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© 2013 The Sandwich Democratic Town Committee
This morning, The Boston Globe stuck a short piece in section B that should receive enormous attention, especially from Democrats and the President, but probably will go little noticed by the public: “Economy’s rise helps deficit fall”. The story states that the Treasury Department has found that through the first four months of this budget year the national deficit is down 36.6% — yes, down.
Treasury stated that the national deficit stands at $184 billion dollars for the October-January period. That is down – there’s that word again — $106 billion on a year over year comparison for the same period. Moreover, the Congressional Budget Office is estimating that for this budget year the deficit will decline to $514 billion dollars, down from a little over $680 billion from last year. The Globe story notes: “That would be the smallest imbalance in six years” (i.e. since 2008).
Good thing we elected and then re-elected a Republican president and have Republican control of the Senate. Oh, wait….
Tucked away in last month’s employment report — a report that you may recall carried the happy surprise of an increase of more than 230,000 new jobs and a 2/10 percentage point drop in the unemployment rate — was a statistic that surprised experts. Among the jobs added were 48,000 new construction jobs. That made specialists sit up straight in a hurry. It signaled a surprising turnaround might be on the way for the housing market.
Today, we have confirmation of that suspicion and it appears to be unusually robust. The New York Times reports a “Sudden Rise in Home Demand Takes Builders By Surprise.” The story comments that after six years of sitting on the sidelines home buyers are streaming back into the market, a market that apparently has scant inventory for sale. In Sacramento, where the decline in the housing market was among the worst in the country, the median sales price has increased 15% in the last year. Across the country, home prices are up an average of 7.3 percent.
The housing turnaround seems to have caught almost everyone in the business by surprise. As desirable as the long-awaited improvement may be, the unusually low level of homes for sale is creating widespread problems for buyers and sellers alike, leading to bidding wars and bubblelike price jumps in places that not long ago were suffering from major declines.
The positive effects of these kinds of trends tend to build on each other and lead to better, greater results over the long term. This is good news for the country and for the Democrats, but not such good news for the negativists and doomsayers among Republicans who seem to still be intent on making this President fail.
Toward the end of the presidential campaign Lou Cerrone (SDTC Vice Chair) and I made a journey up to New Hampshire to help with door-to-door canvassing for the President. As part of our orientation we were told that the time for regular registration to vote had passed. However, in New Hampshire someone may registration to vote at the polls on the day of the election, and thus cast a ballot.
Armed with information about how to do same-day registration we headed off to go door-knocking for the Obama campaign. On our route we encountered several enthusiastic supporters of the President who had not yet registered. So, we dutifully informed them of the procedure and required documentation for registering at the polls on Election Day. It wasn’t an easy process to complete but the people we spoke with claimed to have all the necessary documentation and understood what we told them they had to do. On we went to the next door, absolutely convinced that there was no way those people would actually register and vote on Election Day.
Boy, were we wrong! Although we have no way of knowing whether the people we met actually registered and voted at the polls, a story in today’s Globe revealed startling information. It turns out that approximately 14% of the votes cast in NH on Election Day were cast by people who registered to vote at the polls – 14%! There were 99,319 same-day voter registrations: “…the state saw a nearly 30 percent increase in the number of people who registered at the polls on Election Day.”
Some place in there are a number of lessons about canvassing, voting, and voter-friendly provisions to enable, not block, the ability of citizens to cast their ballots. Given the outcome of the election – both in NH and across the nation – I have to say I am really happy about being wrong.
The employment report for September produced startling results but that didn’t stop Republicans from trying mightily to “spin” the report in their favor. Don’t fall for it! There are some critical facts in that report that we should keep in mind whenever we discuss the economy and employment with friends, neighbors, and colleagues.
- 114,000 new private sector jobs created in September: this is not great of course but it does display continued upward growth in the job market;
- The unemployment rate dropped to 7.8%: in the past critics could point to a decline as possibly coming from people giving up on finding work and who therefore dropped out of the job market, but not this time…
- A whopping 873,000 more people reported being employed than in the previous month. Note that this number comes from household surveys and is therefore distinct from the “new” jobs number which is focused on new positions created in the private sector.
- The unemployment rate (7.8%) and the number of unemployed (12.1 million) match where those numbers stood when President Obama was unaugurated, before the full brunt of the Great Recession had manifested itself.
- +325,000: The economy has now gotten back all of the jobs lost since January, 2009, and then some.
It’s hard to believe that Republican candidates and members of Congress actually hope ill for the economy and people’s employment but that sure seems like what they are doing. They were so bewildered by the good numbers for September that they actually went on a campaign of accusing Democrats of cooking the books, falsifying the report by shaping it to make the President look good as he runs for re-election. Just about everyone honest observer, including Republicans, condemned that effort as irresponsible and wildly off the mark.
Source: Huffington Post
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