Thursday, December 15, 2011
Cap'n Obama will get us through this
The economic weather of which he has no control over, at least that's my gist of what he told Steve Kroft of 60 Minutes. It's a kind of interesting analysis this fatalistic version, wonder if the public will buy it. It'd be like if Jimmy Carter had said the same thing that despite long gas lines and inflation I'ma gonna be the guy to steer us into better waters and nicer climes. All Obama has to do is push the right policies that will make a difference in people's lives like make them buy health insurance, can't help it if Fate's a racist. Obama the Orator vs. Newt the Debater, should be a good one:)
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Obama vs. Gingrich would be a boring debate. Variations on similar themes...meh. No thanks.
ReplyDeleteWell, the bookies like Newt.
ReplyDeleteIn fact they are stacking the odds ...
What I find ironic is that when a Republican is in office and running for re-election and the economy sucks, then the Democrats whine that it's all about the economy, but when a Democrat ruins the economy, they act like either its not their fault, or that it doesn't matter.
ReplyDeleteThey want their cake, and eat it, too. I, for one, want them to choke on their cake.
Anyone who has the intellectual capacity to read a chart would understand that what Beth wrote is nonsense.
ReplyDeleteHere is what the job losses were under Bush--who actually DID contribute to the ruination of the economy--and what the slow but ongoing recovery under Obama is.
It is truly amazing how people make false statements and think no one will challenge them.
Under Bush the economy tanked and the US went to the brink of a great depression.
I don't know if Beth was comatose during that time or if she is being willfully ignorant of verifiable facts.
The catastrophic collapse of the US economy happend under Bush, not Mr. Obama.
But the blame for the causes is equally shared by Republicans and Democrats over years of playing politics. Here's a brief list of those who contributed to our financial collapse:
"So who is to blame? There’s plenty of blame to go around, and it doesn’t fasten only on one party or even mainly on what Washington did or didn’t do. As The Economist magazine noted recently, the problem is one of "layered irresponsibility … with hard-working homeowners and billionaire villains each playing a role." Here’s a partial list of those alleged to be at fault:
■The Federal Reserve, which slashed interest rates after the dot-com bubble burst, making credit cheap.
■Home buyers, who took advantage of easy credit to bid up the prices of homes excessively.
■Congress, which continues to support a mortgage tax deduction that gives consumers a tax incentive to buy more expensive houses.
■Real estate agents, most of whom work for the sellers rather than the buyers and who earned higher commissions from selling more expensive homes.
■The Clinton administration, which pushed for less stringent credit and downpayment requirements for working- and middle-class families.
■Mortgage brokers, who offered less-credit-worthy home buyers subprime, adjustable rate loans with low initial payments, but exploding interest rates.
■Former Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan, who in 2004, near the peak of the housing bubble, encouraged Americans to take out adjustable rate mortgages.
■Wall Street firms, who paid too little attention to the quality of the risky loans that they bundled into Mortgage Backed Securities (MBS), and issued bonds using those securities as collateral.
■The Bush administration, which failed to provide needed government oversight of the increasingly dicey mortgage-backed securities market.
■An obscure accounting rule called mark-to-market, which can have the paradoxical result of making assets be worth less on paper than they are in reality during times of panic.
■Collective delusion, or a belief on the part of all parties that home prices would keep rising forever, no matter how high or how fast they had already gone up.
The U.S. economy is enormously complicated. Screwing it up takes a great deal of cooperation. Claiming that a single piece of legislation was responsible for (or could have averted) the crisis is just political grandstanding. We have no advice to offer on how best to solve the financial crisis. But these sorts of partisan caricatures can only make the task more difficult."
SOURCE
Well, I agree that Bush did not help the economy, sorry if I was only picking on Obama, he just added exponentially to the problems that Bush started.
ReplyDelete"...he just added exponentially to the problems that Bush started."
ReplyDeleteYou mean by saving GM from bankruptcy and saving millions of American jobs in doing so?
You mean by staunching the flow of job losses?
You mean by avoiding a complete financial collapse?
Please provide some facts to back up your claim that Obama "added exponentially to the problems that Bush started."
Meanwhile, you can read this:
"In purely economic terms, how much of this crisis is really Obama's problem, and how much better might he have done to fix it? The answer is: probably not that much.
'A long, long period of halting and slow growth was baked in the cake when he took office,' said Harvard University economist Kenneth Rogoff, a former adviser to Obama's 2008 GOP opponent, John McCain, and the co-author of an acclaimed 2009 book on the nature of economic crises, 'This Time is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly.' 'It's very difficult after such a huge credit bubble and financial collapse to recover all that much faster than we've been doing. It wouldn't have mattered if McCain had won. We would have been in a similar situation.'
[skip]
As Obama himself seemed to understand at the outset, the economic devastation he faced was the worst in 80 years. It was far worse, in other words, than anything Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, Richard Nixon, or Gorge H.W. Bush had to overcome. And because this recession was caused by an unprecedented financial collapse, history shows that it was destined to be longer-lived than most.
The numbers tell part of that story. What Rogoff calls the Great Contraction is essentially an inversion of the debt-inflated consumer bubble of the 2000s, a continuing collapse of demand that has lingered longer than many of Obama's top advisers or the Federal Reserve thought would occur. Though the recovery technically began in June 2009, the reason for this "jobless recovery" is pretty straightforward: Consumers aren't buying, stores aren't selling, and as a result companies aren't making--or hiring. That has been exacerbated by a credit crunch that is also historic. Consumer confidence is at the lowest level since 1980, new data show.
Unemployment trends also indicate that it is somewhat unfair to accuse Obama, as his GOP opponents are wont to do, of driving up the jobless rate beyond what it was when he took office. The official recession began in December 2007, more than a year before he became president, and ended in June 2009, some five months into his presidency. But the unemployment rate is a lagging indicator; in November of 2008, the month of Obama's election, it was still only 6.8 percent, though it had slowly climbed from December and it reached a height of 7.8 percent in January, just before Obama was sworn in. Still driven by what began as George W. Bush's recession, it didn't bottom out until nine months into Obama's term, 10.1 percent in October of 2009, and then barely began to decline over the next two years.
SOURCE
So if I got this straight Shaw if we give Obama another term and the Economy still doesn't recover that much it's STILL George W. Bush's fault. Most voters I think tend to view it in more traditional terms, that if the economy sucks under a certain president's term they in part at least do blame that president and his policies. As I blogged about elsewhere it happened on his watch like with the credit downgrade by S&P. It's like with Crime, if crime goes up in a certain precinct ofttimes the commander or captain for that zone will be replaced or moved somewhere else. May not be fair but this is the way the world works Shaw.
ReplyDeleteZ-man: "So if I got this straight Shaw if we give Obama another term and the Economy still doesn't recover that much it's STILL George W. Bush's fault."
ReplyDeleteMr. Z-man, you absolutely did not get it straight. There was no discussion about assessing blame. You missed the point of my responses to Beth who claimed Mr. Obama "added exponentially to the problems that Bush started."
That's a simple-minded statement about enormously complicated financial problems that involve the rest of the world as well as the US, and the links I provided explained this.
Z-man: "As I blogged about elsewhere it happened on his watch like with the credit downgrade by S&P."
You left out the fact that the S&P downgraded the US rating because Congress--the Republican led House in particular--held the debt ceiling hostage. S&P specifically pointed to the House Republicans as the reason for the downgrade:
"...Democrats were willing to bend on entitlements during the "grand bargain" negotiations; Republicans were unbending on taxes. The last point is important, because S&P really opens fire on the Republicans:
"Compared with previous projections, our revised base case scenario now assumes that the 2001and 2003 tax cuts, due to expire by the end of 2012, remain in place. We have changed our assumption on this because the majority of Republicans in Congress continue to resist any measure that would raise revenues, a position we believe Congress reinforced by passing the act."
SOURCE
So if someone set fire to our house (the USA) and it almost burned to the ground before Obama was elected, then you believe that Obama should take all the blame for the disaster, for not putting it out and rebuilding it fast enough while dealing with an obstructionist Congress?
It appears that you and Beth want to assess blame without looking at the causes of the financial meltdown.
One last thing on this thread. I believe you, Mr. Z-man, and Beth are Catholics? I once was myself.
ReplyDeleteWhat do you and Beth think about the Pope's message on wealth distribution?
"VATICAN CITY (RNS) Noting a "rising sense of frustration" at the worldwide economic recession, Pope Benedict XVI said that a more just and peaceful world requires "adequate mechanisms for the redistribution of wealth."
The pope's words appeared in his message for the World Day of Peace 2012, released on Friday (Dec. 16) at the Vatican."
As a former Catholic, I know that the Pope is the head of the Catholic Church and speaks for it, so what do you and Beth think of the pontiff's socialistic message?
The Pope did not use the term socialism at all, helping the poor I feel should be done personally, not through a governmental force. I don't think Jesus' parable of the Good Samaritan was about someone coming by and letting the beaten person know that the government will come help him, the Samaritan took it upon himself to help that person.
ReplyDeleteThe Pope said a more just and peaceful world requires adequate mechanisms for the REDISTRIBUTION OF WEALTH.
ReplyDeleteYou, Beth, said this on your own blog about redistribution of wealth:
"The Just Take It From Someone else attitude of the Left
Leftists obviously think taking from someone else using force (for example, income redistribution) is all fine and dandy, so it should be no wonder that the leftists at Occupy Wall Street think rape is okay because hey if you want sex, just go ahead and take it with force from someone else"
You apparently do not agree with Pope Benedict.
I was just wondering what your and Z-man's opinion is of what the Pope said.
You did not address it at all in your comment.
Again, the Pope said "a more just and peaceful world requires adequate mechanisms for the redistribution of wealth."
Oh how I'd love to debate thee on economics. You need a lesson or two Shaw.
ReplyDeleteYou mean by saving GM from bankruptcy and saving millions of American jobs in doing so?
Where did the money come from to bail out GM?
You mean by staunching the flow of job losses?
A futile attempt at proving a negative. There is no means by which to gauge how many jobs were saved through these bailouts because it is impossible to know what would have happened if TARP and other bailouts did not occur. To suggest otherwise is pure speculation.
You mean by avoiding a complete financial collapse?
We're not avoiding anything. We're merely kicking a can down the road.
Speaking of eating cake and having it too.
ReplyDeleteIf the pope thinks income redistribution is all fine and dandy he might want to take a gander at those lovely commandments. Pretty sure there's one in there about stealing.
Just because you don't like my answer Shaw doesn't mean I didn't address it properly. Income redistribution does not mean the government has to be the mechanism to do it.
ReplyDeleteThe Catholic Church has become a left-wing institution Shaw. Read the late Malachi Martin. With some notable exceptions like pro-life and sex it's left-wing down the line. Cardinal Mahoney of Los Angeles, very pro-illegal immigrants it seems to me. The late NY Cardinal John O'Connor, very pro-rent control and other things. Makes no difference to me, it's not church dogma just the Church taking political positions. Benedict's statement was straight socialism and maybe he should do the right thing and retire.
ReplyDelete