THEREFORE BE IT RESOLVED, that the Republican National Committee identifies ten (10) key public policy positions for the 2010 election cycle, which the Republican National Committee expects its public officials and candidates to support:

(1) We support smaller government, smaller national debt, lower deficits and lower taxes by opposing bills like Obama’s “stimulus” bill;

(2) We support market-based health care reform and oppose Obama-style government run healthcare;

(3) We support market-based energy reforms by opposing cap and trade legislation;

(4) We support workers’ right to secret ballot by opposing card check;

(5) We support legal immigration and assimilation into American society by opposing amnesty for illegal immigrants;

(6) We support victory in Iraq and Afghanistan by supporting military-recommended troop surges;

(7) We support containment of Iran and North Korea, particularly effective action to eliminate their nuclear weapons threat;

(8) We support retention of the Defense of Marriage Act;

(9) We support protecting the lives of vulnerable persons by opposing health care rationing and denial of health care and government funding of abortion; and

(10) We support the right to keep and bear arms by opposing government restrictions on gun ownership; and be further

RESOLVED, that a candidate who disagrees with three or more of the above stated public policy position of the Republican National Committee, as identified by the voting record, public statements and/or signed questionnaire of the candidate, shall not be eligible for financial support and endorsement by the Republican National Committee.

The survey found 62 percent of voters say tax cuts will create jobs and fight unemployment. Only 21 percent say spending can do that. This cuts against the long-standing economic theories that have guided the White House and Democrats since the beginning of the Obama administration. More good news for Republicans; 51 percent believe canceling the rest of the stimulus money would create more jobs, and only 32 percent — rather less than the Democrats’ base vote — want to keep spending it.

Here’s more about the study from EurekAlert!, a science and technology news site.

Unemployment rates topping 10 percent are the highest in 26 years. Families are working more hours and taking on more part-time jobs. At the same time, unemployment benefits are running out for many families. Faced with the worst recession since the Great Depression, many U.S. families have no choice but to draw on inadequate savings to pay for essential household expenses. Many of these families are at risk of losing their housing. They may also cut back on food and healthcare to make ends meet.

The report, from Brandeis’ Institute on Assets and Social Policy, tried to measure families’ asset holding to their ability to pay for essential household expenses and also to invest in future opportunities for mobility, such as a home purchase, business start-up, retraining, or education. The report also showed that less than half of all families have sufficient savings to address essential expenses and invest in opportunities for mobility when faced with a job loss. And things get worse from there:

Moreover, many more households of color lack the financial assets to meet their expenses during periods of unemployment. Sixty-six percent of African American and Latino households are not asset secure, and only 20 percent of households of color have financial assets to invest in opportunities for mobility. While most American families lack sufficient wealth to invest in education, housing, business ventures, or training for better jobs, the dramatic distance that marks families of color is a reflection of the profound, deep, and systematic racial wealth gap.

Instead of moving to create jobs, Congress took action recently to extend the first-time homebuyer tax credit and to give homebuilders a big tax break.  Hopefully a glimpse of the harsh realities experienced by unemployed workers and their families will entice lawmakers to pass legislation that will produce many more much-needed jobs, instead of propping up home prices and paying off interest groups.

The $787 billion economic stimulus bill addressed the issue, providing additional federal funding for the state-federal Medicaid program. But that extra help expires at the end of next year, when unemployment rates are expected to remain near double digits. The looming expiration has left state health officials and children’s welfare advocates anxious about the effects on kids’ health care.

Enter the House health reform bill, which would provide more than $23 billion to continue the additional federal funding for six months. The Washington Post explains:

Under the Affordable Health Care for America Act, the federal government would continue to pay a higher share of all Medicaid costs — 66 percent on average, up from 57 percent before the stimulus — for an additional six months, and erase in one fell swoop a major chunk of states’ projected shortfalls for the coming year.

“It would be a huge help — critical,” said Cindi Jones, chief deputy director of Virginia’s Medicaid program, which quickly estimated last week that it would receive an extra $360 million to $380 million next year under the bill. At a meeting last week of the nation’s Medicaid directors, Jones said the group is unanimously in favor of the provision.

That provision isn’t included in the Senate’s health reform bill, but states are hoping that it will work its way into the final bill. Of course, the temporary help is no remedy to the flawed Medicaid funding formula. It’s worth asking when Democratic leaders plan to tackle that larger problem, if not in the context of the most sweeping health reforms since the program was created.

Among proposals floated so far by members: a ban on spending unused funds from this year’s economic stimulus law (PL 111-5), tougher earmark disclosure requirements and an “all of the above” climate change plan that would expand offshore oil drilling.

I reported back in July that “cancel the stimulus” would be a key Republican message next year, and in my interview last week with Doug Hoffman, the Conservative Party’s candidate in the NY-23 special election confirmed he’d try to cancel “wasteful” stimulus funding if he got to the House.

It should come as no surprise.

Economists, for many months, have warned that employment rates are among the last economic indicators to rebound from a recession, and there’s no reason to think that this time around would be any different.

To examine why, take a hypothetical case. If, in the first few months of some recession, unemployment numbers increased from 1,000 to 5,000 to 10,000, you wouldn’t expect that you’d suddenly be creating jobs in the first few months of the recovery. Rather, you’d see the unemployment numbers declining, say, from 10,000 to 5,000 to 1,000, until you’re back into job-creation territory.

Throughout those early months of recovery, though the month-to-month number of jobs lost would be declining, the unemployment rate would continue to rise. That’s what’s happening here. In February, when President Obama signed the economic stimulus bill into law, unemployment rose by 697,000. In August, the figure was 216,000. That’s progress by anyone’s measure.

Anyone, that is, except Rep. Eric Cantor (R-Va.).

“No real earnings growth in this report that would suggest sustained upward growth in this economy,” Holtz-Eakin said. “It cannot be considered good news that people left the labor force. If not for that, the unemployment rate might have creeped up to 9.6 percent, is my guess.”

Holtz-Eakin challenged Democratic rhetoric about the effect their policies have had in mitigating economic problems, though he allowed that “no one would argue that the stimulus has done nothing.” The problem: Some Republicans have argued exactly that. In February, Dick Armey, the former House GOP majority leader who now leads FreedomWorks, predicted that the stimulus would actually worsen the economic picture. “Taking money out of the private economy,” Armey wrote, “either through taxes or inflation… and spending it in a way that doesn’t offset the loss of money with real economic gains is worse than doing nothing.” In July, Sen. Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.), the GOP’s whip in the Senate, suggested canceling the rest of the stimulus in a column that ran down the ways it seemed, to him, to be failing and wasting money.

The day after President Obama signed the American Reinvestment and Recovery Act, Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-Texas) took to the airwaves to offer voters a different kind of new deal.

“If the American people will let the Republicans back in charge,” said Gohmert on the Feb. 19 episode of Sean Hannity’s Fox News show, “the 60 percent of this bill that won’t be spent until after the next election, we’ll cut it off and let it go to the Americans.”

Image by: Matt Mahurin

That idea didn’t immediately take. In February, support for the economic stimulus package that passed with no Republican votes in the House and only three (including that of Sen. Arlen Specter, who later switched parties) in the Senate, was above 50 percent. The March 31 special election for New York’s upstate 20th congressional district, an early test of a hard-edged Republican message opposing the stimulus, ended with an upset victory for now-Rep. Scott Murphy (D-N.Y.).

But as unemployment numbers rise, and as the Obama administration is forced to admit that its early projections of what the stimulus package would achieve were overly optimistic, Republicans are returning to that February vote and hanging it around the necks of vulnerable Democrats. Increasingly, they are echoing Gohmert’s enthusiastic pledge to scrap whatever stimulus money is left in January 2011. On Monday, Sen. Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.), the Republican whip in the Senate, said that he agreed with a recent poll that suggested Americans want to “cancel the rest of the stimulus spending.” On Wednesday, Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) took to Twitter to make a similar argument: “Admin spent $110B of the $787B and job loss abounds. They should give the remaining $687B back to the taxpayers and stop this terrible idea.” Rep. Todd Tiahrt (R-Kans.), who is running for U.S. Senate in 2010, has offered multiple amendments to bills aimed at cancelling all of the remaining stimulus money. And the Republican National Committee gave its first-ever Grassroots Logic Award to Matthias Shapiro, a Utah IT consultant who directed a viral video that portrayed the spending and job growth promises of the stimulus as stacks of pennies being shoved off of a coffee table.

The return of the stimulus as a political weapon for Republicans as members in both houses of Congress have pre-emptively pushed back against the unpopular idea of a second crack at an economic rescue bill. It also comes as the party and its candidates grow increasingly confident that the stimulus, by failing so far to meet the projections of President Obama and congressional Democrats, is the key to a midterm election argument that the majority party is making matters worse by spending so much money.

“We’re hitting this message every day,” said one House Republican aide, who boiled the party’s mantra down to three words. “Where’s the jobs? Where’s the jobs? Where’s the jobs? [Democrats] can’t answer that.”

There is some variance in the anti-stimulus mantra. Not all Republicans are going as far as Gohmert, Hatch, or Kyl. On a Thursday conference call that was organized to rebut Vice President Joe Biden on his trip to Ohio, House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio), would only say that Republicans would “certainly revisit” the stimulus, and the money left to be allocated, if they won a majority in the 2010 elections. “Whatever is left in January 2011 ought to get a lot of scrutiny,” Boehner said. “I would suggest to you that a lot of it could be cut, because at the end of the day, most of the stimulus money was about creating more government, not creating more jobs.”

At an event promoting his book “Saving Freedom,” Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.) said Republicans would miss an opportunity if they didn’t talk about the stimulus in those terms. “We need to start talking about it,” DeMint said, referring to the money that might be left to be allocated in 2011, “because we need to turn it into tax cuts instead of government spending.”

According to Republican pollster John McLaughlin, Republicans are benefiting from an “evolution” in the way voters view the stimulus, and the way that it has become blurred with banking industry bailouts, foreclosure prevention plans, and other Democratic plans as a wave of spending that has failed to stem rising unemployment. “Initially,” said McLaughlin, “in February, if you asked people if they were against a stimulus program, it was like asking: Are you against stimulating the economy? Since then there’s been more of a consensus that the level of spending is too high.” Voters aren’t grateful for the small tax cut included in the stimulus, said McLaughlin, because “very few people will say they got it, and it’s been overwhelmed by the state taxes they pay, which have been going up.”

Republicans such as DeMint have argued that doubts about the stimulus reflect increasing doubts about the growth of government and increases in spending. Dan Schnur, a Republican strategist who is now a lecturer at the University of California, Berkeley, said that a much more simple worry was at play. “It’s never been clear that people vote on the deficit,” said Schnur, who worked for Ronald Reagan’s 1984 re-election campaign. “Right now, anti-deficit concerns may be a placeholder for broader concerns about the economy. For the Democrats to take this back and get credit for the stimulus, the economy doesn’t have to be recovered, but voters have to believe it’s recovering. You can be a mile inside of hell as long as you’re heading out.”

Steve Stivers, a Republican who lost a congressional race by a razor-thin margin in Ohio last year in a district carried by Barack Obama, is one of the 2010 candidates betting that voters won’t be taking the Democrats’ side on the stimulus. He launched his bid this month, attacking Rep. Mary Jo Kilroy (D) for “spending trillions, growing the size of government” and creating a debt that “our children can’t afford.” In an interview with TWI, Stivers declined a chance to say, like Hatch or Kyl, that he would cancel the rest of the stimulus money. “There were good parts and bad parts of the stimulus,” Stivers said. “Some of the spending eased human suffering, and no one wants that, regardless of where you are on the political spectrum. What you need to stay focused on is how to improve the economy in the long term. Government spending is not going to do that unless you want a bigger government sector, and that’s not something that creates wealth for the rest of the economy.” Stivers debated a recent argument made by Christina Romer, the chairman of the president’s Council of Economic Advisers, that cutting back on spending during a recession led to disaster when it was tried in 1937. “I don’t think too many historians will argue that anything brought us out of the Depression except for World War II.”

Republican pollsters and strategists agreed that opposing the stimulus is a safe bet for Republicans; Schnur suggested that unless some recovery was visible by March 2010, the electorate would decided that the president’s policy had failed and be more receptive to Republican attacks on spending and deficits. Liberal-leaning economists don’t disagree. “Obama hurt himself politically from the outset,” said Dean Baker, the co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research. “I don’t think he ever clearly made the case for the stimulus. Also, Democrats have been demagoguing about the deficit for years. It would have been very difficult for them to turn around and explain why they didn’t want small deficits right now. They decided that they couldn’t make the case.”

The National Republican Congressional Committee has confirmed those worries, dogging Democrats in vulnerable seats with attacks on their votes for the stimulus. On Thursday, NRCC spokesman Paul Lindsay pointed to a special election in upstate New York — a district being vacated by Rep. John McHugh (R-N.Y.) which, as it happens, borders the district Democrats won on March 31 — as the next test to see how the stimulus will play politically.

“Democrats have painted a large target on NY-23,” Lindsay said. “It’s district they see as competitive. They see it as one they can win. So you’ll probably see a lot of signs there as to whether they want to make stimulus an issue or not.”

In a research note that’s been making the rounds of economics blogs this week, Berner declares that “America’s long-awaited fiscal train wreck is now under way.”

By “train wreck,” he means out-of-control federal budget deficits that he’s sure will finally drag the economy under — as if we weren’t already feeling badly enough about its shaky state.

Berner, you’ll remember, sounded the alarm about the first round of deficit spending that followed the tight budgets of the final Clinton years:

[T]here are those who argue that tax cuts alongside falling interest rates are the proper pick-me-up for the economy. Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan seems game. He has endorsed tax cuts and took the benchmark Federal Funds rate down to 4% from 6.5% last December. … Adds Richard Berner, chief U.S. economist at Morgan Stanley: “These tax cuts are a big deal. The tax-cut train has left the station, and it is clearly going to be stimulative.”

I’ll quote Paul Krugman:

[The 2001 tax cuts] didn’t seem to help all that much. Formally, the recession ended in late 2001, but most labor-market indicators continued to worsen into mid-2003.

It’s not a surprise that a recent Rasmussen poll found that 45 percent of Americans want to cancel the rest of the stimulus spending.  I agree.

Most economists expect the impact of the stimulus to come over the rest of this year, but Republican pronouncements of its failure have been coming for months.

UPDATE: This also appeared at Kyl’s web site.