Frank Rich brings us another must-read in the 9/11 10th Anniversary edition of New York Magazine, as he asks (and then answers) the question: “The 9/11 decade is now over. The terrorists lost. But who won?”
Ed Harrison provides us with a crosspost from his Credit Writedowns blog, via Naked Capitalism, entitled: “ECRI: 'It’s Too Late' for Obama on Jobs.” In his post, Harrison parses comments made over the past few days by one of the most highly-respected economic cycle analysts in the world, Lakshman Achuthan, (here’s a LINK to a post I published on Achuthan, just over a month ago) the co-founder of the Economic Cycle Research Institute, wherein he tells us, once again, that our President’s publicized proposals for job creation, scheduled to be delivered with much fanfare over the next few weeks, are too little and too late to have any significant impact upon unemployment statistics in the coming year, let alone providing anything positive, other than weak spin, for Democrats with regard to the outcome of the 2012 election cycle.
(Diarist’s Note: This is a position which I share, and upon which I have written quite a bit over the past couple of weeks—since outlines for the administration’s job “creation” proposals have been made public--including HERE, HERE and HERE. And, at this point, isn’t it a bit late for the “let’s-wait-and-see-how-this-all-works-out-before-we-start-criticizing-it” response? As I noted in my last post, the Congressional Budget Office has just told us how this is all going to “work out.”)
And, Dean Baker does a deeper dive on how low the administration is setting the job-creation bar in: “President Obama’s job creation mirage.”
I also covered this topic quite specifically and extensively, a little over two weeks ago, in: “Sunday’s NYT Lead: 'White House Debates Fight on Economy'…Not.”
Collectively, what Frank Rich, Ed Harrison and Dean Baker are telling us is that our Party’s leadership in D.C. is planning upon doing little more in 2012 than they did in 2010, in terms of focusing upon failed economic talking points. And, we know—if we’re not going to take a “holiday from history,” as Frank Rich turns the phrase in his most recent NY Magazine article--how that worked out for us last year, now don’t we? (But, onward our Party’s leaders march, into the economic abyss and the 2012 election cycle.)
As Harrison notes in his post, below…
…Dean Baker argued yesterday that the President needed to have focused on jobs in a laser-like fashion much, much earlier in his presidency. I would agree with that.
Obama’s failure to understand where we are in the economic cycle and the relationship to historical precedent has been catastrophic to the conduct of economic policy and critical in his missteps. There is more to Obama’s misfortune than a bad economy.
Taking it one step farther, Frank Rich pulls it all together in his upcoming NY Magazine 9/11 10th Anniversary commentary…
…ten years later, it’s remarkable how much our city, like the country, has moved on. Decades are not supposed to come in tidy packages mandated by the calendar’s arbitrary divisions, but this decade did. For most Americans, the cloud of 9/11 has lifted. Which is not to say that a happier national landscape has been unveiled in its wake…
…
…Three red-letter days in 2011 have certified the passing of the 9/11 decade as we had known it. The first, of course, was the killing of Osama bin Laden. We demand that our stories have beginnings, middles, and ends. While bin Laden’s demise wasn’t the final curtain for radical-¬Islamic terrorism, it was a satisfying resolution of the classic “dead or alive” Western that George W. Bush had dangled so tantalizingly before the nation in 2001, only to let the bad guy get away at Tora Bora. Once bin Laden was gone, he was gone from our politics, too. Terrorism has disappeared as a campaign issue; the old Bush-Cheney fear card can’t be found in the playbook of the GOP presidential contenders. Ron Paul’s isolationism increasingly seems like his party’s mainstream while the neocon orthodoxy of McCain-Palin looks like the cranky fringe.
The other red-letter days were August 5 and 6, with their twin calamities: the downgrading of America by Standard & Poor’s and the downing of a Chinook helicopter by the Taliban, making for the single most fatal day for Americans in Afghanistan. Among the fallen in that bloodbath were 17 Navy Seals, some of them members of the same revered team that had vanquished bin Laden.* Yet their tragic deaths were runners-up in national attention next to our fiscal woes. America may still ostensibly be a country at war with terrorists, but that war is at most a low-grade fever for the vast American majority with no direct connection to the men and women fighting it. The battle consuming our attention and our energies these days is the losing struggle to stay financially afloat. In time, the connection between the ten-year-old war in Afghanistan and our new civil war over America’s three-year-old economic crisis may well prove the most consequential historical fact of the hideous decade they bracket.
The hallowed burial grounds of 9/11 were supposed to bequeath us a stronger nation, not a busted one. We were supposed to be left with a finer legacy than Gitmo and the Patriot Act. When we woke up on September 12, we imagined a whole host of civic virtues that might rise from the smoldering ruins. The New ¬Normal promised a new national unity and, of all unlikely miracles, bi-partisanship: The still-green president had a near-perfect approval rating for weeks. We would at last cast off our two-decade holiday from history, during which we had mostly ignored a steady barrage of terrorist threats and attacks. We would embrace a selfless wartime patriotism built on the awesome example of those regular Americans who ran to the rescue on that terrifying day of mass death, at the price of their own health and sometimes their lives.
…
…In retrospect, the most consequential event of the past ten years may not have been 9/11 or the Iraq War but the looting of the American economy by those in power in Washington and on Wall Street. This was happening in plain sight—or so we can now see from a distance. At the time, we were so caught up in Al ¬Qaeda’s external threat to America that we didn’t pay proper attention to the more prosaic threats within…
Bold type is diarist’s emphasis.
(DIARIST’S NOTE: Naked Capitalism Publisher Yves Smith has provided written authorization to the diarist to reproduce her blog’s posts in their entirety for the benefit of the DKos community. Diarist has also received supporting, written authorization for same from some of Ms. Smith’s blogging guests, including monoline insurance expert Tom Adams and CreditWritedowns.com publisher Ed Harrison.)
“ECRI: 'It’s Too Late' for Obama on Jobs.”
Edward Harrison
Cross-posted from Credit Writedowns
(via Naked Capitalism)
Tuesday, August 30th, 2011 3:39PM
Economic Cycle Research Institute co-founder Lakshman Achuthan was on Tech Ticker yesterday discussing the outlook for the economy. Business Insider does a good write-up of his commentary, highlighting the fact that the ECRI has yet to signal a double dip. However, I wanted to add a few comments as well. ECRI’s underlying message is this: we are in a decade-long post-credit crisis struggle which will mean high unemployment even if policy makers focused on jobs (which they have not, I would add).
I agree with this forecast. When I began Credit Writedowns in March 2008, I wrote:
I am cautious about the long-term outlook for the global economy and the U.S. economy in particular. The likely outcome for the next decade is one of sub-par global growth with short business cycles punctuated by fits of recession.
Achuthan explains that this too is the root cause of why he thinks the jobs picture is going to difficult for the US. In essence, Achuthan is saying he expects a series of what I have been calling Shiller Double Dip Recessions. This dovetails with my view of an austerity-induced initial dip followed by the recession-punctuated lost decade thereafter.
Achuthan also explains well that in the short-term the jobs picture has already been set by previous policy decisions. He expects the monthly jobs numbers to continue to be weaker than earlier in the year. If we get a double dip recession, “by definition, the unemployment will be spiking” he says.
Separately, Dean Baker argued yesterday that the President needed to have focused on jobs in a laser-like fashion much, much earlier in his presidency. I would agree with that.
Obama’s failure to understand where we are in the economic cycle and the relationship to historical precedent has been catastrophic to the conduct of economic policy and critical in his missteps. There is more to Obama’s misfortune than a bad economy.
I would add that anything the US President and Congress do now will only be relevant in the medium-term as the election of 2012 nears. I have repeatedly indicated Republicans will be unlikely to support these current job initiatives. Instead they will focus on trimming government expenditure.
The key here is that it does no good for the Republicans politically to compromise with President Obama. His policies are rightfully seen as failed. The right thing to do politically (but not morally) is to try and strike as much contrast to the President as you can, especially if it makes him look more failed. So that means favouring gridlock and pushing deficit reduction, looking for spending cuts and so on – even if it leads to a government shutdown stare-down as it did under Clinton. Is this the right thing to do? I don’t think so, if only because it reduces the number of potential positive economic outcomes. But I am speaking now more from a forecasting perspective than one of advocacy.
- A few comments about Tuesday’s election’s impact on the economy, Nov 2010
If you listen to the Republican voices in Congress and the Republican contenders for US President, this is what you will hear – and will continue to hear. I believe this will mean recession – and recessions cause tax receipts to plunge and outlays to increase, making the deficit larger. Does focusing on deficit reduction reduce deficits? No, an expansionary fiscal contraction will prove illusive. Focusing on deficit reduction will increase the deficit.
This is looking more like Hoover every day. So, the President will have to hang his re-election hat on being able to claim that he prevented an even worse economic environment, hoping the economy doesn’t double dip.
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As I noted it on August 14th…
..Is the actual strategy of our Party in 2012 going to be one where hope is held out that the Republicans will just scare the crap out of the public so much, voters will feel so compelled to stop them that they’ll rush to the polls to re-elect the President?
You know, I never thought I’d say this—given that I’ve always found that a candidate running for re-election or election had to concisely provide reasons to the voter as to why they should cast their vote for them--but that strategy just might work…at least it would in a world where one is not tacitly demoralizing part of their base while attempting to underwhelm voters, in general; and, where their opposition is not spending a billion dollars to kick their ass.
…But Christina Romer, who stepped down last year as the chairwoman of the president’s Council of Economic Advisers, said Mr. Obama should fight for short-term spending in combination with long-term deficit reduction.
“Playing it safe is not going to cut it,” said Ms. Romer, a professor of economics at the University of California, Berkeley. “Not proposing anything bold and not trying to do something to definitively deal with our problems would mean that we’re going to have another year and a half like the last year and a half — and then it’s awfully hard to get re-elected.”
But there is little support for such an approach inside the administration...
And, as Frank Rich closes out his latest piece in NY Magazine…
…Thanks to the killing of the mastermind of the 9/11 attacks and the scattering of Al Qaeda, at least no one can say, ten years later, that the terrorists won. But if there’s anything certain about the new decade ahead, it’s that sooner or later we will have to address the question of exactly who did.
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