Economists Predict Obama Plan Will Prevent 2012 Recession

Even before taking office Barack Obama was dominating economic policy due to the inability of either George Bush or John McCain to function when confronted by a crisis where the facts contradicted the Voodoo economics popular in the Republican Party. While liberal economists might very well have been correct that Obama’s stimulus was smaller than was needed, it was probably as large as was politically possible, and did keep the country out of a depression. Since then the Republicans have done everything possible to prevent an economic recovery under Obama for political gain, leaving us with a very slow and jobless recovery.

Obama’s latest job program has primarily been discussed in the press and blogosphere with regards to the political implications. Bloomberg has surveyed economists as to its expected affect upon the economy, with economists predicting it will help prevent a 2012 recession:

President Barack Obama’s $447 billion jobs plan would help avoid a return to recession by maintaining growth and pushing down the unemployment rate next year, according to economists surveyed by Bloomberg News.

The legislation, submitted to Congress this month, would increase gross domestic product by 0.6 percent next year and add or keep 275,000 workers on payrolls, the median estimates in the survey of 34 economists showed. The program would also lower the jobless rate by 0.2 percentage point in 2012, economists said.

Economists in the survey are less optimistic than Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner, who has cited estimates for a 1.5 percent boost to gross domestic product. Even so, the program may bolster Obama’s re-election prospects by lowering a jobless rate that has stayed near 9 percent or more since April 2009.

The plan “prevents a contraction of the economy in the first quarter” of next year, said John Herrmann, a senior fixed-income strategist at State Street Global Markets LLC in Boston, who participated in the survey. “It leads to more retention of workers than net new hires.”

Some 13,000 jobs would be created in 2013, bringing the total to 288,000 over two years, according to the survey. Employers in the U.S. added 1.26 million workers in the past 12 months, Labor Department data show.

Regardless of the exact numbers seen next year, there is no doubt that the country will be better off with a continuation of Obama’s economic policies as opposed to returning to Republican policies which destroy the middle class and primarily transfer wealth to the ultra-wealthy. From a political standpoint, Obama will have difficulty with reelection if the economy is doing badly, but those who suggest putting a Republican in the White House are as absurd as the Russians who advocate a return to Stalinism.