Wednesday was a difficult day for The American Independent News Network, which is the larger entity that operates The Iowa Independent. Our chief executive and founder announced two of our sister sites would close and their content would be moved to The American Independent.
A recently introduced bill could have far-reaching impact on the U.S. sugar industry, including American Crystal Sugar, a farmer-owned cooperative that locked out 1,300 Midwest workers on Aug. 1.
The chairman for Herman Cain’s Iowa effort says the campaign “relied more on the word of farmers than Washington regulators” in deciding to run an ad containing claims the Environmental Protection Agency says are false.
The Iowa Senate will remain under the control of a slim 26-25 Democratic majority when it reconvenes in January 2012.
The failure of Washington lawmakers to recognize the severity of the Great Recession has slowed the recovery and allowed unemployment to reach double-digit levels, according to some of the nation’s leading economists.
The experts hope that the latest effort — in the form of a new “jobs bill” being crafted by Democratic leaders — will not only be sizable enough to tackle the problem, but also will focus only on programs providing the most “bang for the buck.”
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev. (WDCpix)
“In retrospect, they were overly optimistic,” Dean Baker, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, a liberal policy group, said of the previous efforts to stimulate the economy. “They just didn’t appreciate the severity of the downturn. … Even now, they don’t seem to get it.”
Not that lawmakers don’t have some practice at the sport. In February of 2008, with the nation’s unemployment rate at 4.9 percent, President Bush approved $168 billion in direct, $600 tax rebates — much of which, the experts suspect, taxpayers saved rather than spent.
One year later, with unemployment tickling 8 percent, President Obama took a $787 billion stab at the same problem. Many economists maintain that Obama’s stimulus has been heroic in preventing the economy from tanking even further than it has over the past year. Yet, with unemployment now hovering at 10 percent, they also contend that there is plenty of room for Democrats to improve their stimulus design.
“It is doing what it was intended to do,” said Heidi Shierholz, economist at the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal analysis group. “It just wasn’t big enough. … At the time, we were losing 700,000 jobs a month. There was definitely [the thought that] this $800 billion is not going to do it.”
Also, Shierholz conceded, “There was stuff in there that just wasn’t that efficient as far as spending goes.”
Read more at The Iowa Independent’s sister site, The Washington Independent.
Do you know where to vote on Election Day? Do you know what to bring with you? Get comprehensive voter information for your state here.
Sign up for our email newsletter