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Opinions/Editorials Title: You Think Obama’s Been a Bad President? Prove It Tell me again why Barack Obama has been such a bad president? I’m not talking here about him as a tactician and communicator. We can agree that he has played some bad poker with Congress. And let’s stipulate that at the moment he’s falling short in the intangibles of leadership. I’m thinking instead of that opening sequence in the show “Mission Impossible,” the one where Jim Phelps, played by Peter Graves, gets his instructions. Your mission, Jim (and readers named something else), should you decide to accept it, is to identify where Obama has been a poor decision-maker. What, specifically, has he done wrong on policy? What, specifically, would you have done differently to create jobs? And what can any of the current Republican candidates offer that would be an improvement on the employment front? I’m not interested in hearing ad hominem attacks or about your generalized “disappointment.”
I want to know, on a substantive basis, why you think he deserves to be in a dead heat with Mitt Romney and Rick Perry and only a few points ahead of Ron Paul and Michele Bachmann in a new Gallup Poll. Is it just that any president -- regardless of circumstances and party -- who presides over 9 percent unemployment deserves to lose?
Left, Right, CenterEvery day you’re pummeling him from the right, left and middle. Senators John McCain and Lindsey Graham even attacked the president for letting Libyan rebels take Tripoli instead of burying Muammar Qaddafi under American bombs months ago. Here we have the best possible result -- the high probability of regime change for about one-thousandth of the cost of getting rid of Saddam Hussein and no bad feelings from the locals -- and Obama gets savaged anyway. Like everyone else, I’ve got my list of Obama mistakes, from failing to break up the banks in early 2009 to neglecting to force a vote on ending the Bush tax cuts when the Democrats still controlled Congress. He shouldn’t have raised hopes with “Recovery Summer” and “Winning the Future” until the economy was more durable. I could go on.
But do these miscalculations really mean it’s time for him to go? Most of the bad feeling goes back to the first year or so of the Obama presidency. And in hindsight, those decisions really weren’t so bad. To prove my point, let’s review a few areas where he supposedly messed up. A Few RebuttalsFrom the left: “He should have pushed for a much bigger stimulus in 2009.” That’s the view of New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, now gospel among liberals. It’s true economically but bears no relationship to the political truth of that period. Consider that in December 2008, Pennsylvania Governor Ed Rendell, a hardcore liberal Democrat, proposed a $165 billion stimulus and said he would be ecstatic if it went to $300 billion. President- elect Obama wanted to go over $1 trillion but was told by House Democrats that it absolutely wouldn’t pass. In exchange for the votes of three Republicans in the Senate he needed for passage, Obama reduced the stimulus to $787 billion, which was still almost five times Rendell’s number and the largest amount that was politically possible. From the right: “The stimulus and bailouts failed.” When Obama took office, the economy was losing about 750,000 jobs a month and heading for another Great Depression. The recession ended (at least for a while) and we now are adding several thousand jobs a month -- anemic growth, but an awful lot better than the alternative. How did that happen? Luck?
Fed, Stimulus, TARPAll the bellyaching ignores that the Federal Reserve’s emergency policies stabilized the financial system, and that the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office estimates that the stimulus increased economic growth and saved or created millions of jobs. According to the Treasury Department, taxpayers will end up actually making money on the bank bailouts under the Troubled Asset Relief Program, which Obama inherited from the previous administration. The Republican alternative for job creation wasn’t tax cuts (the stimulus contained almost $300 billion in tax cuts) but deficit reduction and rolling back regulation. I’ve yet to see a single economist convincingly argue how either would have reversed the catastrophic job losses.
From all sides: “He took his eye off jobs by pushing health care.” Not really. Health care consumed enormous time and political capital in late 2009 and early 2010. But with the stimulus new and still being absorbed (with remarkably little scandal) into the American economy, it’s not as if health care distracted the president from another jobs program in that period. Sure, he should have rhetorically “pivoted to jobs” earlier, but substantively it wouldn’t have made much difference. And Republicans have offered no evidence for their claim that the Affordable Care Act (which includes tax credits for small businesses) has contributed to current levels of unemployment. How could it? The program hasn’t even fully begun yet. The all-purpose explanation from the business community is “uncertainty.” We’re told that people, and enterprises, won’t invest because they aren’t sure about future taxes. This is a crock. “People invest to make money,” the noted lefty socialist Warren E. Buffett recently wrote in the New York Times, “and potential taxes have never scared them off.” Again, from all sides: “He looked weak during the debt- limit debate.” Yep. And if you were president and a group of extremists was pointing a gun at the head of the American economy, what would you have done? Invoking the 14th Amendment sounded satisfying, but a constitutional crisis layered on top of a debt-limit crisis would have been a fiasco, and probably would have ensured default as world markets spent months wondering who in the U.S. had the authority to pay our bills. Be SpecificElections involving incumbents are inevitably hire/fire decisions. With foreign policy mostly off the table, hiring a Republican means buying his or her jobs plan. Firing Obama means rejecting where he has come down on big decisions. He and Romney will unveil their jobs plans in September. In the meantime, I’d like to hear from Democrats, Republicans and especially independents who voted for Obama the last time but have given up on him now. Why?
Your mission, Jim, should you decide to accept it, is to be specific and rational, not vague and visceral. Post Comment Private Reply Ignore Thread Top • Page Up • Full Thread • Page Down • Bottom/Latest Begin Trace Mode for Comment # 25. Your mission Jonathan, should you decide to accept it, is to stop lusting after that failed negro.
#2. To: no gnu taxes (#1) Your mission Jonathan, should you decide to accept it, is to stop lusting after that failed negro. In other words, you have nothing specific to offer.
#4. To: lucysmom (#2) Oh damn, who doesn't have a lot to offer? Your warped political views just wouldn't accept them. His absolute waste of a year on a health care scheme people don't even want? Even at that, he never really offered anything, -- just teleprompted whatever Pelosi's plan of the day was. His failed stimulus -- which did nothing but prop up badly over extending local programs for a short time and resulted in massive new deficits. His abyssmal response to the Gulf oil spill. Need more?
#5. To: no gnu taxes (#4) Need more? Yep, details. That's what specific means.
#7. To: lucysmom, no gnu taxes, ALL (#5) (Edited) Yep, details. That's what specific means. You're given 'details', facts with documented proof of Obama's failures every single day, yet you still deny it, most here are just plain sick of your adolescent whinning when you have no answers. That lazy lard ass has done nothing good for this nation, he's done nothing to bring us together as a people, but he's gone out of his way to separate us into races and create racewars. I challenge you to post here Anything good he has done for this nation since he's been in office, anything, but you won't, you're too stupid, you passed ignorant a long time ago. What has he done to create jobs? What has he done for this economy, show us where he has brought our soldiers home and ended war.... Same here, details, 'specific details'....
#8. To: Murron (#7) (Edited) What has he done to create jobs? What has he done for this economy, show us where he has brought our soldiers home and ended war.... I think he should end all wars and actions and send those soldiers home to compete with others for what's left of the jobs here. What's another million additional job applicants...give or take?
#10. To: mininggold (#8) Why do you think Bush was a bad President? Give specifics. Tax cuts for the rich? Everybody got tax cuts and the rich's share went up. The economy grew after them.. Obama loves those tax cuts. Open borders? ditto for Obama. Probably more so. Wall Street? Obama has been their best friend Wars? Obama loves them
#11. To: no gnu taxes (#10) (Edited) Why do you think Bush was a bad President? I'll pass because this thread is about Obama. Sounds Obama did everything that big business wants and our good capitalist economy should be a humming away. Maybe it's time for a new system.
#14. To: mininggold, no gnu taxes (#11) Why do you think Bush was a bad President? Bush and the GOP reversed the Clinton surplus - returning the money back to the tax payer while increasing govt spend and barrow policies.
#15. To: Godwinson (#14) Bush and the GOP reversed the Clinton surplus There was no Clinton surplus. Clinton fought the GOP every step of the way in balancing the budget, in fact. What ended the Clinton surplus was his lack of foresight in the upcoming dot com bubble. Pretty fucking weak, even for you.
#17. To: no gnu taxes (#15) There was no Clinton surplus. You are a filthy little liar. http://www.factcheck.org/2008/02/the-budget-and-deficit-under-clinton/ Q: During the Clinton administration was the federal budget balanced? Was the federal deficit erased? A: Yes to both questions, whether you count Social Security or not. PS: Even if the dot com bubble inflated the surplus - it would have been nice to have that money in pocket when Bush era emergencies came along like 9/11, Iraq+Afghanistan, Katrina, Wall Street collapse, etc.
#18. To: Godwinson (#17) Pretty fucking weak, even for you -- Let us establish one point definitively: Bill Clinton didn't balance the budget. Yes, he was there when it happened. But the record shows that was about the extent of his contribution. Many in the media have flubbed this story. The New York Times on October 1st said, "Clinton balances the budget." Others have praised George Bush. Political analyst Bill Schneider declared on CNN that Bush is one of "the real heroes" for his willingness to raise taxes -- and never mind read my lips. (Once upon a time, lying was something that was considered wrong in Washington, but under the last two presidents our standards have dropped.) In any case, crediting George Bush for the end of the deficit requires some nifty logical somersaults, since the deficit hit its Mount Everest peak of $290 billion in St. George's last year in office. And 1993 -- the year of the giant Clinton tax hike -- was not the turning point in the deficit wars, either. In fact, in 1995, two years after that tax hike, the budget baseline submitted by the president's own Office of Management and Budget and the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office predicted $200 billion deficits for as far as the eye could see. The figure shows the Clinton deficit baseline. What changed this bleak outlook?
Newt Gingrich and company -- for all their faults -- have received virtually no credit for balancing the budget. Yet the surplus is, in part, a byproduct of the GOP's single-minded crusade to end 30 years of red ink. Arguably, Gingrich's finest hour as Speaker came in March 1995 when he rallied the entire Republican House caucus behind the idea of eliminating the deficit within seven years.
We have a balanced budget today that is mostly a result of 1) an exceptionally strong economy that is creating gobs of new tax revenues and 2) a shrinking military budget. Social spending is still soaring and now costs more than $1 trillion. Skeptics said it could not be done in seven years. The GOP did it in four. Now let us contrast this with the Clinton fiscal record. Recall that it was the Clinton White House that fought Republicans every inch of the way in balancing the budget in 1995. When Republicans proposed their own balanced-budget plan, the White House waged a shameless Mediscare campaign to torpedo the plan -- a campaign that the Washington Post slammed as "pure demagoguery." It was Bill Clinton who, during the big budget fight in 1995, had to submit not one, not two, but five budgets until he begrudgingly matched the GOP's balanced-budget plan. In fact, during the height of the budget wars in the summer of 1995, the Clinton administration admitted that "balancing the budget is not one of our top priorities." And lest we forget, it was Bill Clinton and his wife who tried to engineer a federal takeover of the health care system -- a plan that would have sent the government's finances into the stratosphere. Tom Delay was right: for Clinton to take credit for the balanced budget is like Chicago Cubs pitcher Steve Trachsel taking credit for delivering the pitch to Mark McGuire that he hit out of the park for his 62nd home run. The figure shows that the actual cumulative budget deficit from 1994 to 1998 was almost $600 billion below the Clintonomics baseline. Part of the explanation for the balanced budget is that Republicans in Congress had the common sense to reject the most reckless features of Clintonomics. Just this year, Bill Clinton's budget proposed more than $100 billion in new social spending -- proposals that were mostly tossed overboard. It's funny, but back in January the White House didn't seem too concerned about saving the surplus for "shoring up Social Security."
We have a balanced budget today that is mostly a result of 1) an exceptionally strong economy that is creating gobs of new tax revenues and 2) a shrinking military budget. Social spending is still soaring and now costs more than $1 trillion. Is this the kind of balanced budget that fiscal conservatives want? A budget with no deficit, but that funds the biggest government ever? So the budget is balanced, but now comes the harder part: cutting the budget. Bill Clinton has laid down a marker in the political debate with his "save Social Security first," gambit. That theme should be turned against him and his government expansionist agenda. Congress should respond: No new government programs until we have fixed Social Security. This means no IMF bailouts. No new day care subsidies. No extending Medicare coverage to 55-year-olds. (Honestly, if Clinton has his way, it won't be long till teenagers are eligible for Medicare.) The budget surpluses over the next five years could easily exceed $500 billion. Leaving all of that extra money lying around within the grasp of vote-buying politicians is an invitation to financial mischief. If Congress and the president use the surpluses to fund a new spending spree, we may find that surpluses are more a curse than a blessing.
#25. To: no gnu taxes, Godwinson (#18) Let us establish one point definitively: Bill Clinton didn't balance the budget. Yes, he was there when it happened. But the record shows that was about the extent of his contribution. When accounting gimmicks are eliminated and "off-budget" items are put back in, the real public debt as officially reported has risen every year since the Eisenhower administration (1957). There was no Clinton surplus, but Clinton did almost eliminate the deficit. http://www.treasurydirect.gov/govt/reports/pd/histdebt/histdebt_histo5.htm 09/30/2010 - 13,561,623,030,891.79 http://www.treasurydirect.gov/govt/reports/pd/histdebt/histdebt_histo4.htm 09/30/1999 - 5,656,270,901,615.43
Replies to Comment # 25. #27. To: nolu chan, no gnu taxes (#25) but Clinton did almost eliminate the deficit. What is missed out about the Clinton era tax policies is that the Republicans under Bush sought to eliminate a govt budget/tax balance that was working in favor of an economic policy that was fatuous. Cheney said as much when he said deficits did not matter. The GOP under Bush purposefully supported an economic policy that did not work and they knew it did not work all for domestic political gain.
#28. To: nolu chan (#25) but Clinton
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