The Election Is Over. Now What?

America needs a jobs bill, a better energy policy, and a revamped financial system. Will we get any of those?

By Joseph E. Stiglitz  |  Posted Sunday, Dec. 9, 2012, at 7:00 AM ET

After an election campaign costing well in excess of $2 billion, it seems to many observers that not much has changed in American politics: Barack Obama is still president, the Republicans still control the House of Representatives, and the Democrats still have a majority in the Senate. And now America faces the “fiscal cliff.” What next?

Some of Mitt Romney’s advisers seemed taken aback by Obama’s victory: Wasn’t the election supposed to be about economics? They were confident that Americans would forget how the Republicans’ deregulatory zeal had brought the economy to the brink of ruin, and that voters had not noticed how their intransigence in Congress had prevented more effective policies from being pursued in the wake of the 2008 crisis. Voters, they assumed, would focus only on the current economic malaise.