October 28, 2010
Obama's and the Dems' Achievements  

• Passed the stimulus bill. It was too small mathematically to close the output gap, but:
• The CBO estimates it raised real GDP by between 1.7 and 4.5 percent, lowered unemployment by between 0.7 and 1.8 percent, and increased the number of people employed by between 1.4 million and 3.3 million.
• Blinder and Zandi estimate it raised real GDP by 3.4 percent, lowered unem­ployment by 1.5 percent, and increased the number of people employed by 2.7 million.
• Macroeconomic Advisers, IHS Global Insight, and Moody’s Analytics (and thus all major macroeconomic forecasting firms) provide similar estimates.
• Contrast that with the Republican policy of no stimulus. By CBO estimates, GDP would be lower by between 1.7 and 4.5 percent, unemployment would be higher by between 0.7 and 1.8 percent, and the number of people employed would be lower by between 1.4 million and 3.3 million.
• The stimulus also, among many other things:
• Invested about $100 billion into our crumbling national infrastructure and transportation system, the largest investment in American infrastructure since Eisenhower.
• Invested about $60 billion in renewable and clean energy, by far the largest such government investment ever.

• Passed the health care reform bill, which, among many, many things too numerous to mention:
• Ends denial of coverage because of preexisting conditions. 
• Ends rescission.
• Limits annual and lifetime out-of-pocket expenses and ends lifetime payment caps, so that tens of thousands of people with insurance will no longer go bankrupt each year paying expensive medical bills.
• Requires automatic renewability of insurance.
• Makes children eligible to remain on parents’ insurance plans until age 26.
• Requires insurers to spend 80 to 85 percent of premiums on medical care. (Currently they spend as little as 60.)
• Makes Medicare patients eligible for annual free preventive care services, such as cancer screening. 
• Closes the Medicare prescription drug “doughnut hole.”
• Expands Medicaid eligibility nationally to people with incomes up to 133 percent of poverty.
• Provides generous subsidies to help lower- and middle-income Americans buy health insurance. Consider the following schedule (which assumes a family of four with a $9,435 policy):

• For a family of four at 150 percent of the poverty level, the government covers 86 percent of premiums. At 175 percent of the poverty level, it’s 79 percent, etc. If you can’t tell that this is progressive legislation, you wouldn’t know progressive legislation if it hit you in the face.

• Expanded the State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP) to cover four million more children, bringing the total to 11 million children nationwide.

• Passed the Lily Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, which amended the 1964 Civil Rights act for equal pay for equal work.

• Passed the Hate Crimes Prevention Act (the Matthew Shepard Act) that extends hate crime status to crimes motivated by a victim’s gender, sexual orientation, gender identity, or disability.

• Passed the Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act, giving the FDA power to regulate tobacco, including nicotine content and how cigarettes are marketed. President Bush threatened to veto the bill. The tobacco industry spent nearly $308 million since 1998 trying to block it.

• Passed the Omnibus Public Land Management Act, placing under federal protection more than two million acres of wilderness, thousands of miles of rivers and a host of national trails and parks - the largest conservation effort of the last 15 years.

• Passed the Credit Card Accountability, Responsibility and Disclosure Act, which, among many other things, requires that card issuers give card-holders 45 days notice of interest rate increases and that card-holders can cancel a card before such changes take effect, prohibits card companies from raising interest rates during the first year of a credit card contract, and eliminates unrequested over-the-limit fees.

• Overhauled the student loan system in which banks were subsidized to give loans that were guaranteed by the government anyway, so banks could effectively print money. The savings are now put toward actual aid to students.

• Canceled a bloated, irrelevant weapons system, the F-22, the first time ever that a major U.S. weapons system was cancelled.

• Appointed Sonia Sotomayor and Elana Kagen to the Supreme Court. Contrast that with George W. Bush’s appointees, John Roberts and Samuel Alito. John McCain said he was “very proud to have played a role in the appointment and nomination of two great Supreme Court justices, Roberts and Alito.”

• Signed a nuclear arms deal with Russia that would reduce both countries` nuclear arsenals by a third.

• Eliminated Bush’s rules restricting federal funding of embryonic stem cell research.

And so much else. Most of these things help people. And if that’s boring, I’m sorry. But that’s what governance is. At its best it’s about making people's lives better, incrementally, and often against enormous odds, as over the last two years.

If you’re too apathetic to vote, don’t claim you care about people.