It just might be the worst endorsement ever. Seventeen top economists were asked who would be better for the economy: Romney or Obama. It was clearly viewed as a question of the lesser of two evils by the economists. Nine out of 17 economists selected Romney but Bill Watkins, executive director of the Center for Economic Research and Forecasting at Cal Lutheran University, selected Romney with the world’s best example of damning with faint praise: “Romney’s policies would likely be less bad for the economy than Obama’s.” Like five others, Gary Rosenberger of EconoPlay, simply refused to “pick your poison” between the two men.
I love “polls” with just 17 individuals with at least five refusing to give you an answer.
Of course, Obama did fare worse with the economists but the survey shows that economists, like many Americans, do not see a strong choice between the two men. The result of a monopoly is often less choice and that goes for business or for politics when only two parties control the nation.
Source: CNN
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/peter-s-goodman/we-are-the-100-percent_b_1920681.html Peter Goodman
Romney Budget Proposals Would Necessitate Very Large Cuts in Medicaid, Education, Health Research and Other Programs
Center on Budget and Policy Priorities
PDF of this report (11pp.)
By Richard Kogan and Paul N. Van de Water
Updated September 24, 2012
http://www.cbpp.org/cms/?fa=view&id=3658
Excerpt:
Governor Mitt Romney’s proposals to cap total federal spending at 20 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) and boost defense spending to 4 percent of GDP would require very large cuts in other programs, both entitlements and discretionary programs.
This update of an earlier analysis is based on updated economic and budget projections that the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) issued this summer and additional information that the Romney campaign has provided on his budget proposals. The resulting estimates of the required budget cuts are somewhat smaller than the ones we released on May 21, but they are still very deep.
For the most part, Governor Romney has not outlined cuts in specific programs. But if policymakers repealed health reform (the Affordable Care Act, or ACA) and exempted Social Security from cuts, as Romney has suggested, and cut Medicare, Medicaid, and all other entitlement and discretionary programs by the same percentage to meet Romney’s overall spending cap and defense spending target, then they would have to cut non-defense programs other than Social Security by 22 percent in 2016 and 34 percent in 2022 (see Figure 1). If they exempted Medicare from cuts for this period, the cuts in other programs would have to be even more dramatic — 32 percent in 2016 and 53 percent in 2022.
If they applied these cuts proportionately, the cuts in programs such as veterans’ disability compensation, Supplemental Security Income (SSI) for poor elderly and disabled individuals, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP, formerly food stamps), school lunches and other child nutrition programs, and unemployment compensation would cause the incomes of large numbers of households to fall below the poverty line. Many who already are poor would become poorer.
The cuts in nondefense discretionary programs — a spending category that covers a wide variety of public services such as elementary and secondary education, law enforcement, veterans’ health care, environmental protection, and biomedical research — would come on top ofthe substantial cuts in this part of the budget that are already in law, due to the discretionary funding caps in last year’s Budget Control Act (BCA). By 2022, the cuts under Governor Romney’s budget proposals would shrink nondefense discretionary spending — which, over the past 50 years, has averaged 3.9 percent of GDP and never fallen below 3.2 percent — to 1.8 percent of GDP if Medicare shares in the cuts, and to 1.3 percent of GDP if it does not.
“Romney’s bid for the White House — the most intellectually vacuous, mean-spirited and (thankfully) ineptly run campaign in recent memory — has boiled down to one central idea: The government is just an elaborate welfare dispensary for lazy, morally degenerate people who would rather feast on food stamps than work for a living.
In seeking to cast President Barack Obama as the supposed champion of this model, Romney has eagerly pandered to the libertarian fantasy that the best role for government is no role at all. He has played on the part of the American identity inclined to celebrate our frontier roots while in essence arguing that only losers need government services.
Romney’s cynical campaign has been underwritten by the one constituency that would actually benefit from a crippled government: mega-corporations whose profit opportunities would be boosted in the immediate term by not having to worry about pollution limits, public health interests, labor codes or any other impediment to doing as they please. (And, yes, a handful of well-connected executives would profit handsomely, too.)” Ron Goodman, Huffington Post
Elaine, Austerity does not work. Although Obama was criticized by economists on the right for even having a stimulus package, he needed to do more at the outset. The jobs bill is still stuck in the house.
Joseph Stiglitz: Romney’s Plan Will ‘Increase Likelihood Of A Recession’
The Huffington Post | By Harry Bradford
Posted: 06/05/2012
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/06/05/joseph-stiglitz-romney-spending-cuts-recession_n_1571105.html
With the presidential election just months away, one Nobel Prize-winning economist seems to have made up his mind.
Left-leaning economist and Columbia professor Joseph Stiglitz told Bloomberg Monday that Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney’s plan to slash government spending would send the economy into a downward spiral.
“The Romney plan is going to slow down the economy, worsen the jobs deficit and significantly increase the likelihood of a recession,” Stiglitz told Bloomberg.
He went on to say that President Obama “recognizes the need to stimulate the economy” and sees income inequality as a “significant problem,” while Romney does not.
During other stops on the promotional tour for his new book, “The Price of Inequality: How Today’s Divided Society Endangers Our Future,” Stiglitz touched on income inequality, CEO pay and other economic issues, but was particularly critical of austerity measures that cut government spending while raising taxes.
“No large economy has ever recovered from recession through austerity,” Stiglitz warned during an interview Bloomberg reporter Betty Liu.
A number of recent studies lend support to this view. Both the IMF and United Nations released studies last September that found austerity can have negative effects on the economy. The IMF reported that austerity hurts incomes and worsens long-term unemployment, while a United Nations study warned that nations’ continued pursuit of austerity could result in a “permanent recession.” More recently, the International Labor Organization found that worldwide “austerity has not produced more economic growth.”
Stiglitz’s criticism of austerity is also shared by fellow progressive economists Robert Reich and Paul Krugman, among others. Krugman wrote in a New York Times column last October that austerity both in the U.S. and Europe had been an “abject failure.”
tax policy and the courts are 2 different animals.
By the way I am all for government as limited by our founding documents. People need some government to protect their rights.
How can I be against the rule of law when I say use the court system to punish bad actors?
Government should not be setting standards for the color of margarine, that is what I mean by government should stay out of the economy.
Elaine, Maybe they are former Bain advisors.
Bron,
Intervention is how government enforces laws. You are still blind to that fact by your Objectivist/Libertarian mantra of “government is bad”. You say corporations need to be controlled yet you discount the only mechanism short of using military force against them to exert control: the rule of law. Who codifies and enforces laws? The government. Your insistence that government stay out of business and yet business needs to be constrained from bad action is an ouroboros – a snake eating its own tail.
Bron,
so who are the 17 “top” economists?
*****
I would like to know too.
Here is a “talkie pictograph” of how we are supposed to believe in our plutocracy and what they are and will continue to do to us:
” I mean policies like tax incentives for creating domestic manufacturing jobs and penalties for off-shoring.”
Just more government intervention. Tax policy is a bad way to create incentives for business. They are false markers.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/ezra-klein/wp/2012/09/30/pressed-to-explain-romneys-tax-plan-paul-ryan-ducks/ Some economists might like Romney’s plan to lower taxes on the wealthy and raise them on the middle class but even Paul Ryan is ducking.
Is it true that Romney is a gypsie? Roma, Romani, Romanich and Romney. I googled it and I yahooed it and then I asked the guy who did my driveway sealing job. All indications are that Romney is a gypsy or gypsie. Inquiring minds want to know.
Hey! Zara! That is fighting words or like yelling Fire! in a theatre. Ever since the dog in the crate on top of the car, we dogs are against Romney. My dad, also named Jack MeHoff, was shipped out of Russia for dog abuse. I am a Jack Russell. Elect a guy like Romney to the House of Lords in England. He is well suited– excepting the jeans.
The bottom line is the economy isn’t going to get any better until the financial and commercial banking sectors are forced to be segregated again. A strong economy requires this bifurcation; one system dedicated to supporting the basic integrity of the economy that is not intermingled with a second system that is based on “speculation” (which is essentially gambling). Also required is a change in laws that create proper incentive for rebuilding the American manufacturing base. And I don’t mean “proper incentive” to be policies like removing the minimum wage or allowing polluters to run rampant. I mean policies like tax incentives for creating domestic manufacturing jobs and penalties for off-shoring.
If an economists is really picking…. I’d pick neither as well…. They deal in theory….kind of like a painter in abstract…. But with implications on my. Pocket book….
When you read the CNN article, it seems like a hit job. Very few of the people questioned were named. How can anyone from Wall Street complain when the market has soared ice Obama took office?
so who are the 17 “top” economists?
This is a bogus “poll” if we dont know who they are asking.
I asked 25 “top” economists just the other day and 20 of them said Romney is better, 3 abstained, 1 was for Obama and 1 picked neither.
Mitt Romney …….. for Dog Catcher!
“Economists” … those who did not see a Plutocracy forming, and most of whom do not yet realize that their talk of economy is a myth now, that once upon a time was, when America was a middle class driven consumer economy.
They are the lapdogs of the 1% who live out on Highway 61.