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Election 2012: Your stories
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Stimulus not failed!
My story based on the article : ''The Anti-Economist'' from ''Harper's'' magazine by Jeff Madrick. Good time to reed it! The economy had fallen off a cliff when Obama was elected in 2008. Americans were losing jobs by the hundreds of thousands, and GDP was plummeting. But by the third quarter of 2009, after the Stimulus began reaching Americans, the free fall had stopped. More detailed analisis backs up this conclusion. For example, measuring the impact of the Stimulus on state spanding shows local improvements in growth. Reasonabl estimates are that the Stimulus created 3 million jobs in its 1-st year. Why, then, didn't the economy continue to grow rapidly? Austerity advocates have claimed that persistent high unemployment is proof that the Stimulus failed. The Stimulus was too small when measured against the depth of the recession. A 2nd Stimulus was necessary, but Democrats had been seduced by austerity economics and set out to chop away at the deficit. Romney will ambrace austerity with bright-eyed enthusiasm, and P.Ryan, seems to want to cut every entitlement in sight. Barack Obama is also likely to ambrace it some degree - but perhaps he, and we, will come to our senses. His Health-care plan, having recently made it through the Supreme Court, may yet open a door to making goverment less unpopular. If so - and if he is reelected - Obama will have to walk through that door and proclaim proudly the benefits of goverment. He will have to stimulate the economy and, sometime later in his term, demand higher taxes to stabilize the debt and finance necessary public investment.
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