The Herald Scotland quotes PPI President Will Marshall on Obama’s tax strategy for his second term:
It was a very close race and it showed a country that’s still very divided,” said Will Marshall, president of the Progressive Policy Institute. “But I think that the president does have a specific mandate for an end to tax breaks for the rich.”
Read the entire article here.
Writing for U.S. News & World Report, Jason Gold explains how the Latinos will influence the future of housing policy:
A “Modern Family” coalition of single women, African-Americans, and progressive young voters who are passionate about hot-button social issues helped propel President Barack Obama to a second term this election. But it was the commanding Hispanic vote—Obama won 71 percent of Latino voters—that truly powered the president’s successful run for re-election.
So what helped drive the Latino turnout in key swing states such as Nevada, Arizona, Colorado, and Florida? While a lot can be credited to anti-immigration stances taken by some GOP candidates in the primaries, the struggling housing market in key states also had an impact: The same swing states (Nevada, Arizona, and Florida) that turned out high Latino votes were also the hardest hit in the housing crisis. Moreover, 28 percent of Latino homeowners surveyed earlier this year were underwater, compared to only 14 percent of the general population.
That might have made a big difference when it came to looking at the differing approaches of the Obama and Romney campaigns. While the Obama administration and congressional Democrats crafted legislation and campaigned on broad refinance bills aimed at helping those same underwater borrowers, Mitt Romney took a more hands-off, market clearing approach, infamously telling the Las Vegas Review-Journal to “Let it [housing market] run its course and hit bottom.”
On October 10-12, 2012, the Progressive Policy Institute joined forces with John Cabot University in Rome to highlight the transformative potential of rise of data-driven economic innovation and growth. Hosted by John Cabot in collaboration with the Guarini Institute, the European Privacy Association and the Center for European Policy Studies, the transatlantic dialogue brought together representatives of leading U.S. technology companies and European Union officials, as well as analysts and experts from think tanks, non-profit organizations and academia.
Entitled The Rise of the Data-Driven Economy: Implications for Growth and Policy, the discussion centered on the increasing contribution of data-driven activity to economic growth in the United States and Europe; the European Union’s controversial data protection regulation; the responsibility of companies to build trust by being “ethical stewards” of their customers’ data; and, political threats to an open and free Internet.
Conference Speakers: Rita Balogh, Senior Associate, APCO; Michael Mandel, Chief Economic Strategist, Progressive Policy Institute; Jacques Bughin, Director, McKinsey Global Institute; Anthony House, Manager of Public Policy, Google; Roberto Masiero, President, THINK! The Innovation Knowledge Foundation; Pietro Paganini, Managing Director, European Privacy Association; Pat Walshe, Director of Privacy, GSM Association; Luca Bolognini, President, Italian Institute for Privacy; Ed Black, President & CEO, CCIA; Daniele Pica, Professor, John Cabot University; Megan Richards, Director, DG Connect; Chris Kelly, Kelly Investments; Michael Kende, Co-Head of the Regulation Sector, Analysys Mason; Dimitrios Droutsas, Member of European Parliament; Carolyn Nguyen, Director of Technology Policy, Microsoft; Dr. Thierry Vissol, Special Adviser, DG COMM Media & Communication; Paul W. Taylor, Governing Magazine; Laura Fennell, General Counsel, Intuit; Giuseppe Conte, Professor of Law, University of Florence; Maurice Fitzgerald, VP Strategy–Autonomy, Hewlett-Packard
They defied the pundits: young people turned out to vote in numbers that rivaled their 2008 record. An estimated 23 million young people age 18-29 voted, even more than the highly coveted 65 and over cohort. And not surprisingly, for reasons I’ve previously pointed out, young people overwhelmingly supported President Obama by a margin of 60-40.
But President Obama’s work has really just begun. Now that TV advertising has returned to normal, young people are eager to know what’s next, what President Obama is going to do to help them get more jobs and more money.
Young people are struggling: they’ve had a worse recession and recovery than any other age group. The 18-34 year old cohort is still over 2 million jobs short since the recession began and real earnings continue to fall. But helping young people means understanding why they have been hit so hard in the first place relative to other age groups, why they weren’t the first to be re-hired as common theory dictates, and why the youngest and least educated are being squeezed out of the labor force. Continue reading “Young People Turned Out to Re-Elect President Obama. Now What?”
At CNN, Will Marshall argues that the GOP’s real problem is ideology:
Republicans are consoling themselves with the claim that President Barack Obama didn’t win a mandate Tuesday night, even if he did renew his White House lease for another four years. They are fooling themselves, however, if they think the 2012 election merely ratified the political status quo. More than just a personal victory for Obama, the outcome was an unmistakable defeat for GOP ideology.
Disgruntled conservatives, of course, are already dressing Mitt Romney for the part of fall guy. But this is the politics of evasion. Sooner or later, GOP realists will have to reappraise the party’s message rather than shoot its messenger.
That message was a call for rolling back government. Intoxicated by a potent brew of resurgent libertarian dogma and intense personal animus toward Obama, Republicans vowed to undo his major achievements: health care reform, new rules for financial markets, the regulation of carbon emissions, higher fuel economy standards for autos, and so on.
Read the entire piece at CNN.com.
The economy is improving, but the U.S. is still struggling with an investment drought. Capital spending by business is 26% below the long-term trend, and has not yet recovered to pre-recession levels. By comparison, personal consumption has topped its pre-recession levels, and is much closer to the long-term trend.
Against that backdrop, it is notable that AT&T announced yesterday that it expected a capital spending budget of $22 billion per year for the next three years. To put this in perspective, the *entire* motor vehicle industry invested less than $20 billion in the United States in 2011.
In some ways, AT&T’s willingness to make a public announcement of a capital spending target three years out is a challenge to Corporate America (though the company certainly does not frame it this way). By making this public statement, AT&T is effectively saying that it believes in the communications revolution, data-driven growth, and the strength of the U.S. economy.
Why can’t other companies make the same sort of public announcement of long-term capital spending goals and offer additional certainty to the still recovering U.S. economy? Truthfully, growth is suffering more from investment uncertainty than from regulatory uncertainty. If large companies pledged to maintain or increase domestic capital spending over the next three years, it would go a long way to boosting economic and job growth.
With the election now over, the Obama Administration should hold up AT&T–and other companies willing to invest in America–as examples of what to do right. If Obama wants a high-growth economy with prosperity for all, he needs to encourage more companies to make the same kind of bet on America’s future.
This piece was cross-posted from Innovation and Growth.
In U.S. News & World Report, Jason Gold outlines the five housing issues that will need attention in Obama’s second term:
“Underwater homeowners, tight credit availability, and foreclosures have continued to threaten the nascent economic recovery. So when the nation’s serious housing issues were barely mentioned during election campaigning, it left many scratching their heads, especially with the battleground states of Florida, Nevada, and Arizona among the hardest hit by the housing crisis.
But even if housing was absent from serious debate this election, it will play a significant role in President Obama’s second term. With the election behind us, Americans from Wall Street to Main Street are curious how the President will address the issue that has crippled household budgets and stunted the broader economic recovery.”
Read the entire article at U.S. News & World Report.
Back in 1996, I wrote a book called The High-Risk Society. The book was based on the vision that Americans had to embrace risk and innovation in order to achieve faster growth and long-term prosperity.
An essential part of that vision, however, is the creation of a much stronger safety net. If we are going to ask Americans to take risks for growth, to accept disruption in return for innovation, they have to be protected from the worst consequences of failure.
In particular, it becomes much harder to take a chance on growth if it means you might lose your healthcare. That’s why Obamacare, despite being ungainly and awkward, is an essential step towards a high-growth economy. People who want to start a new company or join an innovative new enterprise shouldn’t have to worry about whether they will be able to get healthcare. People who want to work halftime and go back to school shouldn’t have to worry about whether a sudden medical problem will throw them in the poorhouse.
Obamacare is a step towards unleashing the creative juices of Americans. There are lots of problems, of course. We need to ensure that the new Obamacare bureaucracies don’t strangle innovative company. But now that the basic mechanisms are in place, we can move onto the more important task of empowering innovative and hardworking Americans.
This piece was cross-posted from Innovation and Growth.
Despite Mitt Romney’s belated October dash toward the political center, moderates have lined up solidly behind President Obama. Centrist voters put Obama over the top in 2008, and they could very well do it again today.
Pew’s final campaign poll shows Obama moving from a dead heat to a three-point lead in the election’s last week. Specifically, he cut Romney’s margins among seniors (from +19 to +9) and padded his lead among women (+13 points) and moderates (+21).
Obama leads Romney 56-25 among moderate voters, close to the 60 percent he won in 2008. Because there are about twice as many conservatives as liberals in the electorate, Democrats have to claim big majorities among moderates to win elections. According to Pew, voters now identify themselves as 43 percent conservative, 32 percent moderate and 21 percent liberal, nearly identical to their ideological profile in 2008.
Although liberals consider themselves the Democratic “base,” there aren’t nearly enough of them to deliver victory. In 2008, half of Obama’s vote came from moderates, while liberals accounted for 37 percent. Republicans need fewer moderates to build majorities, which helps to explain why GOP centrists are a vanishing breed. Continue reading “Centrist Voters Back Obama”
Will Marshall, in The Washington Monthly, argues why Republican Party extremism is undeserving of the American public’s support.
Whatever happens, it’s a safe bet the 2012 presidential election won’t go down in history as one for the ages. Barack Obama and Mitt Romney have bickered ad nauseum, but neither has put before voters credible plans for reviving the economy or breaking the choke hold that political polarization has on American democracy.
The choice facing voters, however, isn’t just between the two candidates. It’s also between the parties they represent. And here the choice is easier: Based on its record of political sabotage over the past four years, the Republican Party richly deserves to lose.
America could survive four years of President Romney. But a Romney victory would reward his party’s reckless embrace of ideological extremism and obstructionism. It would vindicate the GOP’s decision to abandon the political center, put partisanship before country, and cater shamelessly to the voters’ darker impulses.
As soon as the results of the election are known, President Obama or President Romney will be beset with a list of difficult decisions: What to do about the fiscal cliff, whether to cut the federal deficit, how to implement healthcare reform or how to get rid of it, whether or how to create jobs.
But the biggest decision facing the next president—and Americans in general—goes far beyond the ‘fiscal cliff’, or any of the machinations which fascinate Washingtonians. Should the United States follow its current path of long-term stagnation, or should we choose a road that likely leads to rapid—but disruptive—growth?
This choice will have huge and resonating consequences. In a slow-growth economy, government leaders must focus on apportioning pain and austerity. The rich and the poor within each country or region struggle over scarce resources, with predictable consequences. We are seeing the face of the stagnant future in Europe now, where country after country are being forced to absorb massive cutbacks. Slow growth means that our children will be poorer than we are. Continue reading “The Next Choice: A High-growth Economy Versus Long-term Stagnation”
On Sunday Mitt Romney told an Ohio crowd that he couldn’t understand why a “college kid” would vote for Obama. He said Obama was spending all their money and that the only thing they would get from it was a bill with interest. Instead Romney promises to cut the deficit and simultaneously create an astounding 12 million jobs in his first term.
Despite his promises, young people overwhelmingly support Obama. President Obama enjoys a 19-point lead over Romney among likely young voters according to the latest polls.
Why? It’s all in the jobs. The number one concern of young voters is jobs and the economy. They need more jobs and more money. And while Romney talks a big game, his lack of details leave young people uninspired.
Meanwhile, Obama’s plan offers concrete ideas to address the economic struggles of young people, the 73 million people age 18-34. Since the recession they have lost over 3 million construction, production, and office jobs. Obama’s plan includes bringing back production jobs that may have been lost to unfair competition, while encouraging “innovation clusters” to form the next crop of high-skill, high-wage jobs. His plan increases public investment in infrastructure, boosting construction jobs in the short-term and providing a foundation for a strong economy in the long-term. His plan establishes more public-private partnerships to better match students with today’s business demands. Continue reading “Why Young People Overwhelmingly Support Obama (Hint: It’s in the Jobs.)”
The big day is finally upon us, and while most signs are pointing to a very narrow popular-vote and perhaps more comfortable electoral-vote win for the president (along with small enough Democratic House and Republican Senate gains to maintain the congressional status quo), the polls and the intangibles are uncertain enough to maintain some sense of suspense.
After a week or so of favoring Romney, national polls have been slowly moving back towards Obama during the last few days. The RealClearPolitics “poll of polls” has Obama up by 0.5%; TPM’s average is at 0.7%. No major national poll—not even Rasmussen—has shown Romney with a lead going down the stretch, though the final Gallup Tracking poll (suspended last week because of the impact of Sandy on response-levels) today could change that. The final Pew survey showing Obama up by 3% is getting a lot of attention because it’s the polling firm that was the first to show a “Romney surge” after the Denver debate.
But it’s the electoral college estimates that are most favorable for Obama, reflecting polls consistently showing him ahead in Ohio, Iowa and Nevada, a combination that along with less competitive “blue states” would give him the presidency. It’s also less clear than it seemed to be last week that Romney has actually pulled ahead in Virginia and Florida, and despite a few outlier polls showing him within striking distance in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin, the consensus is that barring some surprise turnout disparities, those states will fall to Obama as well. Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight rates the probability of an Obama electoral college win at 85%, and Sam Wang of the Princeton Election Consortium at 98%. The conventional wisdom (though not among most Republicans!) is that Obama is in much the same position as George W. Bush was in 2004, with job approval ratings at or just above 50%, and a very small undecided vote. Continue reading “Election Watch: Decision Time 2012”
Recent gains in home prices in the authoritative S&P Case Shiller Index seem to confirm the growing impression that a housing recovery is underway. While the data is clear that home values are indeed rising, it is unclear, as I have pointed out previously, whether the fundamentals behind the rise (record low interest rates, investor participation, and high levels of refinancing) are sustainable.
This does not mean that prices inevitably are set for a decline. The point here simply is to warn policy makers not to take their eye off the ball. Housing markets remain weak, and there is a very real possibility of a double-dip decline in home values early next year.
A closer look at Case Shiller (CS) reveals two trends that could temper enthusiasm about recent index gains. First, the rise in home prices seems to be decreasing month to month. Second, year-over-year (Y-o-Y) increases in home values could falter as many metro regions come up on the one-year anniversary of their lowest price points. This is key since many areas have seen meaningful Y-o-Y gains and that metric has been a large part of the media, policy, and investment narrative driving the recovery. So what happens to housing markets if home price appreciation starts slowing down?
It’s an important question, because investors account for a significant share of housing demand, representing 27 percent of home purchases. Without a continued upswing in prices, they’re likely to stop buying.
Home prices rose 0.9% from July to August, 2012. While welcome, it does represent a decrease of the previous month-over-month reading from June to July 2012 of 1.6%. That number followed three consecutive decreases from 2.2% and 2.3%, respectively. Some of the hardest hit areas that have been key drivers of the home price rebound show similar, albeit erratic, signs of slowing growth over the same period:
| August/July Change % | June/July Change % | May/June Change % | April/May Change % | March/April Change % | |
| S&P CS 20 city (NSA) | .9% | 1.6% | 2.2% | 2.3% | 1.4% |
| AZ-PHX | 1.8% | 2.2% | 2.5% | 2.7% | 2.5% |
| FL-MIA | 1.0% | 2.1% | 1.6% | 1.4% | 0.4% |
| NV-LAS | 1.6% | 0.7% | 1.5% | 1.9% | 1.1% |
Continue reading “Housing Recovery: Getting Stronger or Weaker?”
Will Marshall explains how Obama should speak to America’s pragmatic political center in his closing argument in Politico:
The last time Barack Obama sought my political advice was, let’s see, when was it … oh yeah – never. That’s a shame, because like every D.C. pundit who never won more than a high school election, I’m sure I know exactly what he needs to do to win a second term.
So Mr. President, here it is: my foolproof if unsolicited plan for eking out a victory next month over hard-charging Mitt Romney. Its goal is to enable you to seize America’s pragmatic political center, and it has four parts:
First, stop belittling Romney on the stump. Certainly you should draw sharp contrasts with your opponent on political philosophy and policy, but it’s best to leave highly personal attacks to surrogates, campaign flacks and negative ads. There’s nothing wrong in pointing out Romney’s willingness to jettison issue positions when they no longer serve his purpose. But resorting to ridicule (“Romnesia”) or parroting the kind of contrived, focused-grouped attack lines beloved by political consultants (“wrong and reckless”), makes you sound less presidential and more narrowly partisan. Sure, adoring crowds eat this stuff up, but you’ve already got them in your pocket.
From now to Election Day, you need to speak over their heads to your real target audience — the independents, moderates and weak partisans in eight or nine swing states who will decide this election. Ignore liberals who claim that by bashing Romney you’ll excite the base and spark a big turnout. Persuasion is the name of the game now, and the voters still in play are defined by their aversion to partisan stridency.
Read the entire piece at Politico.
With eleven days left before November 6, the general perception is that the presidential contest is even, though most formal prediction models continue to give Obama a slight edge and some of the more hackish Republicans continue to insist Mitt Romney is riding an endless wave of “momentum” to a landslide.
It’s unclear whether the Romney Surge in the polls that followed the first presidential debate subsided on its own, or was smothered by the vice presidential and the second and third presidential debates, all of which were generally rated as Democratic wins. And for that matter, it’s unclear if the Romney Surge was purely produced by the first debate, or was partially attributable to a natural decline in Obama’s post-convention Surge.
But it does appear that a razor-thin margin divides the two candidates in national polls of likely voters (Obama pretty much leads them all among registered voters), and that while Romney has made gains almost everywhere, he’s still trailing in Ohio, Nevada, Wisconsin and Iowa, and has probably taken the lead in North Carolina and Florida. Virginia and Colorado are too close to call. Post-first-debate measurements of “enthusiasm” that showed Republicans picking up a big advantage were as likely as catching lightning bugs in a jar; both “bases” seem very motivated, particularly in the battleground states. As for undecided voters, some polls (though not others) show Romney making impressive gains among women—presumably charmed by Moderate Mitt—and virtually all show him doing very well—perhaps over 60 percent—among white voters. The new ABC/WaPo poll that came out today, giving Romney a 50/47 lead among LVs, had Obama at 37 percent among white voters, a level lower than any Democratic presidential candidate has received since 1984. But polling in Ohio has universally shown Obama performing better there among white voters than nationally, helping explain his persistent lead in the state most observers think will decide it all (aside from his reported two-to-one lead in early voting). Indeed, the increasing possibility of a Popular Vote/Electoral Vote split in the final results, with Romney winning the former and Obama the latter, is becoming a big preoccupation of the punditry.
So the contest, it appears, will go down to late paid media, GOTV efforts, and external news events. Republicans have a significant but not overwhelming advantage in paid media; Democrats are still perceived to have an advantage in GOTV; and nobody knows how the news will cut, although presidents tend to have more leverage over the news than do former governors. Certainly no one factored Hurricane Sandy into their presidential election forecast models, representing all sorts of challenges and opportunities for Obama, and quite likely disrupting campaign activities in several states in the most crucial days before the election.
Republican hopes of taking back the Senate took yet enough hit this week as Indiana Treasurer Richard Mourdock—already locked in a closer-than-expected race with Democratic congressman Joe Donnelly—followed the path of Missouri’s Todd Akin in making offensive remarks in a public setting about rape and abortion. Mourdock has not been repudiated by national Republicans the way Akin was—indeed, Mitt Romney’s ad endorsing Mourdock is still running despite Romney’s disavowal of the hard-core-conservative Hoosier’s comments calling pregnancies resulting from rape “God’s Will.” But with polls showing significant gains by Democratic candidates in Massachusetts and Connecticut, and no signs of a GOP breakthrough elsewhere, the odds of the GOP making a net gain of three seats are not good. So even if Romney and Ryan win, they may be dealing with a Democratic Senate. This could be very discomfiting to conservatives who don’t trust Romney and assumed he would be effectively controlled by a Republican Congress. But in the heat of the final stretch of the presidential campaign, no Republican is going to breath a word about it.
All in all, between hurricanes, conflicted polling, the possibility of “split decisions” (between the popular and electoral vote, and between the presidential and Senate results), and the even stronger possibility of contested results in key states (both sides have been lawyering up heavily for election day disputes), this could be one of the wildest end-games since—well, 2000. The 2004 scenario of a very close race being decided by Ohio almost seems like a nice, placid fantasy.
