September 2012
16 posts
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The Week Ahead: Wednesday's Presidential Debate...
The biggest election news this week won’t be who wins the presidential debate Wednesday night. It will be how many new jobs were created in September, announced Friday morning by the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Rarely in the history has the monthly employment carried so much political significance. If the payroll survey is significantly more than 96,000 –- the number of new jobs created in August...
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Repackaging Mitt as a Compassionate Conservative?...
“My heart aches for the people I’ve seen,” Mitt Romney said, on the second day of his Ohio bus tour. He’s now telling stories of economic hardship among the people he’s met.
Up until now, Romney’s stories on the campaign trail have been about business successes – people who started businesses in garages and grew their companies into global giants, entrepreneurs who succeeded...
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The Two Major Views About Why Romney is Losing,...
I’ve spent the past few days debating right-wingers — among them, Grover Norquist and Ann Coulter. This isn’t my idea of fun. I do it because apparently many Americans find these people persuasive, and it seems important to try to show why they’re profoundly wrong.
There are two major theories about why Romney is dropping in the polls. One is Romney is a lousy candidate, unable to connect with...
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What Mitt Romney Really Represents
It’s not just his giant income or the low tax rates he pays on it. And it’s not just the videotape of him berating almost half of America, or his endless gaffes, or his regressive budget policies.
It’s something that unites all of this, and connects it to the biggest underlying problem America faces — the unprecedented concentration of wealth and power at the very top...
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Four Reasons Why Romney Might Still Win
Can Romney possibly recover? A survey conducted between Sept. 12 and Sept. 16 by the Pew Research Center — before the “47 percent victim” video came to light – showed Obama ahead of Romney 51% to 43% among likely voters.
That’s the biggest margin in the September survey prior to a presidential election since Bill Clinton led Bob Dole, 50% to 38% in 1996.
And, remember, this recent poll was...
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Why Romney and Ryan are Going Down
Unemployment is still above 8 percent, job gains aren’t even keeping up with population growth, the economy is barely moving forward. And yet, according to most polls, the Romney-Ryan ticket is falling further and further behind. How can this be?
Because Republicans are failing the central test of electability. Instead of putting together the largest possible coalition of voters,...
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Two Cheers for the Fed, but Thumbs Down for...
With deficit hawks circling overhead, the responsibility for creating jobs has fallen by default to Ben Bernanke and the Federal Reserve. Last week the Fed said it expected to keep interest rates near zero through mid 2015 in order to stimulate employment.
Two cheers.
The problem is, low interest rates alone won’t do it. The Fed has held interest rates near zero for several years without that...
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The Wrong Way to Save Money on Health Care
Employer outlays for workers’ health insurance slowed from a 9 percent jump last year to less than half that — 4 percent — this year, according to a new survey from the Kaiser Foundation. Good news?
Our political class believes it is. The Obama administration attributes the drop to the new Affordable Care Act, which, among other things, gives states funding to review insurance rate...
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Moody's in a Mood
The rating agencies are at it again. Moody’s Investors Services says it’s likely to downgrade U.S. government bonds if Congress and the White House don’t reach a budget deal before we go over the so-called “fiscal cliff” on January 2, when $1.2 trillion in spending cuts and tax increases automatically go into effect.
Apparently the credit rating agencies can’t decide which is more dangerous to...
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WatchHere’s a slideshow of the illustrations I did for the new (and expanded) paperback edition of BEYOND OUTRAGE — just out. First time I’ve illustrated my own book (or any other for that matter). Hope you enjoy them.
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The Biggest Economic Challenge of Obama's Second...
The question at the core of America’s upcoming election isn’t merely whose story most voting Americans believe to be true – Mitt Romney’s claim that the economy is in a stall and Obama’s policies haven’t worked, or Barack Obama’s that it’s slowly mending and his approach is working.
If that were all there was to it, last Friday’s report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics showing the economy added...
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The Jobs Report and the Election
President Obama’s speech to the Democratic National Convention was long on uplifting rhetoric but short on specifics for what he’ll do if reelected to reignite the American economy.
Yet today’s jobs report provides a troubling reminder that the economy is still in bad shape. Employers added only 96,000 nonfarm jobs in August. True, the unemployment rate fell to 8.1% from...
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The Real Importance of Bill Clinton's Wonderfully...
Bill Clinton’s speech tonight at the Democratic National Convention was very long but it was masterful — not only in laying out the case for Barack Obama and against Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan, but in giving the American public what they most want and need in this election season: details, facts, and logic.
Republicans have eschewed all detail, all fact, all logic. Theirs has been a...
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The Most Important Political News This Week
The biggest political news this week won’t be the Democratic convention. It will be Friday’s unemployment report. If the trend is good — if the rate of unemployment drops and the number of payroll jobs is as good if not better than it was in July — President Obama’s claim we’re on the right track gains crucial credibility. But if these numbers are moving in the...
