tagged w/ recovery act
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For starters, the Recovery Act is the most ambitious energy legislation in history, converting the Energy Department into the world's largest venture-capital fund. It's pouring $90 billion into clean energy, including unprecedented investments in a smart grid; energy efficiency; electric cars; renewable power from the sun, wind and earth; cleaner coal; advanced biofuels; and factories to manufacture green stuff in the U.S. The act will also triple the number of smart electric meters in our homes, quadruple the number of hybrids in the federal auto fleet and finance far-out energy research through a new government incubator modeled after the Pentagon agency that fathered the Internet. (See TIME's special report "After One Year, A Stimulus Report Card.")
http://www.time.com/time/printout/0,8816,2013683,00.html?dbkFor starters, the Recovery Act is the most ambitious energy legislation in history,... more
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Vice presidents have historically played the fool to U.S. presidents, and Vice President Joe Biden is quietly proving to be cast better than most Hollywood producers could dream.
In limited media coverage, the vice president announced a milestone of 200,000 homes being weatherized with Troubled Asset and Relief Program funds on a trip to Manchester, New Hampshire last week. Didn’t hear about it? Neither did hardly anybody else even though the White House announced the event with all the pomp and circumstance it gives major news events, receiving very little media coverage.
Perhaps that’s because more than 7.5-million Americans have lost their homes to foreclosure, and less than 500,000 have received mortgage modifications through the president’s Making Home Affordable modification program. The event occurred on the same day President Barack Obama was playing golf ironically with his banking buddy. There hardly seems to be any appetite for homes being weatherized when millions are being kicked out of theirs.
“Thanks to the Recovery Act, thousands of construction workers across the country are now on the job making energy-saving home improvements that will save working families hundreds of dollars a year on their utility bills,” the vice president told a small crowd in Manchester. “From replacing windows and doors to adding insulation, these are small changes that are making a big difference for American workers, manufacturers and consumers.
“We’ve hit the accelerator on the weatherization program, making over 200,000 homes more energy-efficient already, and are now full speed ahead to meet our original target of weatherizing 600,000 homes nationwide.”
Biden visited Manchester, where the “DuPont family," no doubt distantly related to one of the richest families in America is expected to save over $600 a year on their utility bills once their weatherization project is completed, according to the White House. The news release issued by the White House went on to say that New Hampshire (being one of the coldest states) has been a leader in the federal weatherization program with more than 1,000 homes that have been re-insulated since June
After ramping up last year, the Weatherization Assistance Program is now weatherizing homes at about 25,000 a month. The White House Making Home Affordable plan intended to modify between four and five million homes when it was originally launched 20 months ago is responsible for less than 500,000 mortgage modifications, a figure that critics of the plan find laughable.
In fairness, the weatherization program is credited with creating thousands of jobs, according to the White House, supporting 13,000 jobs in the second quarter of the year, including 120 new jobs in New Hampshire. Maybe Biden should have made a point of that as he sells the Obama administration’s program across the country and left the DuPonts out of the picture.
Published August 31, 2010Vice presidents have historically played the fool to U.S. presidents, and Vice... more
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Richmond, Va. --
It not only could have been worse -- it most assuredly would have.
The longest, deepest recession since the Great Depression knocked the pins out from under Americans from all walks of life. People lost jobs and, with them, health coverage. Consumer spending withered, putting even more jobs in jeopardy.
Private-sector expansion ground to a halt; businesspeople without customers can't be optimists.
The recession caused record-breaking declines in state revenues nationally. Virginia's general fund tax revenue fell for two years in a row for the first time in 50 years.
And that didn't happen in isolation. At the same time revenues were collapsing, the need for essential services was going up. More families needed help with health care, food assistance, job training; meanwhile, K-12 school and college enrollments were rising. Somehow that widening gap between needs and resources had to be met.
It makes for good TV sound bites to say we should just slash spending. But that's no way to help struggling families and protect Virginia's economy. It's no way to make sure investments are made that will help the commonwealth make the most of prosperity when it returns.
Someone had to do something; luckily, the federal government did. The primary vehicle for assistance has been the federal Recovery Act adopted in February 2009. By the end of this year, the act will have provided Virginia and its citizens with about $9 billion.
Recovery Act money sent directly to the state budget closed a large portion of state budget shortfalls, which helped preserve jobs and maintain many services. Virginia also is receiving valuable federal funding for schools, jobs, housing, transportation, public safety, health, and social services.
And Virginia households benefited directly from Recovery Act provisions like tax credits for working families, economic recovery payments to seniors, disabled adults, and veterans, and extended unemployment payments.
But this is about more than dollar figures and program names. Direct aid to Virginians and fiscal relief for the state budget put money back into the Virginia's economy at a time when consumer demand was plummeting.
When people lose their jobs or see their hours reduced, families cut back on purchasing to reflect their loss of income. That only makes the recession worse: As consumers cut back on what they buy, business profits fall and they too scale back employment, further reducing demand. Someone has to break that vicious downward cycle.
Enter the Recovery Act.
Yes, we are not out of the woods yet. Yes, unemployment is still too high. Yes, it would have been nice if the Recovery Act had provided even more assistance, but that's politics. There is no denying that people are working today, and spending money, who wouldn't be if Congress and the president had listened to the do-nothing voices.
The widely respected, nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office has found that the Recovery Act created between 1.8 and 4.1 million jobs nationwide through March 2010 and raised inflation-adjusted gross domestic product by 1.7 to 4.2 percent. Virginia's proportionate share would come to between 46,000 and 105,000 jobs.
Critics say the Recovery Act will make the federal deficit worse. They are wrong.
First, it's important to point out that most of the deficit comes from the huge tax cuts of the Bush years, fighting two wars, and the monumental economic downturn of the recession. When the economy is back on its feet, we need to turn more attention to the deficit. But the first priority needs to be the nation's jobs deficit.
What the federal government is spending on recovery is but a fraction of the deficit and by preventing a deeper recession and returning the economy to normal more quickly, Recovery Act spending may well reduce long-term deficits.
Looking forward, Virginia still has work to do. Despite crucial assistance from the Recovery Act, many important public services have been cut.
State leaders have repeatedly decided to follow primarily a cuts-only strategy (only raising taxes on low-income working families by slashing the state earned income tax credit in the latest budget, for example) instead of a balanced approach that would position us to provide the services we expect from our public sector and help create the kind of state we all want.Richmond, Va. --
It not only could have been worse -- it most assuredly would have.... more
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"But that’s just the perception of accomplishment. Did the Recovery Act actually accomplish what it was intended to do?
If you ask Republicans, the answer is an emphatic “NO.” The likes of former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich, Minority Leader John Boehner, and the newly-minted Sen. Scott Brown (just to name a few) have all claimed that the Recovery Act “didn’t create one new job.” Are they right?"
Read more: http://www.ypnation.net/recovery-act-working-you-bet-it"But that’s just the perception of accomplishment. Did the Recovery Act... more
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Is Obama doing it? Just asking.
"One year in, the evidence is clear – and growing by the day – that the Recovery Act is working to cushion the greatest economic crisis since the Great Depression and lay a new foundation for economic growth."Is Obama doing it? Just asking.
"One year in, the evidence is clear – and... more
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By Zach Carter, Media Consortium Blogger
One year after President Barack Obama secured passage of his critical economic stimulus package, the U.S. Senate is finally taking anther look at how to create jobs and repair the economy. These issues are more important than ever, but absurd Republican obstructionism and timid Democratic negotiation are once again threatening good public policy.
Not really bipartisan, is it?
As Steve Benen notes for The Washington Monthly, the Senate Finance Committee reached a “bipartisan” agreement to supposedly spur job creation last week. Republicans demanded billions in tax cuts for wealthy people, but kept on caterwauling about the federal budget deficit. In exchange for $80 billion to dedicate to jobs—an extremely modest figure given the state of the labor market—Republicans asked for hundreds of billions in giveaways for the rich. And that’s just to get the bill through the Finance Committee, much less the full Senate.
In a piece for Working In These Times, Michelle Chen notes that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid pulled the plug on the Finance Committee “compromise,” but stripped out a critical extension of unemployment benefits for laid-off workers in the process.
The Republican uproar over such modest job figures is an economically preposterous political ploy, and Democratic cave-ins to their demands are both bad politics and bad economics. Chen notes that 70% of Americans support a $100 billion jobs bill. And we know what kinds of programs help spur employment—many of them were passed in the stimulus bill last year and have saved millions of jobs.
Stopping the Bleeding
In an interview with Christopher Hayes of The Nation, Economic Policy Institute Fellow Josh Bivens explains that Obama’s economic stimulus package has worked well, effectively stopping the job hemorrhaging that the economy was experiencing immediately before Obama took office. Here’s Bivens:
“We haven’t returned to growth on employment … but the rate of contraction has slowed radically. Immediately before the Recovery Act is passed, we’re losing on the order of 700,000 jobs per month … In the past three months, we’re now down to something like between 50 and 75,000 jobs lost per month, on average … it really is a stark before and after.”
Racial inequality and the recession
The trouble is, the stimulus was only big enough to prevent the economy from getting much worse. It was not large enough to return the economy to serious job growth. And the brutal effects of the recession are not being shouldered equally. As LinkTV’s collaboration with ColorLines illustrates (video below), the Great Recession is hitting people of color much harder, but the story of racial inequality is being lost in stories about statistical economic recovery in the financial sector. The special profiles several families of color struggling to make ends meet in the worst recession since the Great Depression, which features Depression-era unemployment rates for African Americans.
“What we don’t see on TV are the [people] who never had a home or a good job to lose in the first place. These are the millions of poor people whose chance to cross the line into middle class has always been cut short by another kind of line, the color line,” says host Chris Rabb, founder of Afro-Netizen.
Rabb, ColorLines and LinkTV describe a social safety net that has been shredded by opportunistic politicians. Instead of focusing on ways to guarantee good jobs, politicians since the Reagan era have demonized black single mothers by exploiting racist stereotypes in an effort to justify slashing federal supports for the poor and unemployed. The result is a fundamentally unstable economy. Our society has weak demand for goods and services in good times, and that demand completely falls apart when economic conditions deteriorate. And while these socially destructive initiatives have been described as “pro-business,” the truth is, businesses don’t like societies where millions of people are impoverished. They don’t have any customers.
Predatory lending strikes again
The recession hasn’t exactly been a picnic for the middle class, either. In an article for Mother Jones, Andy Kroll profiles the mortgage mess that Ocwen Loan Servicing created for borrower Deanna Walters. Unlike millions of other borrowers dealing with mortgage headaches, Walters wasn’t actually behind on her payments. She was making payments regularly, but Ocwen was misplacing them, and charging her thousands of dollars in improper fees. Walters even paid the fees, but Ocwen eventually foreclosed on her home and sold it in an auction without even informing Walters.
As Kroll emphasizes, Ocwen’s antics aren’t unique. There is an entire class of companies known as mortgage servicers that specialize in deceiving and bullying borrowers out of their money. They often use illegal tactics, and as I note for AlterNet, have been systematically exploiting a badly designed foreclosure relief program from the U.S. Treasury Department.
Funding projects that will put people to work
As prominent economist Dean Baker argues for The American Prospect, there are dozens of productive programs that would put millions of people back to work—if they could just get the funding. The government could quickly and easily provide money to improve public transportation, develop open-source software, fund objective clinical drug trials and (my favorite) support writers and artists, whose work would subsequently be available for the public to enjoy for free.
Taxing financial speculation
The federal government can afford these programs right now, especially without any additional tax revenue. But if we’re really worried about the budget deficit, we can always turn to reasonable new sources for taxes. As Sarah Anderson details for Yes!, an obvious place to look is financial speculation. Since excessive and risky trading helped bring down the economy in 2008, a tax discouraging this behavior could make the economy stronger and reap as much as $175 billion a year for the public.
Our economy wouldn’t face troubles of the same order as those it must overcome today if so-called conservatives had not spend decades pursuing a radical agenda to shred the social safety net. The stimulus package has not spurred job growth to date because of cuts demanded by Congressional Republicans, nearly all of whom refused to vote for the bill anyway. Our economy needs a jobs bill now. It’d be nice if Republicans would show some interest in governing, but if they continue to refuse, Democrats must act on their own.
This post features links to the best independent, progressive reporting about the economy by members of The Media Consortium. It is free to reprint. Visit the Audit for a complete list of articles on economic issues, or follow us on Twitter. And for the best progressive reporting on critical economy, environment, health care and immigration issues, check out The Mulch, The Pulse and The Diaspora. This is a project of The Media Consortium, a network of leading independent media outlets.By Zach Carter, Media Consortium Blogger
One year after President Barack Obama... more
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The Obama administration's recovery act has created or saved over 1 million jobs, top administration officials told reporters this week. While official data compiled and released by the independent recovery act oversight board this week showed that direct recipients of federal dollars under the act reported creating at least 640,000 full-time jobs, Jared Bernstein, a top economic advisor to Vice President Biden, stated that the report only told part of the story.
The new report described only "a subset" of the total number of jobs "directly created or saved" by the President's economic recovery act, Bernstein explained on a conference call with reporters. Essentially, the new report was based on reports made by some 57,000 public and private entities about the number of jobs they were able to save or create with the assistance of federal recovery act money.
Analysis of the "jobs multiplier" created by other recovery act money, such as unemployment insurance expansion, tax rebates, stimulus checks to seniors and veterans, expanded health benefits payments and additional circulation of money through the economy was not included in the report. According to Bernstein, the evidence suggests the total number of jobs reported by recipients and created with as a result of the "jobs multiplier" is at least 1 million.
"And the recovery act is on track to create or save 3.5 million jobs before it winds down at the end of next year," Bernstein pointed out. So far $340 billion from the recovery act have been obligated in direct payments to public and private recipients as well as in tax credits, unemployment compensation and stimulus rebates.
Senior White House Advisor Ed DeSeve explained that the new report showed that an estimated 300,000 jobs related to public education had been saved or created by the recovery act. At least 80,000 construction jobs, virtually all of which are private sector jobs, have also been saved or created. He also explained that 90 percent of the recipients of federal dollars reported on the number jobs they create door saved with recovery act money.
While this latter number was higher than expected, a quick calculation shows that as many as 6,000 entities failed to report for some technical reason or other misunderstanding. The true jobs number is likely to be higher.
Even in its limited review, the AP found job counts that were more than 10 times as high as the actual number of paid positions; jobs credited to the stimulus program that were counted two and sometimes more than four times; and other jobs that were credited to stimulus spending when none was produced.
For example:
- Some recipients of stimulus money used the cash to give existing employees pay raises, but each reported saving dozens of jobs with the money, including one Florida day care that claimed 129 jobs saved.
- A Texas contractor whose business kept 22 employees to handle stimulus contracts saw its job count inflated to 88 because the same workers were counted four times.
- The water department in Palm Beach County, Fla., hired 57 meter readers, customer service representatives and other positions to handle two water projects. But their total job count was incorrectly doubled to 114.
Those errors were included in an early progress report on the stimulus released two weeks ago that featured numerous mistakes, including a Colorado business' claim that its stimulus contract created more than 4,200 jobs. TeleTech Government Solutions actually hired 4,231 temporary workers for its stimulus project, but most of them worked for five weeks or less and the others no more than five months, company president Mariano Tan said.
http://www.politicalaffairs.net/article/articleview/9127/The Obama administration's recovery act has created or saved over 1 million jobs,... more
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Vice President Joe Biden is joined by California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and Maryland Governor Martin OMalley as he reports on the success of the Recovery Act in creating or saving over a million jobs so far. October 30, 2009.Vice President Joe Biden is joined by California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and... more
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Colorado companies have created more jobs through federal contracts funded with stimulus dollars than companies in every other state, according to the first batch of Recovery Act data.
While the number -- 4,695 jobs created or saved -- may sound encouraging for Colorado, it also is misleading in terms of economic impactColorado companies have created more jobs through federal contracts funded with... more
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