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Ellen Belcher is the Dayton Daily News opinion pages editor. She writes about state government, education, the environment, higher education and all things Dayton.
Martin Gottlieb is an editorial writer and columnist for the Dayton Daily News opinion pages. He focuses on the political process itself and does such national issues as war, the economy, taxes and Social Security, as well as a hodge-podge of local and state issues.Home > Blogs > A Matter of Opinion > Archives > 2009 > July > 24
Friday, July 24, 2009
Editorial: Voinovich, Brown right on F-22
The U.S. Senate has voted 58-40 to stop building F-22 Raptors, the jet fighters that have never been used in Iraq or Afghanistan.
This is the view of Defense Secretary Robert Gates. He argues that the Air Force and other services don’t always need the most advanced, most-expensive equipment, given the specific kinds of wars the country fights.
President Barack Obama has embraced the position. Sen. John McCain agrees. Both Ohio senators, Republican George Voinovich and Democrat Sherrod Brown, voted with the majority.
The opposition to the Obama-Gates (or Obama-McCain) line was concentrated in states with big defense contractors. Although most Democrats went with the president, those from California, Washington and Connecticut, where contractors have worked on the F-22, abandoned him.
Surely 187 F-22s — the number currently ordered — are enough, and surely the money can be better spent on more useful, lower-flying planes.
The House has voted to build more F-22s. So this fight isn’t over.
But it’s good to see the views of the Pentagon prevail over parochial interests.
Permalink | Comments (7) | Post your comment | Categories: Editorials, Martin Gottlieb, Short editorial
Editorial: Post mortems for stimulus premature
The official unemployment rate in Ohio is 11.1 percent. In Michigan, 15.2 percent. In Kentucky, 10.9 percent. Indiana 10.7 percent. Pennsylvania 8.3 percent. Illinois 10.3. Everyplace, it’s on the rise.
Looked at that way, the differences seem to have less to do with the policies of state governments than with, say, a state’s former dependence on the auto industry.
And yet, the political season is here, at least in the heat of rhetoric. Says a release from Rob Portman, Republican candidate for the U.S. Senate, about a Democratic candidate:“Since Lt. Gov. Lee Fisher became Ohio’s self-appointed Jobs Czar, over 338,000 Ohioans have lost their jobs. We have lost over 136,000 jobs in Ohio this year alone. While Lt. Gov. Fisher continues to support the status quo, another 33,000 Ohioans lost their jobs in June.”
Lt. Gov. Fisher offers the Republicans a two-fer.
Whether the issue is the state government’s performance or the Obama administration’s, he’s a target, because he’s in Columbus now and wants to move to the U.S. Senate, presumably as a supporter of the president.
Even Sen. George Voinovich, a Republican who isn’t seeking re-election next year, is emphasizing the bad news.
“Five months ago, Democrats passed a stimulus bill. … Five months later, unemployment has grown and American taxpayers have little to show for almost $800 billion in spending.” (In fact, though, the vast majority of the $800 billion hasn’t been spent.)
The Obama administration is the legitimate target of some charges and not others. It did make projections about the economy early this year that turn out to have been insufficiently pessimistic. But the president certainly wasn’t optimistic. He always said that the economy would get worse before it got better. He always said that people should look for improvement — if his program passed — next year, not this year.
The administration responds to criticism now primarily by arguing that things would be worse yet if the stimulus had not been passed. In Cincinnati last week, Vice President Joe Biden said budget deficits at the state level could have resulted in thousands of layoffs, if not for the stimulus money, and that would have resulted in thousands more private-sector layoffs.
Maybe. But the largest truth here is this: There’s no point in pretending that the verdict is in on the stimulus.
Ronald Reagan came into office during a bad time for the economy. In the fall of his first year, he won a tax cut that was designed to turn things around. Five months later, things had only become worse. The economy was just entering its worst year since the Great Depression. Democratic rhetoric was apoplectic about how his effort was a failure. And Republicans took a little bath in the 1982 election.
But the year after that, things picked up, and in 1984 the president was able to run for re-election on the slogan “Morning in America,” winning by a landslide.
What about today? The good news is slight. The stock market is up from its pits, and some corporate profits are up, most strikingly in the once prostrate financial sector. But, by common consent, the bottom line is jobs.
Everybody is learning the term “lagging indicator.” People are being told that employment might be the last thing to turn up, because employers will be skittish for a long time.
If only that were the extent of the bad news. In fact, jobs are still disappearing fast. Ohio lost a net 33,000 in June, and the nation lost 467,000.
And things are worse than average in the Dayton area, where all counties have a higher unemployment rate than the state average except Greene, Butler and Warren. Even in the first two of those, the rate is above 10 percent — typically considered awful — and Warren is at 9.7 percent.
Still, there is also no resolution of the debate about the stimulus, no reason to pretend there is any such resolution and no sense in paying any attention to the partisans.
Permalink | Comments (3) | Post your comment | Categories: Economy, Editorials, Martin Gottlieb, National Politics, Ohio politics
