标题: New Urgency in the Battle for Stimulus [打印本页] 作者: 雨落风残 时间: 2011-9-3 23:51 标题: New Urgency in the Battle for Stimulus
美国的失业情况也很严峻，看看Washington Post的报道：
WASHINGTON — Having battled for months over deficit reduction, President Obama and Congress on Friday each confronted new urgency to shift their focus to job creation after the most anemic employment report in many months.
For Mr. Obama, who last month promised a pivot to job creation, the Labor Department’s report raises the stakes as he prepares for a prime-time national address on Thursday before a joint session of Congress. In the speech, he will outline a new round of economic stimulus measures.
In Congress, the reactions from some Republicans suggested small cracks in their party’s wall of opposition to such measures, whether tax cuts or spending. That change underscored the potential of the moment to alter the dynamic in Washington as Congress returns from its recess, though the prospects of a major compromise on short-term stimulus and long-term deficit reduction remain remote.
Within the White House, the report gave ammunition to Obama advisers who have pressed internally for bolder action on tax cuts and spending measures as Mr. Obama makes the final changes to a speech that could be as important to his re-election prospects as any to date. No president since Franklin Roosevelt has been re-elected with unemployment so high.
While the scale of stimulus measures Mr. Obama will seek remains unclear, early indications suggest it will far exceed the limited agenda that the White House was talking about as recently as July, which mostly called for extending for another year a payroll tax cut for workers and unemployment compensation for those out of jobs for six months or more.
Now Mr. Obama has said he will seek those extensions and more, including proposals to put people to work repairing and retrofitting roads, bridges, schools, airports, rails and other public projects, and giving tax incentives to employers to hire additional workers.
The rapidity with which the summer’s signs of a weakening economy have raised calls for fiscal stimulus — from economists, financial forecasters, business leaders and the chairman of the Federal Reserve, Ben S. Bernanke — recalls the final months of 2008, as the near collapse of the financial system intensified the recession that year just as Mr. Obama was preparing to take office. Then, the incoming administration put together a package of tax cuts and spending measures that seemed to grow by the month, and finally passed Congress in February 2009 at nearly $800 billion for two years.
Nonpartisan analysts and the Congressional Budget Office have credited the first stimulus package with helping to end the recession and keep unemployment from growing even higher than it did. They say the winding down of the federal government’s help this year has contributed to the economy’s stall.
But Republicans, who solidly opposed the original stimulus program, say it was a failure that only dug the country deeper into debt — a stand that hardly suggests they will be receptive to such ideas now. That argument against big government helped Republicans win control of the House last November, and they have since forced Mr. Obama and Congressional Democrats into repeated rounds of spending cuts.
While that was widely welcomed at first, given the nation’s mounting long-term debt, economists began to fret that the austerity measures in both the United States and Europe threatened to push the world into another recession. In an analysis this week, for example, the chief economist of OppenheimerFunds, Jerry A. Webman, cited “the counterproductive approach Congress and the administration are taking to fiscal policy.”
Mr. Obama hopes to change the balance with his speech to Congress. He will call for short-term job creation measures now — to prevent a recession that would widen annual deficits through lost revenue and safety-net spending — and for deficit reduction proposals, including spending cuts and tax increases for people with higher incomes, that would take effect after the economy regained full health.
The conventional wisdom has been that Mr. Obama’s job creation plan “is likely to be dead on arrival,” as one financial analysis group, Bank of America Merrill Lynch Global Research, wrote to clients on Friday.
Yet Congressional Republicans’ response to the disappointing jobs numbers suggested slightly more openness than before to Mr. Obama’s pitch. The question is whether the shift is rhetorical or real.
House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, the Virginia Republican who has fostered a reputation as Mr. Obama’s nemesis, in a statement cited two proposals Mr. Obama was expected to make in his address — for infrastructure spending and for job training for the long-term unemployed — as “areas where we can work together to produce real results that will help job creators get people back to work.”
Some Republicans fear the party could bear the greater blame in 2012 if partisan obstruction against the president and political gridlock are seen as damaging to the economy. Through the August recess, unhappy constituents and liberal groups disrupted Republicans lawmakers’ meetings in their districts, demanding jobs bills. And while national polls show Mr. Obama’s ratings at record lows, the grades for Republicans and Congress are far worse.
Secretary of Labor Hilda L. Solis said in an interview that she hoped Republicans would embrace the “bipartisan proposals” Mr. Obama will make. “If they’re not supported,” she said, “then he’s going to take it out to the public.”
Still, many Republicans see no reason to change course, one that is heavily influenced by the antigovernment Tea Party movement that helped them win power last year.
Representative Tom Price of Georgia, chairman of the House Republican Policy Committee, in a statement said more Americans would find jobs if “Washington stops standing in the way.”
Democratic Congressional leaders called for adding job creation to the mandate of the special Congressional committee that was created by the deficit reduction deal to recommend up to $1.5 trillion in deficit reductions over a decade. Representative John Larson of Connecticut, chairman of the House Democratic Caucus, introduced legislation to achieve that.
But Don Stewart, a spokesman for the Senate Republican minority leader, Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, said, “The mandate of this committee is deficit reduction, not new spending programs.”
Republicans blame the economy’s weakness on the uncertainty businesses face as a result of the administration’s actual and proposed regulations on health, environmental and financial matters.
Their main proposed remedy is to end those regulations, and Republicans claimed victory on Friday when Mr. Obama overruled the Environmental Protection Agency — a favorite Republican target — and shelved a plan for stricter standards against smog-causing pollutants that industries said would have huge costs in dollars and jobs.
That action by the president — who, in a departure from most of the past months, did not appear in public today to speak about the jobs report — suggests the increasing pressure he feels to curb his agenda, even at the expense of enraging supporters like environmentalists whose votes he will need next year.作者: 雨落风残 时间: 2011-9-3 23:55
Barack Hussein Obama was sworn in as the 44th president of the United States on Jan. 20, 2009. The son of a black man from Kenya and a white woman from Kansas, he is the first African-American to ascend to the highest office in the land.
He defeated Hillary Rodham Clinton in a lengthy and bitter primary battle before defeating Senator John McCain, the Arizona Republican, in November 2008.
As president, Mr. Obama has won passage of a number of sweeping pieces of legislation, notably a health care bill that will eventually provide near-universal coverage, a goal that had eluded Democratic presidents for 75 years. Other big victories included the $787 billion stimulus bill, passed in February 2009, meant to shore up a cratering economy, and a financial regulatory reform measure, passed in July 2010, meant to reduce the odds of another Wall Street meltdown.
But Mr. Obama has been stymied on measures like immigration reform and a cap and trade system to reduce carbon emissions by the steadfast opposition of Congressional Republicans, who were joined on some key votes by conservative Democrats. His popularity fell steadily — from 70 percent to under 50 percent — as unemployment stayed stubbornly high. By official accounts, the recession ended, but the recovery was too tepid to knock more than a few fractions off the jobless rate. The White House admitted that it had underestimated the extent of the recession, the worst since the Great Depression of the 1930s.
With voters angry about the economy and frustrated with Washington, the Tea Party Movement rose to prominence pushing a radically anti-government agenda, while on the left, pride in accomplishments like the health care bill was diluted by a belief that Mr. Obama was too quick to compromise, too concerned with the well-being of the banks and too reluctant to fight.
A 'Shellacking' in 2010 Midterms
On Nov. 2, 2010, Republicans rolled to their greatest midterms gains in 80 years, recapturing the House of Representatives and cutting the Democrats' majority in the Senate. After what Mr. Obama termed a "shellacking,'' he pronounced himself ready to cooperate with Republicans. The Republicans identified their top priority as rolling back or repealing health care reform.
Later that month, Congress returned to Washington for a lame-duck session that Republicans said would be shaped by their new ascendancy. In fact, after striking a compromise with Republican leaders on the Bush-era tax cuts, Mr. Obama and the Democrats reeled off a string of victories, winning passage of the New Start treaty, the repeal of the military's "don't ask don't tell policy'' and a fund for workers at the World Trade Center site after the Sept. 11th attacks.
Mr. Obama gave in to the Republicans on their top priority -- extending the Bush tax cuts for all income, not just that below $250,000 -- but in return the Republicans signed on to what amounted to a second stimulus package, agreeing to keep benefits flowing to the long-term unemployed, cut payroll taxes for all workers for a year and take other steps to bolster the economy. The agreement provoked anger within the Democratic ranks.
But the deal not only changed the calculus within Congress, but seemed to buoy Mr. Obama's poll numbers as well, and reinforce a sense that he was more willing than his opponents to seek compromise. Mr. Obama also won praise for his speech at a memorial service for the victims of the shooting in Tucson, Ariz., in January 2011.
Nobel Peace Laureate Amid Wars
Overseas, the president stuck by his decision to withdraw troops from Iraq, though on a slower schedule, and began a major escalation of American forces in Afghanistan, announcing in December 2009 that he would send an additional 33,000 troops there. But the war in Afghanistan continued to drag on, and in June 2010 Mr. Obama dismissed his chief commander there, Gen. Stanley McChrystal, after disdainful remarks he and his staff members made about top administration officials became public. General McChrystal was replaced by his boss, Gen. David H. Petraeus, who had been the architect of the anti-insurgency strategy put in place in Iraq in 2007. In the fall of 2010, preliminary talks began between the Afghan government and the Taliban, and administration officials began to speak less of the 2011 that Mr. Obama had set as a date for American withdrawal to begin, and more of 2014 as the time when security might be handed over entirely to the Afghan army.
In 2009, Mr. Obama had been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, an early accolade that the Nobel committee said reflected his emphasis on diplomacy but which was widely seen as being primarily a rebuke of his predecessor.
Mr. Obama’s diplomatic skills were tested in regard to Iran’s nuclear program, where he won a new round of tougher United Nations sanctions; North Korea, which grew more bellicose as its leader, Kim Jong-Il, appeared install a son as a successor; and climate change, where personal intervention by Mr. Obama broke a stalemate at the Copenhagen climate talks in late 2009 but produced no substantive breakthrough.
His most ambitious diplomatic effort came with the relaunching of Middle East peace talks in September 2010. The leaders of Israel and the Palestinian Authority came together for the first time in two years, but the talks broke down almost immediately over the expiration of an Israeli moratorium on some construction in the West Bank.
Mr. Obama put one judge on the Supreme Court in each of his first two years in office. Both were women, bringing the number of female judges to three for the first time in the history of the court. One, Sonia Sotomayor, was the first Hispanic member of the court. She replaced Justice David Souter. Mr. Obama chose his solicitor general, Elena Kagan, to replace the court’s oldest and most liberal justice, John Paul Stevens.
Other issues facing Mr. Obama were the sorts of unpredictable events that can force the reshaping of plans, like the record-setting oil leak deep under the Gulf of Mexico that gushed from April well into July. The spill dominated news coverage for months but appeared to have played little to no role in the election that followed.
Fires in the Middle East
In 2011, the Middle East erupted in rebellion, with long-standing regimes overthrown in Tunisia and Egypt and others like Libya engaged in bloody crackdowns. Mr. Obama, a president often torn between idealism and pragmatism and faulted for moving too slowly, found himself navigating the counsel of a traditional foreign policy establishment against that of a next-generation White House staff worried that the American preoccupation with stability could put a historic president on the wrong side of history. Ultimately, Mr. Obama responded by offering cautious support for the protests spread throught part of the region in the wake of the uprising in Egypt.
Mr. Obama formally opened his re-election bid in April 2011. To build the grass-roots network that he believes is essential to winning a second term, he is preparing to undertake the most ambitious fund-raising effort by a sitting president.作者: 雨落风残 时间: 2011-9-4 00:56
And introductions to the Tea Party Movement
Tea Party Movement
The Tea Party is an antigovernment, grass-roots political movement that began in 2009 and went on to become key to the Republicans' successful bid to take control of the House of Representatives in the 2010 midterm elections.
In the Senate, the Tea Party carried to victory Marco Rubio in Florida and Rand Paul in Kentucky. But it cost the Republicans some seats they had once counted as solid, most notably in Delaware, where Christine O'Donnell lost after having routed an established Republican in the party primary.
The Tea Party contingent in the House, and its supporters, have played a pivotal role as a series of fights over federal spending unfolded over the course of 2011.
It was pressure from Tea Party members that led House Speaker John A. Boehner to push for deep cuts in the final months of the 2011 budget, which brought the government to the brink of a shutdown in April. And resistance to making revenue increases part of any deal over raising the federal debt ceiling played a large role in Mr. Boehner's decision to break off talks with Mr. Obama in late July over a so-called grand bargain to cut the deficit by $4 trillion over 10 years.
While Tea Party groups and members of the Tea Party caucus in the House loudly insisted that they would not support any increase in the debt limit, many rank-and-file Tea Party voters did support it, according to polls. They did not want to risk damaging an already-fragile economy with a potential government default. The majority of Tea Party supporters, in fact, wanted an agreement.
And when Tea Party supporters were asked if the debt-ceiling agreement should include only tax increases, only spending cuts, or a combination of both, the majority — 53 percent — said that it should include a combination. Forty-five percent preferred only spending cuts.
The House approved the agreement, which included no tax increases, on Aug. 1, and the Senate passed the measure the following day, hours before the deadline set by the Treasury. By 32-to-28, members of the Tea Party Caucus voted for the bill, despite earlier claims.
