Lost in all the talk about Newt Gingrich’s plan to establish a base and then a state on the moon has been the plight of thousands of jobless along Florida’s Space Coast, who are struggling with the end of the space shuttle program.This has been a big issue in the Sunshine State, with the shutdown exacerbating a weak economy struggling to recover from the Great Recession.
While Gingrich’s expansive and aggressive plan — which also includes robust commercial space operations in Earth orbit and a rocket to Mars — promises much employment, the other three candidates were strangely silent on the matter of how to get unemployed aerospace workers back on the job.
The front-runner, Mitt Romney, strongly attacked the Obama Administration’s space policy as being disastrously directionless and Gingrich’s moon plans as being loony, but he provided no specifics on what he would do differently. Instead, he’s going to consult with a bunch of experts and get back to us. Ron Paul and Rick Santorum mainly confined their remarks to describing Gingrich’s moon base as a waste of money in a constrained budgetary environment.
There are two charitable explanations for the lack of details, neither of which offers much hope to the unemployed. One is that space policy is low on any candidate’s agenda, so most of them haven’t thought it through very much at this point. The second is that this is still the primary, which means the candidates — save for Gingrich — are more interested in attacking each other than offering detailed plans to counter the Obama Administration’s policy.
Over at the Salon, Andrew Leonard has another theory that’s far more disturbing: the candidates lack any fresh ideas. Not just for the Space Coast, but for the unemployed nationwide:
None of the Republican presidential candidates have anything new to say on the topic that we haven’t already heard from the GOP, ad infinitum, ad nauseam, for the last 30 years. Their proposed strategy hasn’t changed an iota since Ronald Reagan ran for president: It’s still all about cutting taxes and slashing regulations.
And there’s a big problem with that. Because whether or not you believe that the current unemployment problem is cyclical — that is, part of the normal ups and down of the business cycle — or structural — a more or less permanent response to a profoundly changing economy — the Republican platform is toothless. On the one hand, it’s hard to combat a cyclical problem with the same policy proposals that one puts in place in good times or bad, and on the other, it’s arguable that the structural problems in the U.S. economy are, at least in part, a consequence of decades of low taxes and deregulatory philosophy.
A tour of the GOP candidates’ websites is revealing. Ron Paul’s website doesn’t even mention either “jobs” or “unemployment” under the category of “issues.” The closest he gets is advocating the passage of more anti-union “right to work” laws. Rick Santorum’s Where I Stand page tells us that he believes in American “Exceptionalism,” is a “Champion of Faith and Families” and makes clear that he really, really opposes gay marriage; but it has no section devoted to either jobs or unemployment. Newt Gingrich does manage to include a page on “Jobs and the Economy” but somehow can’t bring himself to utter the word “unemployment.”
To his credit, Mitt Romney is the only Republican candidate whose website includes a comprehensive (87-page!) plan announcing his economic agenda. If you’re looking for a full-throated lambasting of Obama’s management of the economy, along with complaints about high unemployment, that’s where you’ll find it, a fact that, at first glance, would seem to make Romney a little more suited for electoral success than his current poll numbers would indicate.
But a closer look at Romney’s plan — or Gingrich’s, for that matter — reveals why neither he nor his fellow GOP pretenders to the White House throne are making a bigger deal of the plight of the jobless. They just don’t have anything fresh to say.
Romney’s prescription for an economy that isn’t producing enough jobs is to reduce taxes on savings and investment, eliminate the “death” tax, and cut corporate taxes. As for regulatory policy, for starters, he promises to repeal “Obamacare” and Dodd-Frank, as well as “review and eliminate” all other Obama-era regulations. But this agenda doesn’t separate him from his fellow GOP presidential candidates. He just spells out the party line in greater detail. If anything, Gingrich and Paul are further to the right — advocating even more extreme tax cuts and greater swaths of regulatory slash-and-burning.
None of that does much for the Space Coast. Which explains the relative silence about the unemployed there.
This also points to a larger question no matter who ends up running against Obama: will the strategy work at all? The economy has been steadily recovering, although not at the rate everyone wants. The jobs report for January was unexpectedly strong, with 243,000 new jobs created.
If there is a positive trend for the rest of the year, then Obama can say that the worst is long over, recovery is well underway, and sunnier days lie ahead. Barring any major scandals, wars or terrorist attacks on American soil, that could make Obama hard to beat in November.
Loading ...
