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Obama Saved U.S. Capitalism and ...
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Anonymous
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Being President is a thankless job. Remember in 2008 how Iraq was a big campaign issue? All the handwringing about it? Now we have ended combat operations. How important does that rank in the public eye? Not at all. The problem is solved and no one seems to say "hey, that guy got our troops out of harm's way, just like he said he would". I'm not trying to get into a debate about the surge vs. whatever else. The main point is that it is one with and therefore it does not count toward the President's list of achievements because it is not a current worry.
Obama did not fix our economy. What he did is to avoid 12+% unemployment. That is the official word of the CBO, a nonpartisan Congressional research arm. Now 12% unemployment may not sound a whole lot worse than 9.6%, but it is. It is the difference between tight consumer credit vs. a near shutdown of lending (credit cards and mortgages) regardless of credit-worthiness. In other words, even people with squeaky clean FICO scores start to look like a bad bet. To a lender, profitability falls off a cliff at that 10% number. So Obama and Congress basically avoided this catastrophe. Even worse, they avoided a meltdown of the financial system. It is very hard for people to understand why they should care about lending to companies. But the bottom line is that even most of the healthiest businesses need credit, if only to handle short term cash flows. In the case of commercial credit, it had already stopped. We can think of this as financial services gone awry, but the effect was that ordinary businesses were grinding to a halt. This was scarier than the consumer side. Honestly, I think that both presidents deserve credit for avoiding this trip into the abyss. So we now have an economy that is going to take a few more years to dig out and then maybe won't be what it once was. But we have a functioning economy. I'm a bush hater, but I will say flat out that his aggressiveness in attacking the credit meltdown was his most important achievement - it dwarfs the 9/11 response. Likewise, Obama should credit for this and for the stimulus. Should we be surprised that a president can't return us to 3% growth and 5% unemployment? Hell no. The Republicans keep pounding the message that the private sector creates jobs. It's true. Government's role is to put the brakes on a death spiral, and that's what it did. But Obama will be judged for not avoiding catastrophe but for not personally assuring immediate prosperity. |
Anonymous
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The private sector wasn't creating many jobs before the meltdown.
With that said, the GOP partisans here seem to think that if McCain had been elected, we'd be seeing 5% unemployment and 4-5% GDP growth. I mean, how much tax cutting can we really do before we start needing to cut services? One thing I do notice, though, is that many ruby-red GOPers are from areas where the median house price is 3-4x median household income. For them, and in those metro areas, capitalism/the American way works better. |
Anonymous
| A good President would have done the following...Saved the banks from failure (Bush did it). Used stimulus to immediately build 50 nuclear plants. F...oil and F green energy. Cut goverment salaries by 25% including congress. Let the states balance their own budgets. Obama didn't do jack in Iraq, he just followed to Bush plan to end combat in 2 years. And he has escalated afghanistan AND hasn't even come close to closing Guantanamo. Bush knew what he was talking about, Obama was clueless,,,but acting like he knew what he was doing. Cut Taxes on companies that manufacture and let GM and Chrysler go bankrupt and reorganize without a Union....we need to make things again. |
Anonymous
My brother actually works in nuclear energy. That's the most ignorant idea for stimulus spending I have ever heard. You can't get the engineering plans done in one year, let alone actually employ people. It's good that you aren't running the country. As for your comments on banking, the Tarp is only the smallest part of the banking bailout. You are omitting the much larger actions of the Fed, which are north of $1 Trillion so far. Just this week they announced a $600 billion buy of Treasuries. That's as big as the Tarp right there. So you know about as much about banking as about nuclear energy. If the Republicans wanted credit for getting out of Iraq by 2010, they should have just promised to do it when McCain was running. They screwed around with how giving a date was going to play into the hands of the enemy. We'll never know if McCain would have gotten us out because he never said he would do it in the first place, and in part as a result, he did not get elected. Your ignorance on the budget is about the same. Have you any idea how much your salary cut would save? According to OPM, the Federal government employs 2.8 million people according to the OPM factbook. That excludes the military. Your plan will save between 15 and 20K per person. So congratulations, your grand plan cuts $56 billion from the federal budget. Only $1,344 billion left and you have eliminated the deficit. Think I'm wrong? Get out the budget and check for yourself. Seriously, do you even think before you write these things? |
Anonymous
| Better than Obama's stimulus that got us nothing but debt. At least by now the engineering would be done and plants being built rather than nothing but debt. Plus we would be on our way to cheap / clean energy...something to build an economy on. |
Anonymous
| Better than Obama's stimulus that got us nothing but debt. At least by now the engineering would be done and plants being built rather than nothing but debt. Plus we would be on our way to cheap / clean energy...something to build an economy on. Obamas stupidity on guantanomo just shows how much smarter Bush is than Obama. Bush certainly knew a lot more about reality than Obama. Green energy.....what a joke. Global warming....what a joke. Closing guantanamo what a joke. Get this loser out of here to start buildin homes with Carter asap. |
Anonymous
You didn't read carefully. You can't even get the engineering plans done in a year. And the permitting process isn't like going downtown for a permit to renovat your kitchen. End to end, it is a ten year process, perhaps two years of which could be blamed on regulatory or public interest lawsuits. It is the absolute worst stimulus project you could pick. I am all for nuclear. Like I said, my brother works in the area. But it is not even close to stimulus. It's total ignorance of nuclear power. Obama's stimulus did not do nothing. The nonpartisan CBO, which isn't even answerable to the Executive Branch, said it created between 1.4 and 3.3 million jobs. That's worth .7 to 1.8 points of unemployment. That is a big deal. You may not believe it, but your congressmen believe in the CBO. Anyway, about 1/3 of the stimulus plan was tax cuts, and that portion didn't produce jobs at all. |
Anonymous
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Even if I grant that the stimulus did nothing, which is impossible to prove since we can't know what would have happened in its absence, I for one am convinced that inaction would have been devastating.
Most likely no approach would have solved the problem by now, and I am sure that nobody can prove that their idea would have been better (although I believe that the Krugman approach was a better idea, but others say exactly the opposite). Bottom line, whoever said Bush was smarter that Obama is correct in the sense that GWB was smart enough to kill two birds with one stone: His policies were a bonanza for his corporate backers, and simultaneously put the overall economy into such a hole that his successor was almost bound to look bad when he could not get it out within two years. Yeah, I know the right is tired of hearing us liberals blame Bush, but just as sure as the faithful continue to believe God created the universe no matter what atheists say, we liberals are not about to abandon what we see as a fundamental truth just because you refuse to accept it. |
Anonymous
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Bush started a useless war for no reason
Every president is going to be a has-been. Every president inherits problems from the previous one. |
Anonymous
But unlike Obama's difficulty solving the problems he inherited from Bush, Bush completely succeeded in getting rid of that terrible surplus problem he inherited from Clinton. |
Anonymous
LOL! Terrible surplus problem 
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Anonymous
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I like how 18:32 doesn't even begin to address the Big Four - Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and the Pentagon.
On the flip side, my Tea Partier dad said Sunday, "Freeze Social Security, and I know it'll affect me." I have to give him kudos for being intellectually consistent and being willing to cut government programs that affect him. My idea was to freeze Social Security but create some sort of supplemental program for those who have no other source of income. So you'd get say $800 a month from regular Social Security and then $10 a month from supplemental Social Security (and that $10 would increase over time.) That way you're only paying COLAs to those who really need it, not comfortable union/public sector retirees or hedge fund managers. |