Within the now-expired farm bill that has been stuck in the House due to Republican obstruction is a program to help support the U.S. sugar industry. If the bill comes up during a lame duck congressional session, then critics of the sugar program want it to be struck from the bill.

Now, candy makers are using Halloween to drum up opposition to the sugar subsidies. In a press release, the Coalition for Sugar Reform called the sugar program “one of the last Depression-era ghosts,” according to The Hill:

The colorful flyer argues that the U.S. sugar program is costing consumers $3.5 billion a year through higher prices and puts 600,000 food processing jobs at risk.

The sugar program supports sugar beet and sugarcane growers by restricting imports of sugar. It also limits the amount of domestic sugar that can be sold as long as imports remain low.

The American Sugar Alliance, which represents farmers, has argued that sugar program does not affect the budget and that removing support for sugar farmers could make the U.S. overly dependent on imports.

“It’s surprising that lobbyists for some of the most profitable food companies in the world have instead focused on scoring cheap political points, putting U.S. farmers out of business, importing more subsidized foreign sugar, and boosting their already bloated profits,” said alliance spokesman Phillip Hayes. Regardless of what the sugar industry says about the subsidies, 46 senators voted to end the sugar program when the Senate considered the farm bill earlier this year — up from 29 in 2001.

The U.S. sugar program props up the nation’s sugar industry through import limitations and tariffs. A 2006 Commerce Department study found that three manufacturing jobs are lost for every one sugar-growing job that is saved through the artificially high sugar prices.

Additionally, the U.S. spends $4.9 billion each year in “direct payment” subsidies to farmers of certain crops. But instead of fulfilling the goal of giving small farmers “income stability,” the subsidies go to high-income owners of select croplands who are already enjoying high commodity prices and profits, according to analysis by the Center for American Progress. If Congress gradually phased out the subsidies, then this funding could be used for deficit reduction as well as farm-based clean energy projects, rural home modernizations, biofuel crop cultivation, and agricultural exports.

Early estimates of the damage caused by Hurricane Sandy have ranged from $20 billion up to $50 billion, with about $8 billion covered by insurance and the rest foisted upon governments in the form of destroyed infrastructure. According to an analysis by economists at IHS Global Insights, Hurricane Sandy may knock up to 0.6 percent off of GDP growth in the 4th quarter of this year:

On a national scale, $30 billion to $50 billion in economics losses would represent about 0.2% to 0.3% of nominal GDP. Part of these losses will eventually be made up by reconstruction activity, but it would be naïve to put forward the view that a hurricane is in some sense a stimulus for the economy. There’s no guarantee that reconstruction activity will be extra activity, on top of what would otherwise have occurred, rather than a substitute for that activity. [...]

The effect on growth for the fourth quarter will not be catastrophic but might still be noticeable, especially in an economy with little momentum anyway. Suppose that the affected regions lose just 25% of their overall output for two days that is not recoverable later. That would knock about $25 billion annualized ($6 billion actual) off GDP, and could take as much as 0.6 percentage points off annualized fourth-quarter real GDP growth rate.

Economists at Wells Fargo, meanwhile, estimate that “the storm may reduce gross domestic product by as much as 0.2 percentage points this quarter.” Economists at Moody’s Analytics, said the economic effect will be “noticeable but temporary.” “While natural disasters take a large initial toll on the economy,” Moody’s Ryan Sweet said, “they usually generate some extra activity afterward. We expect any lost output this week from Hurricane Sandy will be made up in subsequent weeks, minimizing the effect on fourth quarter GDP.”

Our guest blogger is John Griffith, a Policy Analyst with the housing team at the Center for American Progress Action Fund.

President Obama is understandably reticent to tout his housing record, especially in swing states hit hard by the five-year foreclosure crisis. But with the early stages of a housing recovery underway, it’s time for the president to look his public in the eye and state a simple fact: the housing market is better off now than it was four years ago.

Nearly every housing indicator supports that claim. Compared to February 2009 — the first full month of the Obama presidency — today’s home sales are up nearly 20 percent, housing construction is up 50 percent, and foreclosure activity is down to a five-year low. Average home prices are down slightly since Obama took office, the only major indicator that’s worse off. But we learned this week that home prices rose in August for the seventh consecutive month after adjusting for seasonal changes.

Improvements in the housing sector tend to drive growth in the broader economy, as each home built creates about three full-time jobs, $90,000 in new tax revenue, and thousands more dollars of spending on home-related products. Obama can credibly say that his housing policies have helped spur growth.

When Obama took office, the housing market was in free fall. Home prices were plummeting, home sales and construction were steadily declining to fractions of historic norms, and foreclosures were rising at a near-record clip. Nearly four years later, we’re seeing a very different trajectory.

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Our guest blogger is Adam Hersh, an Economist with the Center for American Progress Action Fund.

The Romney campaign’s “update” yesterday of its economic plan contains little new in it besides regurgitations of dubious old claims, proving only that the GOP presidential candidate and his advisers take seriously their vow that “we’re not going to let our campaign be dictated by fact checkers.”

Perhaps the most spurious claim from the Romney economic team is that President Obama’s economic policies are responsible for America’s current economic woes. Any responsible reading of the fact shows that Obama policies are delivering the U.S. economy from an economic abyss caused by eight years of George W. Bush.

The chief authors and advocates of those Bush policies, of course, are Columbia University’s Glenn Hubbard, Harvard University’s Gregory Mankiw, and Kevin Hassett of AEI — the same men now in charge of Romney’s economic platform. From 2001 to 2008, their policies delivered the weakest economic expansion since World War II and set the stage for the financial crisis and Great Recession. This is the situation from which millions of Americans are still recovering.

Romney’s economic plan, like Bush’s, is based on a dubious assumption: That massive tax cuts largely benefiting the wealthy will spur economic growth. As chairman of President Bush’s Council of Economic Advisers, Hubbard predicted the first round of tax Bush tax cuts would “quickly deliver a boost to move the economy back toward its long-run growth path,” starting with adding 300,000 more jobs and half a percentage point to the economic growth rate.

He predicted a second round of tax cuts would add another 1.4 million jobs to the U.S. economy, over and above the 3.1 million jobs the economy would create on its own from natural economic growth in that time. Mankiw — who succeeded Hubbard as chairman of Bush’s CEA — co-signed a letter with Hassett “enthusiastically” endorsing more tax cuts because “it is fiscally responsible and it will create more employment [and] economic growth.”

By 2007, Hubbard and Mankiw’s job-creation predictions had fallen nearly eight million jobs short of their mark. And yet, Romney’s economist supporters maintained this week that his as-yet-unspecified tax plan would create at least seven million new U.S. jobs in Romney’s first term.

They provide no causal analysis for this claim, just a gut feeling that conservative policies would create an economic surge. The good news is that the American public appears wise to the Romney-Bush rehash. A New York Times/CBS poll out today shows that 67 percent of people believe Romney intends to ape Bush’s economic policies.

Mitt Romney’s misleading auto bailout ads that hit Ohio this week touted his plan to help the auto industry, even though no specific plan was mentioned, no plan exists on his web site, and his presidential campaign did not respond to requests from reporters when asked about the plan.

Writing on Romney’s campaign web site, ex-Chrysler chairman and Romney endorser Lee Iacocca has now laid out Romney’s plan to help the auto industry: it’s a massive corporate tax break that will make it easier for businesses to offshore their profits.

When Mitt Romney is president, he will reduce our nation’s corporate tax rate to 25 percent from 35 percent – currently the highest combined tax rate in the industrial world – so that American car companies can compete on a level playing field at home and abroad. He will also stop the extra tax automakers are forced to pay when they want to bring home their profits to reinvest in the United States. President Obama could have done this the day he took office since his party controlled both houses of Congress, but he chose not to. [my emphasis]

Steven Rattner, Treasury’s lead adviser during the auto rescue, said on a conference call today that he would “take issue” with the idea that auto companies need tax breaks. “I’m not sure what Lee Iacocca is talking about,” Rattner said. “The least of the industry’s problems has been taxes. When you lose as much money as they lost, you don’t pay taxes and you often don’t pay them for a very long time. That’s not the industry’s problem.”

Romney’s plan, at a cost of more than $1 trillion, wouldn’t help the American economy or auto workers if history is any guide. The amount the U.S. actually collects from corporations is among the lowest in the developed world. And if the U.S. is failing to remain competitive with the rest of the world, its auto companies haven’t noticed: American auto companies are thriving at home.

The plan to eliminate the tax on repatriated profits — those earned overseas and returned to the U.S. — surely won’t help auto workers. George W. Bush’s repatriation tax failed to spark economic and job growth, and many of the companies that lobbied for it ended up cutting jobs and stashing even more money overseas in its wake.

While Romney is falsely attacking Chrysler and General Motors for moving auto jobs to China, his plan for the corporate tax system would make it even easier for them to do so. Romney’s shift to a territorial tax system would add incentives for corporations to outsource jobs and offshore profits, and one study estimates that it would lead to the creation of 800,000 overseas jobs at the expense of American workers.

Eurozone unemployment hit another record high last month of 11.6 percent. 18.4 million Europeans are out of work. In some countries, unemployment has hit 25 percent.

According to a new study from the National Institute for Economic and Social Research, a London-based research organization, the austerity measures implemented across Europe in an attempt to get the continent’s debt under control and stem its financial crisis have actually made matters worse, stunting growth and increasing debt:

In a damning examination of Europe’s coordinated fiscal consolidation, the London-based National Institute for Economic and Social Research said the ratio of debt to gross domestic product will be around 5 percentage points higher in both the U.K. and the euro zone because of the spending cuts and tax rises pursued from 2011 to 2013.

NIESR said the implications of its study–which is the first to model the quantitative impact of coordinated austerity measures across the EU–is that the current austerity strategy being pursued by individual member countries, as well as the EU as a whole, is fundamentally flawed and is making matters worse.

“Not only would growth have been higher if such policies had not been pursued, but debt-to-GDP ratios would have been lower,” the report, written by economists Dawn Holland and Jonathan Portes, said. “It is ironic that, given that the EU was set up in part to avoid coordination failures in economic policy, it should deliver the exact opposite.”

According to another recent study, 116 million Europeans are at risk of falling into poverty, while the continent is doubling down on austerity.

The U.S. has rebounded from the financial crisis faster than Europe, in part, because it did not engage in the same level of austerity, sucking money out of an economy that was already weak. However, the so-called “fiscal cliff” that it set to hit at the end of the year would actually entail more fiscal contraction than that experienced by several European countries that have gone all in on austerity.

After releasing false radio and television ads about the auto bailout, Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign unveiled a new commercial that highlights another one of the candidate’s favorite false claims. This ad, first flagged by the Huffington Post’s Sam Stein, revives Romney’s claim that President Obama has “gutted the welfare work requirement” through a waiver program that Republican governors, including Romney himself, have long asked for.

The ad hits Obama on a number of issues, but the most blatantly false of its claims are aimed at welfare:

NARRATOR: If you want to know President Obama’s second term agenda, look at his first: gutted the work requirement for welfare. Doubled the number of able-bodied adults without children on food stamps. Record unemployment. More women in poverty than ever before. Borrowed from China and increased the debt to over $16 trillion, passing the burden onto the next generation. We may have made it through President Obama’s first term – it’s our children who can’t afford a second.

Watch it:

As reporters, fact-checkers, and the directive Obama signed made abundantly clear, the welfare work requirements will remain in place even if states are granted waivers. The major change is that states will be granted more leeway in how they transition welfare recipients into jobs. That is a change sought and supported by many Republican governors, like Romney endorser Rick Snyder (MI), who said of the program, “More flexibility to governors is a good thing.”

The Temporary Assistance to Needy Families program certainly needs changes — since 1996, it has failed to provide America’s poorest families the assistance they need. But with the election in the balance, Romney has now resorted to making claims in multiple advertisements that even members of his own party say are false.