Analysis: Obama recovery plans raising questions

WASHINGTON – President Barack Obama offered his domestic-policy proposals as a "break from a troubled past." But the economic outlook now is more troubled than it was even in January, despite Obama's bold rhetoric and commitment of more trillions of dollars.

And while his personal popularity remains high, some economists and lawmakers are beginning to question whether Obama's agenda of increased government activism is helping, or hurting, by sowing uncertainty among businesses, investors and consumers that could prolong the recession.

Although the administration likes to say it "inherited" the recession and trillion-dollar deficits, the economic wreckage has worsened on Obama's still-young watch.

Every day, the economy is becoming more and more an Obama economy.

More than 4 million jobs have been lost since the recession began in December 2007 — roughly half in the past three months.

Stocks have tumbled to levels not seen since 1997. They are down more than 50 percent from their 2007 highs and 20 percent since Obama's inauguration.

The president's suggestion that it was a good time for investors with "a long-term perspective" to buy stocks may have been intended to help lift battered markets. But a big sell-off followed.

Presidents usually don't talk about the stock market. But the dynamics are different now.

A higher percentage of people have more direct exposure to stocks — including through 401(k) and other retirement plans — than ever.

So a tumbling stock market is adding to the national angst as households see the value of their investments and homes plunge as job losses keep rising.

Some once mighty companies such as General Motors and Citigroup are little more than penny stocks.

Many health care stocks are down because of fears of new government restrictions and mandates as part a health care overhaul. Private student loan providers were pounded because of the increased government lending role proposed by Obama. Industries that use oil and other carbon-based fuels are being shunned, apparently in part because of Obama's proposal for fees on greenhouse-gas polluters.

Makers of heavy road-building and other construction equipment have taken a hit, partly because of expectations of fewer public works jobs here and globally than first anticipated.

"We've got a lot of scared investors and business people. I think the uncertainty is a real killer here," said Chris Edwards, director of fiscal policy for the libertarian Cato Institute.

Some Democrats, worried over where Obama is headed, are suggesting he has yet to match his call for "bold action and big ideas" with deeds.

In particular, they point to bumpy efforts to fix the financial system under Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner.

Obama may have contributed to the national anxiety by first warning of "catastrophe" if his stimulus plan was not passed and in setting high expectations for Geithner. Instead, Geithner's public performance has been halting and he's been challenged by lawmakers of both parties.

Republicans and even some top Democrats, including Rep. Charles Rangel, D-N.Y., chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, have questioned the wisdom of Obama's proposal to limit tax deductions for higher-income people on mortgage interest and charitable contributions.

Charities have strongly protested, saying times already are tough enough for them. The administration suggests it might back off that one.

Even White House claims that its policies will "create" or "save" 3.5 million jobs have been questioned by Democratic supporters.

"You created a situation where you cannot be wrong," the chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, Montana Democrat Max Baucus, told Geithner last week.

"If the economy loses 2 million jobs over the next few years, you can say yes, but it would've lost 5.5 million jobs. If we create a million jobs, you can say, well, it would have lost 2.5 million jobs," Baucus said. "You've given yourself complete leverage where you cannot be wrong, because you can take any scenario and make yourself look correct."

Republicans assert that Obama's proposals, including the "cap and trade" fees on polluters to combat global warming, would raise taxes during a recession that could touch everyone. "Herbert Hoover tried it, and we all know where that led," says House Republican leader John Boehner of Ohio.

The administration argues its tax increases for the households earning over $250,000 a year and fees on carbon polluters contained in its budget won't kick in until 2011-2012, when it forecasts the economy will have fully recovered.

But even those assumptions are challenged as too rosy by many private forecasters and some Democratic lawmakers.

Many deficit hawks also worry that the trillions of federal dollars being doled out by the administration, Congress and the Federal Reserve could sow the seeds of inflation down the road, whether the measures succeed in taming the recession or not. The money includes Obama's $3.6 trillion budget and the $837 billion stimulus package he signed last month.

To the notion that he favors a government-operated approach toward fixing problems, Obama says none of it started on his watch — the collapsing economy or the taxpayer-funded bailouts designed to keep matters from getting even worse.

"By the time we got here, there already had been an enormous infusion of taxpayer money into the financial system," he said in an interview posted Saturday on The New York Times' Web site. "And the thing I constantly try to emphasize to people if that coming in, the market was doing fine, nobody would be happier than me to stay out of it. I have more than enough to do without having to worry the financial system."

Polls show that Obama's personal approval ratings, generally holding in the high 60s, remain greater than support for his specific policies.

"He still has a fair amount of political capital, so the public is willing to cut him some slack and go along with him for a while," said pollster Andrew Kohut, director of the Pew Research Center. "But the public will have to get some sense that the kinds of things he's proposing are going to work, or are showing some signs that they are working."

Allan Sinai, chief global economist for Decision Economics, a Boston-area consulting firm, said the complexity and enormity of the crisis make it hard to solve.

"There's no way to get it all right, regardless of which president is making policy," Sinai said. "The problem is the sickness got too far. The actions taken, medicine applied, were mainly the wrong actions. So it's just worse, and it gets harder to deal with. At this stage, there is no easy answer, no easy way out. It's a question of how we fumble through."

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EDITOR'S NOTE — Tom Raum has covered Washington for The Associated Press since 1973, frequently reporting on the economy.

Push is on to tailor cancer care to tumor's genes

WASHINGTON – The days of one-size-fits-all cancer treatment are numbered: A rush of new research is pointing the way to tailor chemotherapy and other care to what's written in your tumor's genes.

Everyone with advanced colon cancer now is supposed to get a genetic test before taking two of the leading treatments. It's a major change adopted by oncologists last month after studies found that those pricey drugs, Erbitux and Vectibix, won't work in 40 percent of patients.

Scientists are furiously testing similar genetically tailored care in breast and lung cancer. It's a flurry of work that reflects a huge problem: Most medications today benefit at best about half of patients but it usually takes trial-and-error to tell.

That means a lot of people suffer side effects for nothing, and it's incredibly costly. When the American Society of Clinical Oncology recommended giving colon cancer patients that $300 test for a gene called KRAS, it estimated the move could save a stunning $600 million a year — by keeping drugs that cost up to $10,000 a month away from patients who won't benefit.

Here's the critical consumer issue: As tantalizing as this personalized medicine is, gene testing is like the Wild West. Laboratories often introduce new tests at the first clues they might work, not waiting for final proof. Few tests so far have won the backing of major medical groups like ASCO, the cancer specialists, making research studies a best bet for many patients.

"A bad test is as dangerous to a patient as a bad drug," notes Dr. Richard Schilsky, ASCO president and a University of Chicago oncologist. "The tricky part is to figure out which of those (genetic differences) are clinically important and which are just variations that exist."

This is not about testing if people carry so-called cancer genes that make them prone to illness. Instead it's about finding a tumor's genetic signature — a pattern of gene and protein activity that signals if the cancer will grow fast or slowly, be more or less likely to recur, and whether it would be susceptible to treatment.

"We're getting into science fiction sort of, if now medicine is being able to analyze things at the genome level," breast cancer patient Claire Weinberg of Oxford, N.C., says in wonder.

A community hospital initially dismissed Weinberg's breast lump but she fortunately sought a second opinion at Duke University Medical Center — where, cancer confirmed, she enrolled in a study of gene-directed chemotherapy.

"I felt it could only benefit me for them to know even more about me," she says.

The ultimate goal: "What's the right recipe for those patients?" explains Dr. Matthew Ellis of Washington University in St. Louis, co-inventor of a different breast cancer genetic approach.

Under study:

_A less precise test already can tell certain breast cancer patients if they're at high or low risk of relapsing, helping the chemo-or-not decision. But which chemo? Duke's Dr. Kelly Marcom is genetically profiling breast biopsy tissue from nearly 300 newly diagnosed patients headed for pre-surgery chemo. Some are randomly assigned to one of two standard chemotherapy cockails; the rest get the cocktail that matches their tumor profile.

It's too early to tell if the gene-directed approach helps more tumors shrink.

But, "I can have no regrets," says Weinberg, who learned after surgery that she'd been in the gene-tailored group and her tumor shrank enough to save her breast. She's also getting post-surgery chemo in case any rogue cells remain.

_Instead of custom profiling, an experimental test unveiled last week examines 50 breast cancer genes to determine which of four disease subtypes the woman has.

If it pans out — and much larger studies are planned — the Breast Bioclassifier could change breast cancer's very names. When studied on stored samples of old tumors, researchers found some women safely skipped chemo — their subtype responded better to post-surgery tamoxifen, or hormone therapy. A more aggressive type was sensitive to most chemo choices but not hormone treatment, the team reported in the Journal of Clinical Oncology.

And still another group didn't respond well to either care, a group that desperately needs new options, said Ellis, who co-developed the test with doctors at the University of Utah and University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.

_Next up, lung cancer. Hospitals nationwide are recruiting 1,200 lung cancer patients to study who carries extra copies of the tumor-spurring gene EGFR. They'll get either of two top treatments, Tarceva or Alimta, to see which is best for which genetic condition.

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EDITOR's NOTE — Lauran Neergaard covers health and medical issues for The Associated Press in Washington.

Kisses unleash chemicals that ease

CHICAGO – "Chemistry look what you've done to me," Donna Summer crooned in Science of Love, and so, it seems, she was right. Just in time for Valentine's Day, a panel of scientists examined the mystery of what happens when hearts throb and lips lock. Kissing, it turns out, unleashes chemicals that ease stress hormones in both sexes and encourage bonding in men, though not so much in women.

Chemicals in the saliva may be a way to assess a mate, Wendy Hill, dean of the faculty and a professor of neuroscience at Lafayette College, told a meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science on Friday.

In an experiment, Hill explained, pairs of heterosexual college students who kissed for 15 minutes while listening to music experienced significant changes in their levels of the chemicals oxytocin, which affects pair bonding, and cortisol, which is associated with stress. Their blood and saliva levels of the chemicals were compared before and after the kiss.

Both men and women had a decline in cortisol after smooching, an indication their stress levels declined.

For men, oxytocin levels increased, indicating more interest in bonding, while oxytocin levels went down in women. "This was a surprise," Hill said.

In a test group that merely held hands, chemical changes were similar, but much less pronounced, she said.

The experiment was conducted in a student health center, Hill noted. She plans a repeat "in a more romantic setting."

Hill spoke at the session on the Science of Kissing, along with Helen Fisher of Rutgers University and Donald Lateiner of Ohio Wesleyan University.

Fisher noted that more than 90 percent of human societies practice kissing, which she believes has three components — the sex drive, romantic love and attachment.

The sex drive pushes individuals to assess a variety of partners, then romantic love causes them to focus on an individual, she said. Attachment then allows them to tolerate this person long enough to raise a child.

Men tend to think of kissing as a prelude to copulation, Fisher said. She noted that men prefer "sloppy" kisses, in which chemicals including testosterone can be passed on to the women in saliva. Testosterone increases the sex drive in both males and females.

"When you kiss an enormous part of your brain becomes active," she added. Romantic love can last a long time, "if you kiss the right person."

Lateiner, a classical scholar, observed that kissing appears infrequently in Greek and Roman art, but was widely practiced, despite the spread of skin disease at that time by facial kissing. And there was a potential for social faux pas by kissing the wrong person at the wrong time.

Overall, the science of kissing — philematology — is under-researcherd, Hill concluded.

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