue Duck Tavern and Cintronelle that week while the President is trying to sell this bill on his own. Let’s see if white progressives and their poor black constituents unleash on them.
Poor white folks voting against their own economic interests predates this President and this Congress
say it OVER AND OVER AND OVER AGAIN.
they are so wrapped up in their Whiteness, that they will vote against their OWN ECONOMIC INTERESTS.
because, of course, all the time the GOP is talking about getting ‘ those people’, they thought the GOP meant Black and Brown folks. now that it’s finally obvious that the GOP was talking about their poor asses too…suddenly they’re supposed to be coddled like a child who finds out about Santa.
I say fuck that – they should be apologizing to the rest of us for voting for these sociopaths, time after time.
Folks who have a personal conversation with the President are more likely to opt out of the GOP stereotypes and to correct folks in their personal networks who hold those stereotypes.
OK, I will apologize for my radio-brainwashed white neighbors voting for these sociopaths if you will grant that Obama himself can break through the stereotypes in face-to-face encounters with them. We are not talking about huge margins that have to swing to put pressure on the Republicans to get the American Jobs Act passed.
I and events have turned around a half dozen folks in that category. Interestingly, killing Osama bin Laden was a big help.
I doubt that many African-American constituents need convincing about the jobs bill, except for not opposing it because it doesn’t go far enough. Am I right? The President should go talk to the folks who need convincing and enough of them to put pressure on the sociopaths they voted for. The President need not do this alone. Local folks can carry forward some of the momentum.
Most of these folks in the South are the sons and grandsons of people who voted for FDR; some still have a framed Norman Rockwell “Four Freedoms” picture that their parents had. Some are the sons and grandsons of people who were in the labor movement briefly in the 1930s. Some of them are in families that were Republican since Lincoln. It takes a lot of money and a lot of work for these sociopaths to keep most of these people afraid or angry. And a good many are just social conformists afraid to rock the boat. And others are in an information cocoon of a church had the misfortune to call a politicized right-wing preacher.
The folks who seem to be hopeless are the managers and the IT workers and the doctors who vote for these sociopaths. They are not voting for their economic interests, but they think they are.
It’s not Bobby Scott particularly who needs to be put on notice, it’s Eric Cantor. The more Eric Cantor is afraid, the bolder the nervous Democrats can be.
In fact the poorest whites have tended to support Democrats exactly because of memories of the New Deal. It’s the folks that imagine that they’ll be affluent some day that drift toward Republicans. The problem is that most poor whites don’t vote at all and can’t imagine unleashing anything on a Congresscritter. Good ole boys are one step above poor whites; they have enough money to buy manly stuff like guns and fishing equipment and stuff to fix up cars.
But exposing what happens to progressive lawmakers of all races in Washington is a service that well needs doing.
Wow. This is new:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/plum-line/post/white-house-doubles-down-pass-the-whole-jobs-bill
-republicans/2011/03/03/gIQAJgAwEK_blog.html
TODD: The bill gets sent to Congress next week. Are you guys assuming that it gets sort of piecemealed, that at the end of the day you’re going to get some of what you want but not all of what you want?
PFEIFFER: No, we’re not assuming that. The president said it 16 times, I’ll say it a 17th time today. He wants them to pass the American Jobs Act. That’s the piece of legislation he’s sending up. It’s a simple thing. Puts the Americans back to work and puts more money into the pockets of working families. Our belief is that everything in this bill is reasonable. Everything in the bill has bipartisan support. Everything will have an effect right now. And so we want them to pass it.
Wow. A backbone. A Democrat actually showing spine for a change. Can this possibly last?
We’ve all seen how the GOP has played the Lucy-with-the-football routine with legislation up until now. Now Obama is saying – screw the negotiations – just pass the fucking bill.
What is the plan behind this? What is their real goal? I can’t know for sure, of course, but I suspect that part of what they are doing is trying to get their base enthusiastic again. It is worth noting, for example, that one of the few journalists to get an advanced copy of the bill description was Krugman. They WANTED his positive approval, and they wanted it in time for his Friday column. Could it actually be that they are now, for the first time, taking actions designed to please their own supporters?
The real goal is obvious:
The rope-a-dope is done for a brief burst of fighting. Don’t know if this will be more that the elephant bouncing on the ropes or not. A lot depends on the Democratic caucus’s unity and backbone.
“It has definitely perked up progressive morale.” You are distinguishing between progressives and the professional left, right? I wouldn’t ordinarily quote Ben Smith in any serious way to substantiate a point, but he had a moment of rare honesty this morning when he distinguished between the stark difference in the response from progressives and the professional left .
To that point, a professional left member/”reformed” conservative like Ed Schultz an evening earlier felt compelled to explain away Rick Perry’s ponzi scheme comments about social security saying he didn’t want to dismantle it but reform it. But reform it?! When did any discussion of reforming social security become ok to self-described progressives?! Rick Perry makes a Jonathan Swift like proposal and it receives the respect of consideration from liberals it doesn’t deserve. What happened to liberal dogma that thou shalt never mention social security and reform in the same sentence? What happened to what progressives said was an indisputable FACT that there is nothing–ABSOLUTELY NOTHING–insolvent about the social security trust fund?!
The following evening the President merely says that Medicare and Medicaid need to be strengthened to be saved, and the professional left goes crazy. The lead discussion of the President’s speech of every hour on MSNBC was “the President wants to cut Medicare and Medicaid.” Some even threw in social security for effect when he never mentioned social security. Come the f*ck on! If this is not a blatant white liberal double standard than what is?!
Did anyone catch Hardball today? Chris Matthews did his opening segment about the Jobs Bill by really rubbing Eric Cantor’s nose in it. He pointed out that there are 94 bridges in Cantor’s district that are structurally deficient and need to be repaired or replaced now, suggesting that Eric Cantor should not be re-elected if he can’t get his district’s bridges fixed. He then proceeded to run the names or descriptions of all of those bridges on the lower screen while doing the segment. Awesome.
Check it out. Loved it.
Headline of the program segment: “Build, baby, build” — love it!
Didn’t catch that. I thought the segment was called “Give ’em Hell, Barry.” But I just love the way he said that Cantor may not be re-elected if he doesn’t get those damn bridges fixed because when the schoolbus drives over that bridge and it starts to rattle, we should all think of Eric Cantor. Then he reminded us of the horrific (structurally deficient) Minneapolis bridge with the schoolbus on it when it failed.
Brilliant television.
Of course you remember the theme of the 2008 Republican Convention “Drill, baby, drill.” And this must be a take-off on that.
Wouldn’t it be awesome to have “Build, baby, build” be the theme of the 2012 Democratic Convention? In the midst of a long depression, it could be a very appealing slogan, I think. Just make it all about building out the country after decades of neglect. New high-speed rail, new smart energy grid, new geothermal energy systems, new air traffic control systems, new airports, new…..
Yes, We Can Build It.
Also, too…
Rather than “Win The Future” how about “Build The Future” ???