... Economic conditions today — with output growing, some prices rising, but unemployment still very high — bear a strong resemblance to those in 1936-37. So are modern policy makers going to make the same mistake? ...
... In fact, in important ways we have already repeated the mistake of 1937. Call it the mistake of 2010: a “pivot” away from jobs to other concerns, whose wrongheadedness has been highlighted by recent economic data.
To be sure, things could be worse — and there’s a strong chance that they will, indeed, get worse. ...Paul Krugman
Krugman -- and other economists who studied the Great Depression -- have warned us about this all along. More stimulus, not less; more attention to "spending cuts" by Republicans, who are not only the last of the big spenders and least grounded in reality, but whose single purpose (as they've stated firmly) is to bring down President Obama. A second economic "dip" (plunge?) could do the trick.
Or maybe not.
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Make no mistake: The higher the unemployment rate in November 2012, the less likely President Obama is to win a second term.
But we should be careful about asserting that there is any particular threshold at which Mr. Obama would go from favorite to underdog, or any magic number at which his re-election would either become impossible or a fait accompli. Historically, the relationship between the unemployment rate and a president’s performance at the next election is complicated and tenuous.
Nate Silver is looking at the effect of employment rates on incumbent parties in elections from 1912 on. His graphs are many, his study detailed and his conclusions unlikely to satisfy completely either party. Too many variables.
The unemployment rate itself is subject to fairly significant measurement error. Voters will interpret the unemployment rate in different ways, and assign the president varying amounts of credit or blame for it. The unemployment rate is but one of a number of salient economic indicators. Economic performance is but one of the ways that voters evaluate a president. Voters’ evaluation of a president is important, but they also consider the the strength of a president’s opponents, including third-party alternatives in some elections.
In other words, the media are pushing the Republican hopes that continued high unemployment will ("goody, goody!") bring Obama down. But -- once again -- supporting hard facts just aren't there.
Clearly, Mr. Obama’s odds will be impaired if his hand contains more deuces and treys than aces and kings — and that, in essence, is what weaker data from the labor sector implies for him. But this is an inexact science — more so than either journalists or political scientists tend to acknowledge.
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Moody’s Investors Service warned Thursday that it might downgrade the United States government’s sterling credit rating if Congress did not increase the nation’s debt limit “in coming weeks,” putting a spur to the sputtering talks between party leaders and the White House on a plan to restore fiscal stability. ...NYT
This is a reaction to unwillingness on the part of Republicans in Congress to pass the debt limit hike.
Blame the Republicans again? Sure. They object to doing something which was done by Congress 10 -- count 'em, 10! -- times during the Bush administration. Their party is increasingly a) playing politics during a crisis, and b) driven by a largely ignorant but passionate new group of paid agitators called the tea party movement.
At the very beginning, they were a passionate bipartisan group whose cry was "fiscal responsibility." The movement went on to become coopted by racists, ambitious media celebs like Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin, and by a well-oiled Washington lobby group with plenty corporate money and corporate media.
The treasury secretary, Timothy F. Geithner, met on Capitol Hill with House freshmen, including Republicans who have suggested that they see little or no risk in a showdown over the debt limit. Citing the Moody’s statement, Mr. Geithner urged them to support raising it or risk an economic crisis.
“We didn’t create this mess,” one Republican told Mr. Geithner, according to a person in the room.
Wrong, says the New York Times -- as does history.
Independent analyses have shown that more than half of the $14.3 trillion debt is from policies enacted during the past decade when Republicans controlled both the White House and Congress, and much of the rest from lost revenues and stimulus spending and tax cuts since Mr. Obama took office at the height of the financial crisis and recession.
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Obstruction of the President isn't, of course, confined to economic policy. Republicans' refusal to consider judicial nominees is unprecedented and inexcusable.
Throughout President Obama’s first two years in office, Senate Republicans waged war on his judiciary nominees — allowing only a handful of them to be confirmed. The GOP’s obstructionism grew so bad that conservative Chief Justice John Roberts scolded the Senate for its dismal confirmation record. A new report by the Alliance for Justice shows that the GOP’s obstructionism was truly historic — the worst obstructionism any new president faced at any point in American history. ...Think Progress
Worst of all:
Disturbingly, much of this obstructionism targeted women and people of color. Although Obama’s nominees are the most diverse in American history, every district court nominee with unanimous Republican opposition in the Senate Judiciary Committee was a woman or person of color.
