At a meeting with “local job creators” at Consolidated Machine and Welding in Hannibal, Rep. Roy Blunt (R-7th) spread a little of the usual Republican B.S. about the effects of the stimulus:

The selfishness of what the government is doing and realizing that it is wrong and unsustainable and probably in that order. Even if it was sustainable, it’s wrong to decide we’re going to spend whatever we want and we’re going to let someone else figure out how to pay …

Kind of incoherent, but I think I know what he’s trying to say – and what I want to know is why didn’t anybody tell Blunt that the stimulus is working? According to a recent article in the National Journal:

If the economy produces jobs over the next eight months at the same pace as it did over the past four months, the nation will have created more jobs in 2010 alone than it did over the entire eight years of George W. Bush’s presidency.

Thanks to the massive job losses of the Bush recession, we won’t be out of the woods for a long time, but a good case can be made that Pat Garofalo of Think Progress is justified in claiming that the continuing improvement “is a strong sign that the economic stimulus package passed last year is doing what it is supposed to.”

And guess what?  Garofalo adds that contrary to the standard Republican talking point when confronted with job growth statistics, most of the new jobs were not in the public, but in the private sector – an important indicator that the economy is turning around. In all, 523,000 new jobs have been added in the private sector in the first four months of 2010.

Even the slight uptick in unemployment to 9.9% is less disappointing than in the past since, according to White House Council of Economic Advisers Chair Christina Romer, “such a rise in the labor force often occurs in recoveries as workers who had dropped out of the labor force are drawn back in by improved employment opportunities.” Further reinforcing the meme of a recovering job market, The Wall Street Journal notes:

More U.S. workers quit their jobs than were laid off in March, the second month in a row this occurred and a sign of employees’ growing confidence that more positions are becoming available in a slowly recovering job market.

If Roy Blunt wants to keep on blathering abut the stimulus and the debt burden for future generations, somebody really ought to give him a few facts about the relationship between debt and economic growth. It’s simple really – if we create jobs now and grow the economy, there will be less debt for future generations, not more.

If all that was necessary for recovery was, in Roy’s words, for “government to step aside and let Main Street employers create the jobs that are needed most,” we wouldn’t be in the mess that we are in now – after all, it was eight years of laissez faire, hands-off, and every man for himself that got us into the mess we’re in in the first place – and all the desperate lies of sad, ideologically irrelevant pols like poor old Roy can’t really change that fact. The truth always comes out in the end.

So how can Missourians celebrate Earth Day tomorrow in a way that will have real impact? The answer is easy if you live in or near St. Louis or Kansas City: join Repower America and other “clean energy patriots” at a rally outside Claire McCaskill’s offices in those two cities (find information about St. Louis rally here; Kansas City information is here). Alternatively, Repower America will also host call-in events in Kansas City and St. Louis  (click on the cities to volunteer or get information).

At the call-in events, you can volunteer to do outreach to other Missourians and enlist them to, in turn, contact Senators McCaskill and Bond, and tell them how much they want them to support strong clean energy legislation. If you just want to contact one of our senators to deliver the message yourself, you can phone this Repower America number and ask to be patched through to either senator: 1-877-9-REPOWER (9-737-6937).

Why are these events important? We can take it as a given that Senator Bond is unlikely to change his stripes and support meaningful clean energy legislation any time soon, but it is still important for him to hear that many of his constituents do want congress to limit carbon emissions and invest in clean-energy jobs for Missouri.

As for Senator McCaskill, we have recently seen that she may be beginning to get the message that clean energy can mean growth and jobs for Missouri, as well as being essential to continued American competitiveness since other countries are rapidly jumping on the band-wagon. Nevertheless, she needs to know that we support her shifting position, and that we will have her back if she follows through and does what’s right – which includes measures to restrict carbon emissions.

In case you yourself want more reasons about why clean energy is important to Missourians specifically – apart from the general “save the world” issues involved with climate change – just take a look at any of these three fact sheet prepared by Repower America, “Clean Energy Potential in Missouri,” “Clean Energy Jobs in Missouri,” and “How Clean Energy Will Help Missouri’s Farmers.” And then, if you are able, make it on over to one of the Repower America rallies tomorrow or volunteer for one of the phone-in events right away.  Happy Earth Day!

Conventional wisdom – you know, those clichés that animate corporate media analysis – has it that you can’t raise taxes in tough times when revenues shrink, so you must cut spending in order to balance your budget. Republicans, as authors and seminal propagators of these clichés, are firm about this tenet. Consequently, Governor Nixon, a realist faced with a majority Republican legislature, is going about the business of “fixing” our state budget problems by slashing essential spending – while the legislature plans an orgy of tax cutting that is sure to bring a smile to the faces of their I-got-mine-but-I-want-more constituency.

Meanwhile, everybody agrees that the issue is jobs, but nobody seems to notice that the budget cuts that are being made will mean lots of lost jobs – real tangible jobs, lost right now while we are struggling hardest to keep our heads above water. To be precise, Mark Zandi of Moody.com estimates that state budget cuts will cost the U.S.  900,000 jobs unless more stimulus funds reach the states in time.

The proposed tax cuts, on the other hand, might or might not mean a few more jobs sometime in the future. Objective data does not really confirm that lowering tax rates necessarily leads to job creation. As a case in point, Missouri has seen mediocre job growth over the last decade when compared with many states with higher taxes.

Still our Missouri Republicans insist dragging us all, as Zaid Jilani at Think Progress puts it, down:

… the path of the “deficit peacocks,” who demand cutting social spending while ruling out tax increases on those who have benefited immensely from years of conservative policies.  

This choice has not been universal; Jilani describes states such as Oregon and Wisconsin where progressive policymakers have decided that:

… at a time when the tax burden between the wealthy and the middle class is “narrower than at any time in modern history”  …[to] look for ways to responsibly raise revenues while protecting their states’ spending on vital programs.

Looks like we will get another chance to test Keynesian solutions against “free market” business giveaways – and one can only shudder when thinking about how, if the tax cutting mentality continues to prevail, the Missouri misery index will almost surely soar in the coming months.

From his campaign tour bus, Roy Blunt twitters:

Missourians are enterprising people. We don’t need the govt to create jobs. We’ll create jobs if govt will move over. #RoyBluntBusTour

Before we let Mr. Blunt get away with this, there are a few inconvenient facts that he needs to explain.

As of December 2009, Missouri’s unemployment rate was 9.6%, very close to the highest ever recorded rate of 10.3% in 1983. That miserable statistic, of course, is the result of the deepest national recession since the great depression, brought to us, as all honest economists agree, by the tax and regulation cutting GOP. The lowest unemployment rate recorded in Missouri was 2.3% in 2000, under the liberal Mel Carnahan, during the last years of the liberal Clinton administration.

When Roy’s son, little Matty, ascended to the Missouri statehouse, he along with his Republican legislative enforcers in Jefferson City brought unemployment to highs of 6-8%. Doesn’t actually inspire confidence in Mr. Blunt’s grandiose claims about what he and his anti-government fellow travelers can achieve, does it?

Of course, there’s also the inconvenient fact that government interference in the form of the stimulus, maligned as it is by good old boys like Roy, probably saved our goose – even though it’s still a skinny old bird. The question is whether or not the likes of Roy Blunt, touting their failed economic theology, are the people to fatten the goose back up and give us some of those golden eggs.    

Paul Krugman compares the deficit scare talk that is becoming ubiquitous to the false “groupthink” that led us into the Iraq War. At the opposite pole, the St. Louis Post-Dipsatch printed a story about how attendees at the Tea Party convention are seeking to define their hitherto diffuse, rage-impelled “movement” as a “push for limited government and fiscal conservatism” where “Criticism of the deficit and debt is a growing rallying cry.”  

Where do our local politicians come down on this choice between the views of a reality-based Nobel laureate, and sound bites and fury from the same corrupt fools who sold grandma on death panels? The Republicans, of course, have all been pre-programmed to grunt in unison about evil taxes, wasteful spending, and deficit horrors (often, oddly enough, while putting holds on vital appointments in order to get their earmark money). Sadly, however, when it comes to some members of the Missouri Democratic congressional delegation, the answer seems to be pretty clear – they’ll go for the short-term pander as well.  

Take, for instance, Claire McCaskill, who loves to talk about how tough she is – she claims she “has never shied away from taking on the special interests, and she has never feared asking the tough questions.” But when it comes to the spending necessary to prime the economy and create the jobs, this is what she has to say :

The friction between job creation and watching our spending, getting control of deficit is huge.

As McJoan at Dkos correctly observes:

Why that should be so, particularly for a Democrat, is a mystery. People with jobs pay taxes, which creates revenue. People with jobs cost the government less in unemployment benefits, in Medicaid, in any number of necessary social services. People with jobs drive our economy.

Want to fix the deficit? Do what is necessary to create jobs – by which I don’t mean more of the voodoo tax cuts of our Republican past – and the deficit will take care of itself. And while that is happening, the job of politicians like McCaskill is to use their considerable communication skills and access to the media to help their constituents understand how it works.

Update:  This graph (via TPM) makes the relationship of jobs and stimulus spending pretty clear:

The red bars show the rate of job loss during President Bush’s last year in office; the blue bars show job loss slowing during President Obama’s first year of office … and McCaskill thinks that the deficit is the big problem for our economy right now?

Most of us have heard our more retrograde legislators and cable news pontificators gleefully proclaim the stimulus a failure – despite evidence that it softened the recession fallout considerably (see also here). Wiser observers, such as the Nobel-prize winning economist Paul Krugman, note that more rather than less stimulus was what was really needed if we wanted to give the economy the boost required to rev up the jobs engine:

What we’re in right now is the aftermath of a giant financial crisis, which typically leads to a prolonged period of economic weakness – and this time isn’t different. A bolder economic policy early this year might have led to a turnaround, but what we actually got were half-measures. As a result, unemployment is likely to stay near its current level for a year or more.

Sadly, Krugman is probably correct when he notes that efforts to augment the stimulus with realistic job-creation measures will probably fall victim to the current political climate. The result, according to Krugman, will be “years of terrible job markets, combined with political paralysis.”

Krugman’s grim observations were brought vividly home to me when I came across Claire McCaskill’s comments on the topic of a potential Senate jobs bill:

I think we’ve got to be really careful in thinking we can spend government money to get us out of recession,” said Democratic Senator Claire McCaskill, who called for low-interest loans for small businesses.

Nothing too cringeworthy in that pious little observation – but nothing too promising in the vision and courage departments either.  

While the President may set the direction, no president, no matter how visionary or politically savy, can do what needs to be done alone. He needs the support of smart legislators with the courage to take the necessary political risks, not those who, like McCaskill, tiptoe around issues out of fear of offending the sensibilities of the small-minded.

What I want to hear from McCaskill and the rest of the Missouri delegation – the Democrats at any rate, since the Republicans are a lost cause – are serious ideas.  They don’t even have to do the heavy-lifting; there’s lots of good thinking out there for them to draw upon.

Consider, for instance, the Economic Policy Institute’s (EPI) Five-point Plan to Stem the Jobs Crisis, which recommends a WPA style program, along with investments in infrastructure, transportation, and education. The EPI estimates that it would create an estimated 4.6 million jobs in the first year alone, and could be funded by a financial transaction tax, which, in the best progressive style, would hit only wealthiest ten percent.

Why isn’t McCaskill at least addressing ideas like these rather than taking refuge in Republican-lite rhetoric? And why doesn’t she tell us why she is so negative about cap-and-trade? Even honest conservatives like Lindsey Graham admit that controllling CO2 emissions and shifting to a green economy could  power up the economy.

It’s early days yet after all. The President’s job’s forum will take place just tomorrow, initiating the new emphasis on jobs, and there will be time in the coming months for McCaskill to develop her thinking and to communicate her ideas.  Perhaps she’ll blow our socks off.  And perhaps she won’t.  

THE WHITE HOUSE

Office of the Press Secretary

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

February 17, 2009

White House Releases State by State Numbers; American Recovery and Reinvestment Act to Save or Create 3.5 Million Jobs

WASHINGTON, D.C. – The White House today released state-specific details on the local impact of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.  The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act is a nationwide effort to create jobs, jumpstart growth and transform our economy to compete in the 21st century. The compromise package of $789 billion will create or save 3.5 million jobs over the next two years. Jobs created will be in a range of industries from clean energy to health care, with over 90% in the private sector…

And here’s what that means for Missouri:

…The table [pdf] below outlines the impact of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act compromise package on employment by state. The estimates are derived from an analysis of the overall employment impact of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act conducted by Christina Romer, Chair of the Council of Economic Advisers, and Jared Bernstein, Chief Economist for the Vice President, and detailed estimates of the working age population, employment, and industrial composition of each state…

…Missouri 69,000…

[emphasis added]

And here’s what this means for Missouri by congressional district:

…The table [pdf] below outlines outlines the impact of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act compromise package on employment by congressional district….

…Missouri 69,000

Congressional District 1 Missouri 7,000

Congressional District 2 Missouri 8,100

Congressional District 3 Missouri 7,800

Congressional District 4 Missouri 7,600

Congressional District 5 Missouri 7,300

Congressional District 6 Missouri 7,900

Congressional District 7 Missouri 8,000

Congressional District 8 Missouri 7,300

Congressional District 9 Missouri 7,900…

[emphasis added]

And those republican members of Congress (Representatives Akin, Blunt, Emerson, Graves, Luetkemeyer and also including Senator Kit Bond) who voted against the economic stimulus? The don’t appear to favor employment for their constituents. The do appear to favor insane republican dogma over creating and/or saving jobs.

And with these numbers the White House has provided us all a benchmark to check the progress of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.

Mike Garman, who is running for Todd Akin’s seat in the second congressional district, wants to focus on the plight of American workers.

Garman remembers when American companies were the envy of the world.  According to his website, he grew up in that world and understood that American workers made those companies great:  “Mike’s father, a Korean War Naval Veteran and a post-war United Auto Worker, lived the adage of ‘an honest day’s work for an honest day’s pay.'”

Now that union membership has fallen from around 30 percent of the workforce in the fifties and sixties to only 12 percent of the workforce, Garman blames the hard times for blue collar workers on health care and the evisceration of labor laws.  

Canada still has a 30 percent union workforce, and part of the reason unions continue to thrive there is that Canadian companies aren’t saddled with paying for the health care of their employees. Garman insists that if we had government health care, our corporations would be far more competitive.

As for the disembowelment of our labor laws in this country, Garman would like to see the NLRB given the teeth it needs to enforce fair labor practices.  He especially wants to see what labor advocates call “fifty plus one” enacted.  

Fifty plus one refers to what happens after union reps get a majority vote in a company to form a union there.  Typically, the owners stall month after month, maybe up to a year, firing the people who voted in favor of the union and hiring people who will vote against one.  Eventually, they fire enough old workers and hire enough new ones to defeat the union proposal.

A fifty plus one law would mandate a ninety day period for setting up negotiating committees and a 120 day period for agreeing on a contract.  If there’s no contract in place at the end of that time, the matter automatically would go to binding arbitration.  Such a bill was introduced, but didn’t make it through both houses, and anyway, it would have faced a veto.

Of course, a devotion to getting everyone access to health care and protecting good jobs is no guarantee of success in the second congressional.  At best, Garman faces an uphill battle.  The insurance companies will love Akin with lots of cash.

I pointed out to Garman how strongly Republican West St. Louis County is.  I noted that St. Charles is only starting to trend Democratic and that Garman doesn’t have a big “name”. He wasn’t fazed.  Without a hint of conceit, he is rarin’ to take on the battle, because he feels that people’s fear of the health care crisis crosses party lines.  What he didn’t say about the strength of his candidacy–but that I can say–is that he comes across as a down to earth guy who’ll appeal to blue collar voters in St. Charles and Lincoln counties.  Furthermore, he knocked on 3,000 doors just to see if St. Charles residents approved of the Ambulance Service.  He’ll be a hard worker.  

Of course Garman isn’t going to face Akin unless he can get by Byron DeLear.  His attitude is that a primary challenge from DeLear (who has not yet filed) “would be the best thing that could happen to my campaign. I welcome it.”  Garman assumes that a primary contest would put his face and his ideas before the public early on.

Some of you are skeptical about anyone’s chance in Akin’s district, and others think this might be the year for Dems to wallop a few Bush clones.  Here’s hoping the optimists are vindicated, but even if the skeptics prove correct, Mike Garman intends to give Todd Akin a serious challenge.