Obama’s Youth Misery Index

By February 1, 2012

Justin Bieber is amazing,  truly.  As a red-blooded, truck driving, Bruce Willis-watching, steak eating, gun-shooting American man, I have to give the lovable little guy and his serendipitous career serious respect.  But more remarkable than Bieber himself are his Beliebers.  They represent an irrational, piercing and intensely loyal devotion to a persona that transcends than any individual person and their true attributes.

Bee-bopping 12-year-olds (and slightly more sheepish 18-year-olds) are not the only ones to succumb to the weight of personalities.  Four years ago, somewhere between watching Slumdog Millionaire and bragging about the iPhone 3G they preordered, college students fell in love with their own personality cult.

It was something about the seas stemming their rise and the planet beginning to heal.  It was a landslide election for President Barack Obama. Sixty-eight percent of voters in our age bracket backed Obama at the polls, and they gave him almost four times as many Facebook Fans as McCain.

So what did their investment in Team Obama yield?  Ron Meyer at the Young America’s Foundation created a metric to measure just that, called the “Youth Misery Index.”  By simply adding youth unemployment, federal debt per-capita, and average student indebtedness at graduation, it’s a quantitative picture of exactly how those voters are fairing under the Administration’s policies.

Under President Obama, the Youth Misery Index has reached a record high. The President doesn’t magically run the economy, but it is influenced by his policy response to the recession.  The first step was borrowing $826 billion to bail out state governments, hire public sector workers, keep key constituencies happy and try to stimulate the economy.

Did it work?  Even if Team Obama was 100 percent correct and they optimistically “saved or created” 2.4 million jobs, that’s a price of more than a $270,000 per job.

What all that spending did accomplish was ramping up the national debt.  Funding programs with T-Notes is free money to politicians who see only low interest rates, but it costs a fortune to young people who will spend a lifetime paying for record deficits.

PolitiFact confirmed that by the end of Obama’s first term his administration will have added more national debt than the previous 43 presidents combined.

Democrats love to blame debt on the Bush tax cuts, but even after Bush tax cuts had been in effect for years, the annual deficit stood at less than $200 billion.  It exploded after falling revenues in the recession and sweeping bailouts, social programs and a new health care entitlement that had to rig the books to pass Congressional Budget Office scoring.

College students realize all of this, and reality came crashing through the façade.  The most recent numbers in a Harvard poll show that, for the first time, more college-aged voters disapprove than approve of Obama’s performance.

We have a jobless recovery where businesses are slow to hire, investors are reluctant to roll out new capital, and there’s uncertainty about taxes and a quirky regulatory system.  What’s the Administration’s reaction?

Promising us that if we could only tax the rich more, then it’s nothing a few green jobs, infrastructure projects, broccoli in school lunches, and a high-speed rail to Disney World couldn’t fix.

The president should to stop punishing businesses with the second highest corporate tax rate in the developed world, and might as well simplify and flatten the whole code while he’s at it.  Young people can’t afford to finance more stimulus experiments that attempt to create wealth by dipping it out of one side of the bucket and pouring it into the other side.

Young people, in their demonstrable misery, are losing faith that Barack Obama is the man for that job.

 

Will Simpson is an economics and finance major, and a columnist for The Arkansas Traveler.  

 

His column runs bi-weekly on Wednesdays.  

  • Grant Bodiford

    This article is so biased and misinforming it’s a shame.  I guess I’ll do a line-by-line of several of the premises you began with.  First, each job did NOT cost $270,000 (
    http://www.politifact.com/texas/statements/2011/jul/20/david-dewhurst/david-dewhurst-says-presidents-economists-say-stim/).  That bit of misinformation fails to even consider that much of the stimulus bill was tax breaks, projects, funding for programs, etc. 

    Also, your paraphrase of PolitiFact is a tad off because they’ve also ranked very similar statements false (
    http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2011/dec/16/mitt-romney/mitt-romney-says-obama-has-racked-much-debt-almost/) (
    http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2011/jun/01/sarah-palin/sarah-palin-says-obama-has-accumulated-more-debt-p/).  The debt ASSOCIATED with his presidency may come close to these claims, but in actual debt he has SIGNED, this claim is a flat no. ( http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/ezra-klein/post/obamas-and-bushs-effect-on-the-deficit-in-one-graph/2011/07/25/gIQAELOrYI_blog.html ) The debt isn’t entirely Obama’s fault.  The trillions spent in Iraq was done under Bush but wasn’t technically deficit spending at the time.  Your downplay of the Bush Tax Cuts is also shocking.  Sure it was only $200 billion DEFICIT for a few years, but over the past 10 years that few hundred billion has totaled $2.8 trillion in debt and growing! (http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/fact-checker/post/revisiting-the-cost-of-the-bush-tax-cuts/2011/05/09/AFxTFtbG_blog.html).  You’re spot on on the revenues falling, which caused more deficit, but still fail to mention that Bush policies brought in the $4-5 trillion debt I mentioned above. 

    You can’t solely blame Obama and yell “look, he did it!” because the debt is higher during his presidency.  By all means, complain about what he’s doing wrong to fix it, but don’t act like he’s the sole reason of the debt. Hell, most reasons for the debt are out of his control. 

    One of the comment’s that shows a huge amount of conservative bias is the health care reform comment. (“a new health care entitlement that had to rig the books to pass Congressional Budget Office scoring.”).  First of all, what books were rigged? And, how were they rigged?  If you don’t like the CBO’s official reports, then whose financial reports of the health care law are preferable? (Are they Heritage or Fox? :P)  The CBO has reported on MANY occasions that the health care reform cuts down federal deficits by over $100 billion over the next year, which in turn can help the debt if we continue cutting/increasing revenues.

    Also, flat taxes are undesirable to many Americans.  Coming from a very blue collar and under average income household, most flat taxes proposed by republicans have caused my family’s taxes to RISE, while rich pay less taxes.  I did manage to find one point agreeable in your article, lowering the corporate tax rate.  As a blue dog democrat, lowering the corporate tax rate makes sense, as long as the many corporate loopholes that allow companies to get away with paying 0-5% in taxes to be rid of.  In turn though, capital gains taxes need to be increased a tad (not dramatically, but something that reflects at least what the upper middle classes pay in %). 

    When talking facts, please research more and present them to students here at the University in a more correct manner.  Just so you know, I hate the fact that I’m going to be working down this huge public debt as I grow older just as much as you do.  The difference, is that I’m not trying to pin all this debt on a single president who has only been in office for three years and has been attempting to working with stubborn GOP house members to reduce debt/deficit.  And by the way, unemployment has been dropping a bit – down to 8.5% recently.

    Young people, as demonstrated above, are being misinformed and misguided by biased conservative journalists. 

  • Grant Bodiford

    ***** On my paragraph about the health care law, I meant to type that it cuts down federal deficits by over $100 billion over the next ten years.  Not a single year =P.

  • http://www.facebook.com/WilliamNSimpson Will Simpson

    Thanks for your thoughts, Grant.  I’ll answer more thoroughly when I have time, but two your two biggest points:

    1) CBO stats on the PPACA were skewed because, when instructed by Congress on how to score it, they looked at a ten year window that had more years of revenue than outlays.  Because costly provision are phased in, it was a completely misleading conclusion.  Elmendorf even hinted at that, essentially saying they would run the numbers, but it didn’t look at the whole picture.

    2) What Obama is actually responsible for (accrued debt, responsibility for unemployment, etc):  Debt has doubled under his administration, that’s the problem; we can disagree on solutions.  Right-leaning economists (like Harvard’s Marty Feldstein & Greg Mankiw) have always thrown fits about how we score the Bush tax cuts, because the CBO assumes they are a total deadweight loss on revenue, a lot of empirical research suggests that at least half the arithmetic loss in revenue is recovered from GDP growth and the associated taxes.  Some supply-siders (Heritage/AEI wonks) say it’s even more.

    As for unemployment, the takeaway is that his administration erred in its stimulus projections, and there is incredibly demonstrable waste.  Your politifact link about the cost of each job saved/created doesn’t work, but even so, I’ve read both sides and think it’s a fair assessment.  Stimulus tax cuts were hollow, they were rebates; we need rate changes to improve the incentives people face.

    I disagree on flat tax reform, but that’s an insanely long conversation itself.

    Anyway, I don’t have time to have a terribly engaged conversation on here, but at some point I’d love to chat.  I appreciate your thoughts and I’m glad you commented, although I don’t appreciate being lectured to present facts in a “more correct manner;” or say that conservative journalists are misinforming young people.  Earnest people disagree on policy.

    I read all the Paul Krugman/Ezra Klein lefties and National Review/WSJ right wingers.  The later just wage more convincing and morally consistent arguments in my opinion.

    Best regards,
    Will

  • Jeremy

     ”Young people, as demonstrated above, are being misinformed and misguided by biased conservative journalists.”  Only, you forgot to put “only” in between misguided and by.  You need to clear about that point because I don’t think people know that it’s only and no one else.

    Will is right about the CBO’s penchant for static scoring.

    You are right that Bush sucked.  Obama just happens to be worse.  And he has a great deal more control over deficits than you have given him credit for.  It’s a bitter pill he is unwilling to swallow at least in his first term.  Perhaps he would go hardcore in a second term, but I doubt it.

    ————————————————————–

    All that aside, why is it even a discussion that this Presidency has been at best below average.  Deficits, U3 unemployment, U6 unemployment, long-term unemployment, youth unemployment, minority unemployment (cause he ostensibly cares), manufacturing, real inflation (not the garbage that excludes food, etc.), percentage of GDP government spending, disposable income adjusted for inflation, wage increase relative to inflation — pick a category, he is either competing for the worst or is sole owner of the worst in the modern Presidency. 

    He is a failure, an abject failure.  All you have to do is put the stats next to someone you hate and it’s pretty clear.  He’s awful.  By almost any metric, he is the worst President in at least 65 years.  Taking it all as a whole, he’s the worst in the entire modern Presidency.  As bad as Bush was, Obama is worse.

  • http://twitter.com/davidlackey David Lackey