Complete the mission, complete what was decided but not yet implemented. This is Barack Obama's real program for the second term, but it is a shadow programme, not very expendable in the electoral campaign. In a country where everything is a show, propaganda based on a realistic reference to continuity would be bankruptcy. Little competitive compared to the cannonade of the Republican rampant Tea Party, "silenced" by a Romney who tried, with difficulty, to portray himself as the candidate with a human face that the conservatives need to overthrow the Obama dream. However, according to many observers, a mask that hides unwelcome surprises for workers and the poor.
A close collaborator, a few weeks ago, urged the mayor to focus more on past successes, therefore to reveal the reality of the facts: it is true, Obama does not have a recovery plan in his drawer to wave on the media. For a simple but valid reason: the pillars on which the discontinuity with the Bush era was based, ie the health care and financial system reform, are still largely unimplemented. With extreme effort and mediation skills, Obama managed to get them through the gauntlet of the Republican Congress unscathed. Essential, so far, has been the firm Democratic majority in the Senate. Without which the Grand Old Party would have dismantled both Obamacare and the Dodd-Frank Act piece by piece, a regulatory wall of a thousand and more pages pointed out by many parties (even bipartisan) as a bureaucratizing mess impossible to apply in the real world. On the other hand, it is difficult to remedy the widespread metastasis of bad finance with a few strokes of the pen.
As for Romney's program, his workhorses win in commercials but are lame if analyzed carefully, especially in tax matters: the plan is to reduce taxes on the rich, covering the hole with linear cuts to tax breaks and deductions, as well as of welfare and subsidies. But the details, so far, have not been received. Not even the phantom plan for 12 million jobs has been illustrated properly. As for immigration, abortion, homosexual rights, there is total silence, even if silence in this case is prudential: the economic question is central and it would not be appropriate to risk too much on chapters considered - today - secondary.
Obama, on the contrary, despite a campaign that will be remembered above all for Romney's gaffes and the marginalization of Europe, has shown greater awareness of a problem that – willy-nilly – the next head of state will have to face: the deficit. The President would like to cut it by 3800 trillion over ten years, raising the marginal rate on income above 250 thousand dollars. An attention to the accounts that is not forgiven by the "liberals", who on the contrary call for more public intervention. Looking at the numbers, they are not entirely wrong. Federal debt is 105% of GDP but the attractiveness of federal bonds is intact, guaranteed by the still strong appeal of the dollar as a global store of value. To the point that the ten-year bond is quoted today at 1,75%, while the two-year yields are at 0,30%: on both maturities, negative in real terms. And the US giant does not suffer from the gaps in competitiveness, as well as in political credibility, which separate the European periphery from the central European core. And which have so far blocked in the bud any ambition to relaunch the continental economy with Keynesian recipes.
Despite Obama's greater clarity (and coherence), the most surprising fact that has emerged in recent days is that Romney receives more support in economic matters: an ABC News poll even gives him ten points ahead of his rival. But it is, according to many economists, an undeserved advantage: the conservatives accuse the President of a feeble recovery, but at the same time they were the first to put a spoke in the wheels of growth: for example by peremptorily rejecting the American Jobs Act or by slamming the door on Congress whenever, after the midterm elections, there is an odor of para-Keynesian stimulus programs. And today the country finds itself having to face the "fiscal cliff" only for an ideological quirk of the Tea Party.
Despite a GDP that returned to 2% growth in the third quarter and an unemployment rate that dropped to 7,8%, the conservatives continue to object that the "jobless recovery" is caused by uncertainty, the daughter of presidential policies . In particular, the White House does not forgive the 800 billion dollar injection, the so-called "American Recovery and Reinvestment Act" of 2009, a mixed protocol between infrastructure spending, subsidies and tax breaks which - according to the hawk Paul Ryan – had limited effects, failing to rebound the rate of employment and output growth. But according to most economists, growth continued to struggle because, on the contrary, there would have been a need for a much more robust plan to complement the Federal Reserve's ultra-expansive monetary policy.
In any case, the "ARRA" has probably stimulated the creation of at least three million jobs. In the absence of the plan, however, six more would have been lost, in addition to those burned by the implosion of the housing bubble. Then there is another reflection to be made: the hangover from private debt still needs to be disposed of, and before households have completed a long but necessary process of "deleveraging", some time will still have to pass. And it is by no means certain that, in the future, the level of private consumption will sustainably return to the splendor of the pre-crisis years.
Not even Wall Street traders and the CEOs of large companies believe the tale of uncertainty that the Republicans tell. Nonetheless, they support Romney, not so much for his dubious and uncertain economic recipes, as for fierce opposition to the taxes that Obama would make them pay, to consolidate the federal accounts while saving welfare and health care reform, without which over thirty million Americans would be left without coverage.
After all, as Kenneth Rogoff and Carmen Reinhart recall in “This time is different”, after a financial crisis it takes an average of seven years of ordeal before recovering the lost ground.
The United States are certainly halfway there, but the "democrats" fear that Romney's counter-reform will again plunge the country into real uncertainty, a prelude to a new plunge into the recession.
