So I've got this family member and she is clearly an undecided voter. I don't understand how anyone could be undecided, nor do I understand how so many people could vote for or even like Romney .. but regardless they exist and we should be willing to help them ... even if they live in decidedly blue or red states because other than the president, there are the down ballot issues and other offices local, state and federal.
Below the fold is my reply to my cousin-in-law wanting information about positive stuff Pres. Obama has done and will do beyond 2012. If anyone has ideas for additional messages, please suggest them .. or if there are things I should add to this message, please suggest those as well. I don't slight her for being misinformed or under-informed because I know her husband, my cousin is a strong right winger and probably pollutes the house with the noise of FOX. Instead I congratulate her for seeking out information and wish her luck learning about Obamacare and Romneycare and not having her head explode.
I'll see what I can come up with .. but maybe we can start with today's unemployment rate dropping from 8.1% to 7.8% (and 0.5% in two months). And the reason for the fall was because people are getting hired, not leaving the labor force. In the last week or two we have seen the death of two more Romney talking points. The first one died when the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) gave an update to their numbers that showed we now have a net jobs since Jan 20, 2009. So Romney can no longer say we've had net job loss under Obama ... which in my opinion was a bad thing to argue on because we were losing jobs at the rate of 750k to 800k/month when Obama took office. The stimulus starting, and the breaks on job loss were applied in the months following job loss slowed until we started having positive job numbers in by Feb 2010. Things went well for that following year posting 100k to 200k jobs/month. More recently (in the last 12 months) we've still added jobs, but there has been more variability in the numbers/month. Regardless we have now reached this second mile-stone today where the unemployment rate is back to where it was 4 years ago. The hole in unemployment that was dug by Bush policies is now filled ... and this brings the end to Romney's second talking point, and that is he kept saying that unemployment has remained above 8%. I guess he will have to redraw the line at 7% for the next month. We are certainly not done by any means, but the direction is good and continue to move that way.
Going into the future ... well, the President had proposed a jobs plan in Sept 2011.
Here is a link to the NY Times article about it http://www.nytimes.com/...
Here is a link to the White House summary about it http://www.whitehouse.gov/...
Or the wiki page http://en.wikipedia.org/...
The wiki page outlines the history of the act nicely .. the fact it didn't pass as a whole, but broken into several parts.
I'll let you read that page, but it is also a bit out of date, the third part of American Jobs Act did pass .. this part was renamed the Vow to Hire Heroes Act of 2011. This has helped to lower the unemployment rate for only the Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans from 13.3 in July 2011 before the act was passed (in Nov 2011) to 9.5 in June 2012 .. for over all vets it fell to 7.4%.. Here is a link to that reference: http://www.armytimes.com/...
Despite this, part of the bill remain stuck in congress. These other parts of the bill could create 1.5 to 2.5 million more jobs. Check out this link and the references there in.
http://thinkprogress.org/... Romney wants to make fun of hiring teachers, but the reality is we need them. I'm not certain how things are going in the NY education system, but in AZ and CA they have been shedding teachers and school days left and right for the last few years. To keep our economy going strong we have to invest in the education system today (if not yesterday!). And the Teachers and First Responders Back to Work Act would help to do this. But this is all stuck in the senate. I am confident that these things will get through (nothing will happen until after election day since the congress is in recess till then) because funny things happen when there is a lame duck session. A lot of good stuff happened after the 2010 election, and I expect the same might happen this time because it is all about politics.