Economics which way for obama

Between January, , and December, , 2. Between January, , and December, , The economy created nearly five and a half times more jobs under Obama than it did under Bush. To be sure, there are legitimate questions to be raised about the quality of these new jobs. Many are either in service industries that pay low wages, such as personal care and hospitality, or they are temporary positions.

Some parts of the service sector that pay higher wages, such as computer-systems support and management consulting, have also expanded significantly during the Obama years. The manufacturing sector, after shedding 2. The 2. Higher wage rates, longer hours, and strong job growth have combined to boost living standards.

Obama will bequeath to the next President an economy that is growing steadily, with large numbers of jobs being created on a regular basis, and living standards finally edging up. Other economic indicators, such as the size of the budget deficit, the level of consumer confidence, and the leverage ratios in the financial system, are also looking much healthier than they were when Obama took office.

The benefits of the Affordable Care Act were concentrated on low- and middle-income families, and much if its cost was borne by those earning more than two hundred and fifty thousand dollars a year, in the form of a 3. Looking at this record, most fair-minded people would surely give Obama a positive report card. But, despite the improvements, the U. Yes, the numbers are accurate—I rechecked them in the statistical annex of the latest Economic Report to the President.

On a brighter note, persistent job growth has persuaded some discouraged workers who had stopped looking for work to try again. And yet, at Clean Energy Manufacturing. The Investing in Manufacturing Communities Partnership IMCP program is an initiative designed to revolutionize the way federal agencies leverage economic development funds.

It encourages communities to develop comprehensive economic development strategies that will strengthen their competitive edge for attracting global manufacturer and supply chain investments. President Obama launched the National Robotics Initiative as part of a broader effort to promote a renaissance of American manufacturing through the Advanced Manufacturing Partnership. Four agencies the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, NASA, and the Department of Agriculture have issued a joint solicitation that will provide research funding for next-generation robotics.

Learn More. BusinessUSA implements a "no wrong door" approach for small businesses and exporters by using technology to quickly connect businesses to the services and information relevant to them, regardless of where the information is located or which agency's website, call center, or office they go to for help. Looking forward, the more federal agencies continue to add resources to BusinessUSA to encompass the full range of business programs and services, the more we will be able to reduce the confusing array of websites that exist today.

Raised the bar on quality through enactment of bipartisan child care legislation that raised health, safety, and quality standards for federally-subsidized child care. Made significant reforms to Head Start and secured funding to increase number of programs in all 50 states.

Learn More PDF. Cut the number of so-called "dropout factories" — high schools where no more than 60 percent of students who start as freshmen make it to their senior year — nearly in half since Watch the Facebook Video. Many states have boosted their investments in early childhood education; in FY alone, 28 states and the District of Columbia increased their own investments in preschool. Information about college costs, graduation rates, and earnings will be featured front and center in hundreds of millions of Google searches related to colleges and universities.

Invested in strengthening more than community colleges, connecting them with employers to train students for jobs in fast-growing fields like high-tech manufacturing, energy, IT, and cybersecurity. Secured a six-year extension and expansion of Trade Adjustment Assistance TAA in June , which provides vital job training, income support and other benefits to American workers displaced by the forces of globalization.

This extension means that over , Americans will be eligible to apply for these benefits. In his State of the Union address, the President tasked Vice President Biden with leading a review of federal employment and training programs that reach approximately 20 million people per year, with the aim of making them more job-driven. That review was completed, and the White House released a report you can read on progress and next steps.

WIOA is bringing job training programs into the 21st century by building on what we know works based on evidence — more partnerships with employers, tools to measure performance, and flexibilities for states and cities to innovate and run their training programs in ways best suited for their particular demographics and particular industries.

We challenged America's high schools to make sure students learn the skills that businesses are looking for in high-demand fields. And we asked high schools to develop partnerships with colleges and employers, and create classes that focus on real-life applications for the fields of the future — fields like science and technology and engineering and math.

The Trade Adjustment Assistance and Community College and Career Training grants have created 2, in-demand education and training programs at community colleges in all 50 states. Nearly , participants have enrolled in these programs, which are helping job seekers get the skills they need for in-demand jobs in industries like information technology, health care, energy, and advanced manufacturing.

Programs targeting high-demand jobs have been launched at more than half of community colleges across the country. Investing in apprenticeships leads to strong outcomes for hardworking Americans and businesses. Since the President launched TechHire in March , more than 70 cities, states, and rural areas working with nearly 1, employers have signed on, and over 4, people have been trained and placed into tech jobs.

In his State of the Union address, the President launched the Upskill Initiative, calling on businesses to help workers of all ages earn a shot at better, higher-paying jobs, even if they do not have a higher education. To date, over employers have committed to best practices to give their workers more opportunity to grow and contribute in the workplace. As more jobs are created, it is critical that Americans with skills, experience, and a desire to work have every opportunity to get back to work to maximize the full potential of our talent pool.

Watch on YouTube , Read the Transcript. Read the Blog Post. The Bush tax cuts enacted in and cut the top tax rates for high-income Americans. The American Taxpayer Relief Act the President signed into law reversed these costly tax cuts, including by:. After these changes became effective in , effective tax rates increased sharply for the highest-income Americans, reversing a decade-long trend of tax cuts for the highest-income Americans.

Overall, relative to the tax code in place before the Administration, in Treasury proposed regulations to close a loophole that allows wealthy families to use certain estate planning strategies to claim large discounts on the value of their assets to reduce their estate and gift taxes.

She would not receive any CTC without this provision. Extended minimum wage and overtime protections to workers who provide in-home care services for the elderly, the ill, and individuals with disabilities, who previously were not covered by these basic workplace laws. Read the Fact Sheet. Read more about the final rule to protect workers from silica. Broadband Opportunity Council Report and Recommendations.

We released first ever Federal policy to guide the responsible testing and deployment of automated vehicles, which has the potential to save tens of thousands of lives in the United States. Read more about the policy. When Thaler and Sunstein asked some of their students to play this game, those who started out with high numbers gave dates that were, on average, three hundred years later than those proffered by students with low numbers.

What is going on here? Lawyers who sue cigarette companies often win astronomical amounts, in part because they have successfully induced juries to anchor on multimillion-dollar figures. Anchoring is one of several mental shortcuts that Tversky, who died in , and Kahneman, who is an emeritus professor at Princeton, wrote about in a paper that marked the beginning of what became behavioral economics.

For this and other contributions, Kahneman received the Nobel Prize in economics. Fear of a terrorist attack is a good example. Following September 11, , many people, myself included, greatly overestimated the chances of their being killed in another al-Qaeda attack, relative to, say, their perishing in a car crash.

If I flip a coin and get six heads in a row, I may well conclude that there is something wrong with the coin. Much more likely, the coin is perfectly fair and the run of heads was simply a random event. Once Tversky and Kahneman got people thinking critically about the rational actor model, they and others quickly identified many more mental quirks, or biases, that are pretty much ubiquitous.

From the perspective of behavioral economics, the key ones are inertia, overconfidence, and loss aversion. Students sit in the same chair for lecture after lecture.

Families go on vacation to the same spot every year. At the start of one of his classes, Thaler makes his students fill out an anonymous survey in which he asks them how they expect to perform relative to their classmates. Typically, fewer than one in twenty say they expect to achieve a grade below the median.

That is overconfidence. Loss aversion refers to the fact that once people own something they hate giving it up, be it a house, a car, or even a humble coffee mug. Many years ago, Kahneman and two collaborators divided a class of students in two, giving the members of one group a mug each that they could keep. After waiting awhile, the researchers asked the mug owners how much they would be willing to sell their mugs for, and they asked the students without mugs how much they would pay for one.

Thaler and Sunstein lay out a number of principles that can be used to encourage better choice-making, and they apply them to various topical issues, including retirement saving, health care, and the environment. In reality, because of the status quo bias, or, perhaps, because of sheer laziness, the fallback option matters plenty.

Studies show that when employees have to sign up, participation rates are often as low as 50 or 60 percent. When people are enrolled as a matter of course, with an option to opt out, the participation rises to more than 90 percent. For decades now, economists have been bemoaning the fact that so many Americans save hardly at all. Here is a simple, noncontroversial measure that seems to work. Thaler and Sunstein propose that credit card companies, mortgage issuers, and other financial services firms should be forced to disclose all of their charges clearly, in plain language, so that potential customers can comparison shop.

Disclosure not only helps consumers make better choices: it can also shame businesses into curbing their egregious behavior. Thaler and Sunstein cite the Toxic Release Inventory, a piece of legislation from the s that forced companies to disclose to the government what potentially harmful chemicals they had stored or released into the environment.

As James Hamilton pointed out in his book, Regulation Through Revelation , the measure was originally intended simply to provide the Environmental Protection Agency with more information, but once enacted it allowed activists and the press to target the worst offenders. Fearful of attracting bad publicity, many companies changed their policies, and overall emissions fell sharply. In light of this experience, Thaler and Sunstein propose setting up a Greenhouse Gas Inventory, which would require companies and other organizations to publish the total amount of carbon they are releasing into the atmosphere:.

In all likelihood, interested groups, including members of the media, would draw attention to the largest emitters. Because the climate change problem is salient, a Greenhouse Gas Inventory might well be expected to have the same beneficial effect as the Toxic Release Inventory.

To be sure, an inventory of this kind might not produce massive changes on its own. But such a nudge would not be costly, and it would almost certainly help. All of this makes for interesting reading, and much of it is sensible. But more work needs to be done.

The return of more and more job opportunities for millions of people who now have jobs that they otherwise would not is welcome news. Yet the employed share of workers in their prime earning years in early — Breaking down the employment data by region also shows substantial variations.

Some parts of the country typically have better employment opportunities than other parts. Take, for instance, the employed share of prime-age workers between ages 25 and 54 in each of four large census regions—Midwest, South, Northeast, and West. In , for instance, The gap between the Midwest and the rest of the country has actually grown since , as the Midwest has experienced the largest increase in its prime-age employment-to-population ratio.

More jobs also meant higher wages and eventually more income for American families. This rise in wages followed from both more hours and higher hourly wages for the typical worker.

In fact, real median usual weekly earnings in the fourth quarter of were the highest on record dating back to Amid rising wages, family incomes eventually increased too. From to , median family incomes increased by 5. Yet income in was still short of that for the typical family in , before the Great Recession started.

Families desperately need more jobs and continued gains in wages—areas where policy can make a real difference, as the past years under President Obama have shown.

The biggest blight in the labor market is the continued unevenness of economic experiences. Many groups continue to struggle more than others, even after years of labor market growth. The African American unemployment rate, for instance, was 7. More jobs, higher wages, and income gains made it easier for families to get out from under the mountain of debt that had piled up before the Great Recession.

Just as the recession started at the end of , the average household owed By the fourth quarter of , this debt level had slightly dropped to It fell to Consequently, by the end of , household debt to after-tax income reached a level last seen in , allowing families to breathe easier.

Current debt levels, though, are still relatively high by historical standards. For instance, prior to , household debt never exceeded percent of after-tax income.

A lot of household debt is not particularly worrisome when interest rates are low, jobs are expanding, and wages are rising. The Federal Reserve has already started to raise interest rates, and costly forms of credit such as car loans and student loans have been on the rise for years, offsetting the declines in relatively less expensive mortgages. The president and Congress thus need to pay particular attention not only to creating more jobs but also to ensuring that those new jobs will be good jobs with decent wages and benefits.

This will allow workers to further reduce their debt burden. The ACA has expanded health care coverage to an estimated 20 million adults, resulting in the largest drop in the share of Americans without health insurance since the creation of Medicaid and Medicare in the s. The intense public backlash in recent months to efforts to repeal the ACA demonstrate how it has improved the lives of millions of Americans. The coverage expansion has not only been improving access to care but is also protecting families from financial hardship.

Fewer families—especially low- and moderate-income ones—report difficulty paying medical bills.