unemployment

The Meaning and Misuses of GDP

America’s Gross Domestic Product — GDP — is a very powerful statistic. Markets and politicians zealously track the quarterly numbers looking for a bottom line on how investors and the rest of us feel about our conditions and prospects. Compiled by some 2,000 economists and statisticians at the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA), GDP pulls together everything they can measure concerning how much America’s households and various industries earn, consume and invest, and for what purposes. Over the last two weeks, however, two new developments should have reminded us that we know less about GDP than we usually believe.

Early this week, the BEA itself tacitly acknowledged that the GDP measure lags behind the actual economy. The Bureau released a set of changes in how it calculates GDP, designed to take better account of the economic value of ideas and intangible assets. Today, few among us would question the notion that new ideas can have great economic value. But some 15 years ago, long before smart phones, tablets and protein-based medications, the BEA started to study how to revise the GDP measure to take better economic account of innovations. This week, the Bureau announced that when a company undertakes research and development or creates a new book, music, or movie, those costs will be counted as investments that add to GDP, rather than ordinary business expenses, which do not.

In an instant, the official accounting of the economy’s total current product increased some $400 billion. Business profits also have been larger than we thought, because ordinary business expenses reduce reported profits, while investments do not. Most important, the revisions told us that American businesses and government, together, now invest just 2.1 percent of GDP in R&D — less investment than in the 1990s here, especially by businesses, and less than much of Europe.

While this week’s BEA changes bring us closer to an accurate picture of GDP, last week we learned how naïve we can be about blatant misuses and distortions of GDP. This story began four years ago, when two well-respected economists, Carmen Reinhardt and Kenneth Rogoff, published an economic history of financial crises. R&R’s timing (2009) was impeccable, and their book was a bestseller for an academic treatise. More important, it gave its authors wide public credibility when they issued a paper the following year, “Growth in a Time of Debt,” that claimed to have found a deep and strong connection between high levels of government debt and a country’s economic growth. The data, they reported, showed that when a country’s government debt reaches and exceeds the equivalent of 90 percent of GDP, its growth slumps very sharply.

With the big run-up in government debt spurred by the financial crisis and subsequent deep recession, conservatives who had waited a long time for a plausible economic reason to slash government found it in the new R&R analysis. And based on its authors’ newly-elevated reputations, conventional wisdom-mongers from think tanks to editorial boards echoed the new line on austerity. Even the most liberal administration since LBJ couldn’t resist the new meme. Despite a palpably weak economy, the President and congressional Democrats grudgingly accepted large budget cuts, and then pumped the economy’s brakes some more by insisting on higher taxes. And we were not the only ones so economically addled. As government debt in Germany, France, Britain and most other advanced countries rose sharply, conservatives there argued that less government was a necessity for average Europeans as well.

Just last week, we learned that the R&R 2010 analysis was so riddled with technical mistakes that its “findings” about what moves GDP are meaningless. When three young economists from the University of Massachusetts found they couldn’t replicate the results – the standard test for scientific findings — they took R&R’s model apart, piece by piece, to figure out why. It turns out that R&R – or more likely, their graduate assistants – left out several years of data for some countries, miscoded other data, and then applied the wrong statistical technique to aggregate their flawed data. And as bad luck would have it, all of their disparate mistakes biased their results in the same direction, amplifying the errors. In the end, instead of advanced countries experiencing recessionary slumps averaging – 0.1 percent growth once their government debt exceeded 90 percent of their GDP, the correct result was average growth of 2.2 percent carrying that debt burden.

Utterly wrong as R&R’s analysis was, the austerity advocates proceeded to badly misuse it. The authors had merely reported a correlation between high debt and negative growth – or, as we now know, between high debt and moderate growth – without saying what that correlation might mean. Hard line conservatives and their think tank supporters, here and abroad, quickly insisted it could only mean that high debt drives down growth. That can happen, but only rarely — when high inflationary expectations drive up interest rates, which at once slows growth and increases government interest payments. In the much more common case, Keynes still rules: Slow or negative growth leads to higher debt, not the other way around. In those more typical instances, cutting government only depresses growth more, further expanding government debt. Occasionally, the correlation of negative growth and high government debt reflects some independent third cause. The tsunami and nuclear meltdown that struck Japan in 2012, for example, simultaneously drove down growth and drove up government debt. And sometimes, there is no correlation: Britain carried government debt burdens of 100 percent to 250 percent of GDP from the early-to-mid-19th century, while it was giving birth to the Industrial Revolution.

The R&R analysis did not distinguish between these various scenarios. Yet, the conservative interpretation became the received public wisdom. The IMF, the World Bank and most politically-unaffiliated economists insisted that slashing government on top of weak business and household spending would only make matters worse. No matter. The inevitable result was not the stronger growth as promised, but persistently high unemployment and slow growth here, and double-dip recessions for much for Europe and Japan. In the end, R&R deserve less criticism for their mistakes than for their failure to correct the damaging distortions of their deeply flawed work.

This post was originally published in Dr. Shapiro's blog.

 

 

For Millennials, It’s the Economy Stupid

MillennialThis month’s off year elections sent one message to Washington that has been heard loud and clear. Voters expect Congress to focus on the economy, especially employment, and take decisive and affirmative steps to deal with both the causes and ravages of the greatest economic downturn in the U.S. since the Great Depression. As the Obama administration considers a variety of new proposals to help bring down the unemployment rate, one key constituency is raising its voice and asking for a return on the investment it made in his presidency.

Members of the Millennial generation, born between 1982-2003, who were eligible to vote in 2008 went for Barack Obama over John McCain by a 2:1 margin and made up over 80% of the President’s winning margin. They continue to support his presidency and identify as Democrats by similar margins. A late October Pew survey indicates that Millennials identify as Democrats over Republicans by almost 20 percentage points (52% vs. 34%), well above the 8-point Democratic advantage among older generations. In the latest Research 2000 weekly tracking survey conducted for Daily Kos, 80% of Millennials had a favorable opinion of the president; only 14% of everyone in this generation viewed him unfavorably. This compares with a 55% vs. 39% favorable/unfavorable ratio among the entire electorate in both the Research 2000 survey and in a series of November surveys conducted by organizations ranging from ABC News and the Washington Post to Fox, although some other polls put the President’s job performance ratings closer to 50%.

But despite the clearly stronger support the President has among their generation, Millennials are increasingly restive about the lack of action in Congress to address the economic problems they face – both now and in the future.

Recent Pew research studies underline the major impact that the recession has had on individual Americans and their families. Thirteen percent of parents with grown children told Pew researchers that one of their adult sons or daughters had moved back home in the past year. Pew found that of all grown children living with their parents, 2 in 10 were full-time students, one-quarter were unemployed and about one-third had lived on their own before returning home. According to the census, 56 percent of men 18 to 24 years old and 48 percent of women were either still under the same roof as their parents or had moved back home.

The lack of jobs was particularly acute among adult members of the Millennial Generation (18-27 year olds), 61% of whom said that they or someone close to them was jobless recently. A clear plurality (46%) says that the “job situation” rather than rising prices (27%), problems in the financial markets (14%) and declining real estate values (7%) is their major economic worry.

As a result, the number one concern among Millennials is the state of the economy and the need for jobs, but they have a unique perspective on how to deal with this issue.

Millennials believe there is a clear link between education and employment and are increasingly concerned that the pathway through the educational system into the world of work is becoming increasingly more difficult and expensive to navigate. Last week, about one hundred of the nation’s top private sector and government leaders gathered for the Wall Street Journal’s CEO Council also identified education as the nation’s top economic priority.

For Millennials, the problem is personal. A smaller share of 16-to-24-year-olds – 46 percent – is currently employed than at any time since the government began collecting that data in 1948. A job market with Depression-level youth unemployment (18.5%) and a wrenching transformation in the types of jobs America needs and produces makes the implicit bargain of education in return for future economic success harder for Millennials to believe in every day.

Recently Matt Segal, Executive Director of the Student Association for Voter Empowerment (SAVE) and Founder and National Co-Chair of the “80 Million Strong for Young Americans Job Coalition” presented some ideas to the House Education and Labor Committee on what Congress could do to address this challenge. He advocated increased entrepreneurial resources be made available to youth; more access to public service careers through internships and loan forgiveness programs; and the creation of “mission critical” jobs in such fields as health care, cyber-security and the environment that would tap the unique talents of this generation. Since two-thirds of Millennials who graduate from a four-year college do so with over $20,000 in debt, debt, his testimony also urged immediate Senate approval of the student debt reform bill recently passed by the House.

There is more that can be done beyond these excellent recommendations. This summer, the President's Council of Economic Advisors released a report outlining the importance of community colleges in making America's workforce more competitive in the global economy. "We believe it's time to reform our community colleges so that they provide Americans of all ages a chance to learn the skills and knowledge necessary to compete for the jobs of the future." The report urged Congress to pass House Democratic Caucus Chairman John Larsen’s bill, The Community College Technology Access Act of 2009, in order to help meet President Obama’s goal of graduating five million more Americans from community colleges by 2020.

Millennials, like their GI Generation great grandparents in the 1930s, are facing economic challenges that caught them by surprise and for which no one prepared them. But Millennials aren’t looking for a handout or sympathy. Instead, in the “can do” spirit of their generation, they are organizing to overcome the challenges created for them by their elders. It’s time for the Democrats who control Congress to recognize these concerns and to act decisively on their behalf.

This essay was cross-posted at New Geography.

Noticing and Solving the Problem with Jobs and Wages

America's vaunted job-creating machine has been breaking down, and the administration is finally noticing. 

It was 2003 when I first asked myself whether the dynamics that normally produce lots of new jobs when the economy expands were changing in some fundamental way.  I had noticed that job losses during the mild 2001 recession were five to six times as great as expected, given the modest drop in GDP.   Then we saw that in 2004, two years after the recession ended, the number of employed Americans was still falling, compared to the two months it took for job creation to turn around after the 1981-82 recession and the 12 months it took after the 1990-1991 downturn.  The evidence that America's labor markets were undergoing structural changes of a nasty sort continued to accumulate.  Just as employment had fallen several times faster than GDP during the 2001 recession, so once job creation finally picked up in 2004, private employment gains remained weak.  Over the same period that saw 14 million new jobs created in the 1980s expansion and 17 million new jobs created in the 1990s expansion, U.S. businesses in the last expansion added just 6 million new jobs.   Manufacturing was hit especially hard:  From 2001 to 2004, manufacturing lost more jobs than during the entire "deindustrialization" years from the late 1970s through the 1980s, and those losses continued throughout the entire 2002-2007 expansion.  

With job losses in the current recession already two to four times greater than seen in the downturns of the early 1980s, 1990s and 2001, these dynamics are finally getting broader attention.  Late last week, Larry Summers, the President's chief economic advisor, acknowledged publically that what's known as Okun's Law has broken down.  Arthur Okun, JFK's economic advisor, observed in the 1960s that employment during recessions regularly fell by about half as much as GDP, in percentage terms, which he attributed to the costs employers bear when they fire workers and then have to hire and train again once the downturn ends.   Nobel laureate Paul Krugman also weighed in last week, positing that recessions triggered by bursting bubbles - that would be 2001 and this one -- affect jobs much more than those triggered by tight monetary policies to fight inflation (the 1974-1975 and 1981-82 recessions, for example).  It's an intriguing thought, but it doesn't appear to really jive with the evidence.  The IT-Internet bubble that burst in 2000 certainly helped trigger the 2001 recession, but the downturn's job losses and the subsequent delayed and slow job creation swamped the direct and indirect declines in demand that followed from the implosion of so many Internet and IT companies. 

It's much more complicated than that -- and consequently will be much harder to address.  To begin, the changes in the way our labor markets work also have affected everyone's wages.  During the 1990s expansion, productivity increased by about 2.5 percent per-year, and average wages rose accordingly by nearly 2.0 percent per-year.  That's the way free labor markets are supposed to work: As workers become more productive, employers become willing to pay them more (and which competition forces them to do).   But in the 2002-2007 expansion, even as productivity grew 3 percent per-year - the best record since the 1960s - the average wage of American workers stagnated.  And the most popular political explanation, blaming U.S. multinationals for outsourcing jobs abroad, doesn't hold up here:  Over this period, the number of workers abroad employed by those multinationals hardly rose at all.

This change is also getting more official attention.   Last week, President Obama reminded everyone that economic expansion isn't enough - and we're still quite a way from any real expansion - since most middle-class Americans weren't doing well even before the crisis hit and the economy tanked. 

The administration's agenda could go a long way to addressing these structural changes, if it's done right.   The most plausible explanation is that American jobs and wages are being squeezed by a combination of fierce competition created by globalization and our own failures to control health care and energy costs, two big fixed cost items for most businesses.  The competition has made it much harder for businesses to pass along these higher costs in higher prices - an important reason why inflation has been so low for more than a decade, here and around the world.  But that also means that when companies face higher health care and energy costs that they can't pass along, they have little choice but to cut other costs.   And the costs they've been cutting are jobs and wages.

The only way to ensure that the next expansion won't be like the last one, but instead will create more jobs and bring higher wages, is to make medical cost containment the center of health care reform and make the development and broad use of alternative fuels, from biomass to nuclear, the center of energy and climate policy.  That's not where Congress seems headed.  The House-passed climate bill will do little to drive alternative fuels for at least another decade, when a simple, refundable carbon tax could do the trick.  And the most promising aspects of health care reform for cost-containment - a public insurance option and performance-based reimbursement -- are both under serious congressional attack.   If the President hopes to see more job creation and wage gains than under George W. Bush, these are the places where he should take his stand.

Unemployment in California Climbs to 10.5 Percent In February

Even California, the land of high-tech and innovation, cannot weather this storm. The San Francisco Chronicle reports that unemployment rose to 10.5 percent in February.

The state unemployment rate jumped to 10.5 percent in February, a level not seen since 1983. All told, the recent economic slide has left 1.95 million Californians scrambling for work.

Friday's report from the Employment Development Department charts a sharp rise from January's 10.1 percent rate and brings the state closer to its modern peak of 11 percent, which occurred in late 1982 and early 1983.

The U.S. unemployment rate for February was 8.1 percent. During the Great Depression, unemployment got as high as 25 percent.

January numbers showed California at 10.1 percent unemployment, one of four states with that number higher than 10 percent. (Michigan, Rhode Island, and South Carolina are the others.) Growth in the 1990s was driven, in large part, by the California led tech boom, and California has generally been on the leading edge of the nation's economic activity. High unemployment in heavy manufacturing driven states was how people understood this recession, but these numbers from California mean something different is afoot.

Of course, California's housing market has been hit especially hard, and then there's this

Hispanics and Immigration Reform Must be Part of the Economic Agenda

Reports from the Pew Hispanic Center and others, released at the end of 2008, show disturbing data on the impact of the economic crisis on minorities, and I hope Tim Geithner is up to speed on this information and keeps minorities in mind as he helps map the course for economic recovery.  We hope Geithner's confirmation hearings over the next few days will pass to a speedy confirmation so that he can get to the business of governing "for all Americans," along with President Obama.

Data show that minority workers have fewer employment opportunities, lower wages, or both as compared to their white counterparts. As a result, they tend to have lower incomes and slower income growth.  And because minorities are less well suited than white families to save and build an economic cushion, hard economic times place them in tougher conditions sooner than is the case for white families.

Hispanics are currently suffering a percent of unemployment much higher than that of their white counterparts, 9.2% in January, up from 8.9% unemployment in December 2008.  In addition, the unemployment rate for Hispanics rose faster than for any other group, increasing by 3.1% from December of 2007-December of 2008, while the unemployment rate for whites rose by 2.1% and for blacks, 2.9%.

Even during a period of employment gains enjoyed by Hispanics from 2001-2007, poverty increased among Hispanics over the same period, which only highlights the low wages at which Hispanics tend to work. In 2007, 8.2 percent of whites lived below the poverty line, up from 5.4 percent in 2000, but well below the 21.5 percent of Hispanics who lived below the poverty line in 2007.

Lastly, personal and family income has steadily declined for Hispanics.  From 2001-2007, family incomes for whites were about 30 percent greater than for Hispanics and that gap has increased over time.  Hispanics' median family income declined by an average of 0.5 percent per year from 2000, the last full year before the last recession started, to 2007, the last year for which data are available, falling to $38,679 from $39,935, or by a total of $1,256 (in 2007 dollars). In comparison, whites' median family income fell at a much lower rate of just 0.003 percent per year, for a total decline of $12 between 2000 and 2007, to $54,920 from $54,932 (in 2007 dollars).

Large disparities in health insurance coverage also persist.  In 2007, 32.1% of Hispanics lacked health insurance coverage, compared to 10.4% of whites.

Additionally, Hispanic home ownership rate was only 49.7% for Hispanics in 2007, compared to 75.2% for whites.  While the annual average increase of homeownership was greater among Hispanics, many were also victims of bad-actor lending companies and they ended up purchasing high-cost mortgages, as opposed to market rate mortgages.  Nearly 29% of home purchase loans made to Hispanics in 2007 were high cost, as opposed to only 11% for whites.

We encourage Secretary Geithner and President Obama to show courage and leadership in developing an economic stimulus and economic recovery that addresses these discrepancies and includes financial literacy for minorities.  In addition, we encourage President Obama to take the lead on fixing our broken immigration system in order to help stem this economic crisis.  As long as the trap door of undocumented immigration remains, we will not be able to achieve economic recovery.  It is vital that Congress and the Administration realize that as long as we continue the race to the bottom fostered by our broken immigration system, we will not achieve economic recovery.

Politics and the Economic Crisis

Barack Obama's historic election as a new, national agent of change will face a daunting test as the economic crisis continues to accelerate, and the political pressures arising from what must now be called “The Great Recession” begin to reshape the response.

The latest evidence is today’s unemployment data: one million jobs lost in two months; the sharpest eight-month rise in the jobless rate since 1945, when tens of millions of soldiers and sailors were demobilized; and losses across every sector and every region. Jobs are in freefall along with the markets, investment, consumer spending and household wealth. And economists are now genuinely frightened by the course the Great Recession is taking, because there’s been nothing like it in anyone’s experience.

That’s why long-time advocates of fiscal probity now call for stimulus topping $1 trillion, and why every spending and tax idea floating around Congress for the last decade is back on the table again. The political pressures and real concerns are so overwhelming that there’s talk of large tax cuts, despite the consensus among economists that when people and businesses are as economically downcast as they are today, tax relief has little stimulus power. That’s not only politics at work; it also reflects a sense of grave foreboding among many of those same economists.

We do need unprecedented stimulus – but all of the stimulus in the world won’t change the course of this crisis until we also address its underlying forces. The wealth of American households and the portfolios of American financial institutions will continue to tank until the housing market stabilizes -- or at least until foreclosure rates return to normal. And the most aggressive, easy policy in our history won’t be enough, and financial institutions won’t begin normal lending again, until they’re more confident that the hundreds of billions of dollars in mortgage-backed securities and other derivatives they still own aren’t headed for the drain as well.

The new Administration can take on these challenges directly, as candidate Obama pledged to do with extraordinary foresight. For example, we can impose a 90-day moratorium on foreclosures and use the time to renegotiate the terms of tens of thousands of distressed mortgages held by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. One idea promoted by many economists is to convert those mortgages to 30-year fixed at 5.25 percent, which happens to be long-term mean rate for Fannie and Freddie mortgages. It won’t stop foreclosures, but it should bring down foreclosure rates to near-normal levels, which would do more to stabilize the financial system than the bailouts in the Bush Administration’s own Wall Street version of tsunami stimulus. And some tough love from the new Treasury Secretary could help restart the lending process: having done what we can to stabilize the value of their portfolios, we should consider requiring institutions receiving federal aid to use a real share of that assistance to restart their lending.

We need large-scale stimulus, but it will only work if we first address the underlying problems. Otherwise, 18 months from now, we could be $1 trillion poorer and have little to show for it.

Unemployment Rate of Latinos Skyrockets

In September, the Pew Hispanic Center's report on the overall state of Latinos found that Latinos were in a significantly worse economic condition and reported a decline in their general well-being. We have continued to see how the economic crisis is hitting Latinos particularly harshly, and today we find that the unemployment rate for Latinos has sky-rocketed to 8.8% in October. The overall national unemployment rate for October reported today is 6.5%, with 240,000 jobs cut during the month. Hispanics have been particularly affected, as the number of unemployed Hispanics went up in September to 1.72 million, and in October Hispanics comprised 1.96 million of the 10 million people unemployed nationally.

Hispanic Heritage Month 2008

Every year the United States takes a time out from September 15-October 15 to recognize the contributions of Hispanics in the United States as part of Hispanic Heritage Month. Hispanics are now recognized as the largest minority in the U.S. - the Census estimates that by 2042 one in four persons will be of Hispanic origin. As this year's Hispanic Heritage Month kicked off this week, it becomes clear that an unprecedented number of Latino voters could decide this year's election, Latinos are increasingly represented in government and industry, Latinos are a growing force in the media - as evidenced by the launch of shows like "Agenda" and "Al Punto" on Spanish language networks, and Hispanics are also becoming web and technology users in rapidly growing numbers.

For these reasons and more, the Pew Hispanic Center reported this week on a survey it conducted on the overall state of Latinos. The report reflects how Hispanics are bearing much of the current economic crisis, combined with suffering increased instances of discrimination.

Half (50%) of all Latinos overall (native and foreign born) say that the situation of Latinos in this country is worse now than it was a year ago, according to this nationwide survey of 2,015 Hispanic adults (higher than the average for non-latinos). Fully 63% of Latino immigrants say that the situation of Latinos has worsened over the past year. In 2007, just 42% of all adult Hispanic immigrants - and just 33% of all Hispanic adults - said the same thing. These increasingly downbeat assessments come at a time when the Hispanic community in this country--numbering approximately 46 million, or 15.4% of the total U.S. population--has been hit the hardest by rising unemployment.

Due mainly to the crisis in the housing and construction industry, the unemployment rate for Hispanics in the U.S. rose to 7.3% in the first quarter of 2008, well above the 4.7% rate for all non-Hispanics, and well above the 6.1% rate for Hispanics during the same period last year. As recently as the end of 2006, the gap between those two rates had shrunk to an historic low of 0.5 percentage points--4.9% for Latinos compared with 4.4% for non-Latinos, on a seasonally adjusted basis. The spike in Hispanic unemployment has hit immigrants especially hard. For the first time since 2003, the unemployment rate for Latinos not born in the United States was higher, at 7.5 percent, than the rate for native-born Latinos, at 6.9 percent, the report found. Latinos make up 14.2% of the U.S. labor force, or roughly 22 million people.

In addition to the economy, issues like immigration, access to health care, and discrimination continue to be of concern to Hispanics and to Hispanic voters. In the Pew survey, one-in-ten Hispanic adults - native-born U.S. citizens (8%) and immigrants (10%) alike - report that in the past year the police or other authorities have stopped them and asked them about their immigration status. Some Latinos are xperiencing other difficulties because of their ethnicity. One-in-seven(15%)say that they have had trouble in the past year finding or keeping a job because they are Latino. One-in-ten (10%) report the same about finding or keeping housing.

On the question of immigration enforcement, the Pew Center's research demonstrates the same data NDN found through our polling on immigration, released last week. Latinos disapprove of current enforcement-only measures - more than four-in-five Hispanics (81%) say that immigration enforcement should be left mainly to the federal authorities rather than the local police and 76% disapprove of workplace raids. Two-thirds (68%) of Latinos who worry a lot that they or someone close to them may be deported say that Latinos' situation in the country today is worse than it was a year ago, as do 63% of Latinos who have experienced job difficulties because of their ethnicity and 71% of Latinos who report housing difficulties because of their ethnicity.

Most Hispanics in the U.S. are native born, i.e., U.S. citizens legally not susceptible to deportation, therefore the fact that most Hispanics worry about raids, immigration, and even facing possible deportation reflects how the existing reckless "enforcement-only" policies are impacting not only foreign Hispanics, but U.S. citizens.

NDN has a history writing and speaking about the Hispanic community as one of the great American demographic stories of the 21st century, recognizing that it will be hard for any political party to build a 21st century political majority without this fast-growing electorate. Hispanics have become one of the most volatile and contested swing voting blocs in American politics, and they are responding to this attention. As reported in Hispanics Rising II, an analysis of the Hispanic electorate and their motivation, Hispanic immigrants are becoming increasingly involved, as reflected by the data released this week by the Immigration Policy Center, demonstrating a spike in citizenship applications. Immigrants want to be U.S. citizens, they want to apply for citizenship, often having to overcome virtually impossible obstacles to be able to pay the obscenely high application filing fees.

Therefore, political candidates will do well to pay attention to the many challenges facing Hispanics today. At the onset of Hispanic Heritage Month this week, both Presidential candidates released statements praising Hispanics' contributions to American society and their military service. The difference between the two statements is that Barack Obama also called for comprehensive immigration reform. On the other hand, John McCain didn't mention it. This is curious because polling for the last 3 or 4 years, including the latest polls conducted by NDN, consistently shows that immigration is of top concern for Hispanic voters.

Syndicate content