But contrary to the right-wing spin machine, there are those pesky facts, such as these five (of many):Long Run wrote:You might think the party whose major accomplishments are a failed trillion dollar stimulus, 5+ trillion in new debt, a healthcare overhaul that is currently a disaster ....
(A) The stimulus worked and would have worked even better if the Republicans had not done everything they could to sabotage it;
(B) The Affordable Health Care Act, despite its rollout problems, has already provided at least ten important benefits to children and young adults -- benefits which the Republicans had no intention of ever providing;
(C) Under Obama, there have been four consecutive years of reduction in the federal budget deficit, including a 37% from fiscal year 2012 to fiscal year 2013;
(D) Obama ended the Bush-Cheney fiasco in Iraq; and
(E) Obama ended the war in Afghanistan -- the longest war in US history.
It is long past time for the right-wing spin machine just to sit down and shut up.
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(A) The stimulus worked:
(B) The Affordable Care Act has provided at least ten benefits for children and young adults:The president is no more likely to get credit for the Fed’s action — for which he was not responsible — than he gets for the transformative law for which he was fully responsible: the 2009 stimulus, which fundamentally turned around the nation’s economy and its prospects for growth, and yet has disappeared from the political conversation.
The reputation of the stimulus is meticulously restored from shabby to skillful in Michael Grunwald’s important new book, “The New New Deal.” His findings will come as a jolt to those who think the law “failed,” the typical Republican assessment, or was too small and sloppy to have any effect.
On the most basic level, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act is responsible for saving and creating 2.5 million jobs. The majority of economists agree that it helped the economy grow by as much as 3.8 percent, and kept the unemployment rate from reaching 12 percent.
The stimulus is the reason, in fact, that most Americans are better off than they were four years ago, when the economy was in serious danger of shutting down.
But the stimulus did far more than stimulate: it protected the most vulnerable from the recession’s heavy winds. Of the act’s $840 billion final cost, $1.5 billion went to rent subsidies and emergency housing that kept 1.2 million people under roofs. (That’s why the recession didn’t produce rampant homelessness.) It increased spending on food stamps, unemployment benefits and Medicaid, keeping at least seven million Americans from falling below the poverty line.
And as Mr. Grunwald shows, it made crucial investments in neglected economic sectors that are likely to pay off for decades. It jump-started the switch to electronic medical records, which will largely end the use of paper records by 2015. It poured more than $1 billion into comparative-effectiveness research on pharmaceuticals. It extended broadband Internet to thousands of rural communities. And it spent $90 billion on a huge variety of wind, solar and other clean energy projects that revived the industry. Republicans, of course, only want to talk about Solyndra, but most of the green investments have been quite successful, and renewable power output has doubled.
(C) Continuous reductions in the federal budget deficit, including a 37% reduction in fiscal year 2013:[1] The ACA eliminates “lifetime caps” so insurance companies can’t penalize kids with diabetes for getting cancer. ...
[2] The ACA extends the incredibly successful Children’s Health Insurance Program – which has protected kids during the recession – through 2015. ...
[3] No-cost preventive care keeps kids healthy and moves America closer to health care, not fix-it care. ...
[4] A stronger Medicaid will ensure child abuse and neglect victims leaving foster care can get the health care they need. ...
[5] Tax credits are already helping small businesses cover uninsured children. ...
[6] New health insurance “exchange” marketplaces give parents more options to cover uninsured or underinsured children. ...
[7] The ACA strengthens Medicaid, so parents can get care too – research shows kids are more likely to be insured when parents are insured. ...
[8] Parents can keep kids on the family insurance policy until age 26, so kids don't start adulthood uninsured. More than 2.5 million kids have already benefited! [And that was as of more than a year and a half ago.] ...
[9] "No wrong door" cuts the red tape, so when kids apply, they get coverage, whether through CHIP, Medicaid, or a new health insurance "exchange" marketplace. ...
[10] Children can no longer be denied coverage or care for pre-existing conditions like asthma or cancer. That means kids can get the care they need when they actually need it.
Congratulations, America! Your deficit fell 37 percent in 2013.
The federal government's 2013 fiscal year ended Sept. 30, though most of us were so busy focusing on the government shutdown that accompanied the new fiscal year that there wasn't much time to reflect on the year that had passed.
Now the Treasury and Office of Management and Budget is out with the final budget results. Surprise! The deficit fell quite a bit in 2013. The federal government took in $680 billion less revenue than it spent, or about 4.1 percent of gross domestic product. In 2012, those numbers were $1.087 trillion and 6.8 percent of GDP. That means the deficit fell a whopping 37 percent in one year.
This is the first sub-$1 trillion and sub-5 percent of GDP deficit since the 2008 fiscal year, which ended the very month that Lehman Brothers fell and a deep crisis set in.