On Friday the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that the unemployment rate fell from 9.0 to 8.6 percent in November. However, if it continues to hover between 8.5 and 8.7 percent on Election Day, as the Federal Reserve Board speculates, re-election is looking to be bad news bears for Obama. You see, no president since Franklin Delano Roosevelt has won a second term in office when the unemployment rate on Election Day was over 7.2 percent (the rate when Ronald Reagan won his second term in 1984).
But does this have to be Obama’s re-election fate? G.O.P. candidates are of course using the unemployment rate to promote their own economic plans of less taxation and regulation, never hesitating to point out Obama’s failed stimulus package and jobs bill. But stepping back from the G.O.P. talking heads and the media headlines we can see that Obama has been and is on the right track to solving the unemployment conundrum, while Republicans have reverted back to their free-market, deregulation loving imaginations.
Case in point, Obama’s 2009 economic stimulus plan was not such a failure after all and could have brought the unemployment rate down even further if it weren’t for republican ideals of less spending and less taxation. Nobel Laureate Joseph Stiglitz noted in 2010 on DemocracyNow! that the economic stimulus package did have some immediate effect at bringing down the unemployment rate, but was too small and contained too many tax cuts to make a bigger impact. It was presented this way solely to garner Republican votes.
Obama again tried to remedy the situation with another jobs plan that was voted down by the Senate in October of this year. The House then separately passed 15 of these jobs bills in order to get something accomplished, but their passage has currently stagnated in the Senate so republicans can preserve their message of “less government, less regulation.” However, in his paper “Regulatory Uncertainty, a phony explanation for our jobs problem” Lawrence Mishel from the Economic Policy Institute cited that lack of demand, not taxes and regulation, is holding business back from hiring. Why are republicans ignoring the facts?
And remember, “less government, less regulation” is what started this mess four years ago under George Dubya and now the economic plans of Republican front runners Newt Gingrich and Mitt Romney look eerily similar to what we have all too soon forgotten. Gingrich, is in favor of “very serious deregulation” while Romney has vowed to “initiate the review of all Obama-era regulations with the goal of eliminating any that unduly burden the economy and job creation.” In lamens terms, Gingrich and Romney would end regulations that were put in place precisely because deregulation didn’t work. Defying logic is always the cornerstone of any good republican economic plan.
So just what will be Obama’s fate on election day? Will we defy history and re-elect a president who is working to get us out of this unemployment conundrum? Or will we vote in Gingrich or Romney, give it a year or two, and then say oops, we did it again?
