Also, I wrote this on Word and when I transferred it the formatting went funky. Graphs in particular. Sorry. Click on the links to get better, clearer images.
Our proximity to the President was thrilling. His speech, though, was disappointing. He seemed tired. Maybe even sick. I can see the complaint about his reliance on teleprompters because he stumbled through the speech unassisted. Though I don’t get how this makes for the cache of political ammunition that has been leveled at him-given the ineloquence of his predecessor and the awkward off script moments of his competitor. Here there was not the same vigor of hope and change. From the years of opposition there were new scars and some new anger. (I think in particular some angry words were alluding to the “you didn’t build that” ridiculousness. A perfect example of an awkward sentence turned into outright fabrication. I hate to even go to the trouble here, but somehow the lies are sticking. We’ve seen several “You didn’t build that" billboards in CO.
Here’s Jon Stewart’s take. The least serious of my sources, but the most entertaining
http://videocafe.crooksandliars.com/heather/jon-stewart-rips-fox-and-romney-out-contex
The President hit some of the same notes (“Yes we can”) but sounded like a band on a reunion tour trotting out the tired hits. I don’t blame him, he’s got better things to do, but he has to pander if he wants to continue doing so. That his speech wasn’t polished doesn‘t bother me so much, it‘s the implications of it. I thought Obama’s best advantage was a verbal one, contrasting his ideas with Romney’s during the debates. I am not so sure now.
Here’s what feels like a painful confession-I like Obama. Or, if you're on the other side, I still like Obama. I feel bad for the guy. Nothing he does seems to please anyone.
He’s a socialist. He's anti business.
He’s been bought by wall street and repays them through bailouts and employment.
(actually not nearly as much as you might think)
http://www.factcheck.org/2012/02/obama-white-house-full-of-wall-street-executives/
He’s an out of touch elite, a Harvard lawyer (2 dirty words), who hasn’t helped regular Joes on Main street.
Yet who rather than work on wall street himself, worked in the inner city as a community organizer and with this poor codling mindset has created a welfare state to the detriment of the business community, the "Food Stamp President" (these critics forget all about the recession momentarily-strange as this is the only time they do so-somehow overlooking that people who lose their jobs become poor, and poor people haven’t the money to pay taxes, let alone eat, and since feeding themselves is difficult, might need some assistance).
He’s a millionaire, but wants to pay more taxes, who has been responsible for tax cuts galore.
He’s soft, and anti American. He’s going to criminalize gun ownership, but who wiped out upper echelon Al Qaeda leadership with drone attacks,
http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/politics/2011/09/the-terrorist-notches-on-obamas-belt/
while scaling back troop presence. Who’s improving the world image of America while deporting more immigrants than Bush.
-According to the Pew Global Attitudes Project, in 2008 the positive view of the United States in Germany was 31 percent, in France it was 42 percent, and in Japan it was 50 percent. Last year, it was 62%, 75%, and 85%
(Some might use this as proof of his anti-Americanism, but wouldn’t you say people are less likely to try and blow you up if they like you?)
-“According to current figures from Immigration and Customs Enforcement -- the federal agency responsible for deportations -- Obama has removed 1.4 million people during his 42 months in office so far...If you instead compare the two presidents’ monthly averages, it works out to 32,886 for Obama and 20,964 for Bush, putting Obama clearly in the lead. Bill Clinton is far behind with 869,676 total and 9,059 per month. All previous occupants of the White House going back to 1892 fell well short of the level of the three most recent presidents.”
http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2012/aug/10/american-principles-action/has-barack-obama-deported-more-people-any-other-pr/
While we're at it we might clear up the nasty anti-business rumor too.
"corporate profits are now at a peak in dollar terms and close to an all-time high as a percentage of GDP. Total cash reserves at U.S. corporations total more than $2 trillion, close to a 50-year high in relative terms."
http://business.time.com/2012/01/18/the-big-winner-of-the-great-recession-is/#ixzz26lKgR7OH
And despite these huge profits corporate taxes are near their lowest levels ever
("Since 1950, corporate tax receipts have averaged 2.7 percent of GDP. In the Obama years, they’ve averaged 1.16 percent of GDP.")
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/ezra-klein/post/obamas-real-record-on-business/2012/06/11/gJQAcvr7UV_blog.html
He's a radical who ran as a centrist. He's the same as usual after promising transformative change.
He’s been blamed for the failure of the success that he had little to do with. Yeah, that’s as screwed up as it sounds. We’ll try it this way. No one wants to admit they were responsible for the stimulus, much less try to point out that it worked.
Speaking of the stimulus-it was too big, it was too small. And Obamacare, it’s a government takeover of health care. No, others say, Obamacare isn’t a government takeover of health care, and it should be. Either way Obamacare wasn’t written by Obama. In fact prior to Obama's involvement the individual mandate had some support from Republicans.
"I am for people, individuals -- exactly like automobile insurance -- individuals having health insurance and being required to have health insurance. And I am prepared to vote for a voucher system which will give individuals, on a sliding scale, a government subsidy so we insure that everyone as individuals have health insurance."
Who was that? Newt Gingrich actually (Meet the Press Oct. 3, 1993)
Democrats complain he’s ineffective. He’s a sell out, who did too little, who caved to Republican threats. Too tame, too timid. He spent way too much time trying to work with the other side, when a mutual deal was clearly impossible. Not diabolically evil, but naïve.
Yes, he hasn’t produced the types of change his campaign followers hoped for, like ending racism and immediately erasing all our problems, but many liberals forget or discount two things
1. His challenges
Don’t need to go into details here, on how much things sucked when he stepped in, but he had other difficulties, like -“only for roughly four months during Obama’s term did Democrats have the 60 Senate votes they needed to overcome a filibuster.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/04/magazine/what-the-left-doesnt-understand-about-obama.html (This article makes several of my points much better than I)
And they needed those 60 votes, because much of Obama’s plans have been filibustered. While only “41 senators, which could represent as little as 12.3% of the U.S. population, can make a filibuster happen” it takes 3/5 to break a filibuster, which is called Cloture.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Senate#Filibuster_and_cloture
The number of cloture filings have doubled during Obama’s presidency
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/ezra-klein/post/the-history-of-the-filibuster-in-one-graph/2012/05/15/gIQAVHf0RU_blog.html
Here's a choice example of liberal unreasonableness-I think almost everyone would agree the word "stimulus" is political poison right now, but even at the beginning there was hesitation. $400-$500 was the conventional stimulus figure weeks before Obama’s larger proposal passed and did so barely. Yet despite robust Republican and public opposition many liberals now say that it was insufficient and should have been, and still should be, doubled and the fact that Obama passed the original bill, while facing widespread public criticism, is proof he's soft. That he slipped in a couple of smaller and more covert stimulus measures since the original tends not to get brought up.
2. He’s criticized for ineffectiveness despite a number of large accomplishments.
Which leads us right into the Republican side of things because one person’s accomplishment is another’s destruction of America. Strangely Republicans seem to view Obama in much higher regard than Democrats. He’s frighteningly effective (in his socialist agenda) in nearly everything, except the economy. Totally unwilling to work with Republicans or compromise to boot.
So is Obama a complex, conflicted man in a conflicted and dumbed down political landscape? Is he confused and inconsistent? Is he too modest? Has he, like he said he would, taken ideas from both sides? Has he for each particular issue depending on circumstances and feasibility adjusted? Has he focused on the end result and whether or not it was better than the alternative nothing, whether that be unrealistic liberal dreams that would have amounted to nothing or the more straightforward do nothing "no" of Republicans? Has he simply been lied about?
The most notable contradiction of Obama is that the man whose inspirational speeches got him elected, has during his presidency been such a poor communicator that most people don’t know what he has done or why he’s done it. (Though to be fair to him, he’s up against a powerful machine whose goal is to spread misinformation. If you don’t think so, consider this- If the problem was solely Obama’s lack of articulating his plans and motivations clearly, people would simply be confused. There would be no narrative to his presidency. Many people are emphatic, however, about what Obama has done and that narrative is the exact opposite of the truth. Here is the frightening effectiveness.
A main theme of the Republican narrative is that the debt is our biggest threat and that cutting it by shrinking government is our way out of the recession. This seems to be a popular believe, though I think cutting social programs now would be the worst time to do so. What’s worse than losing your job? Losing your job and finding out that, though all the time you were working you could have gotten food stamps and unemployment insurance, now that you need them those programs have been gutted.
People argue about the proper size of government and what governmental employees should be paid, but government jobs are jobs, that pay real money, that in turn get spent on real things like food and rent, putting money into the economy. When so many have lost their jobs the idea that we would voluntarily elect to terminate existing jobs (while also claiming that this is somehow helping the economy) seems foolish.
If a construction worker is unemployed, instead of giving him unemployment, why not have him build a road? I guess there’s another option. If he’s already working for the government, fire him, and slash his unemployment benefits.
The seeming one consistency between Republicans and Democrats is that if Obama acted differently (though they have wildly different ideas on what that better would entail) the economy would be in better shape.
Some of this is understandable. The economy stinks. Obama’s in change, so he gets blamed. But if he is blamed for underestimating our economic problem this applies to his critics also, that without his actions things would be much, much worse. It’s kind of like if you caught on fire and a doctor saved your life and you can’t stop complaining because it hurts and you think he botched the reconstructive surgery. (All my metaphors, for some reason, are going to involve fire by the way).
Then again recession problems are tied to consumer confidence. It would do no good for Obama to be excessively dire about the state of the economy. I guess we won’t know how naïve he was or wasn’t.
Here’s how the austerity (Don't spend money) vs. stimulus debate played out.
First Bush and Republicans thought stimulus was a good idea. Once Obama showed up it wasn’t such a great idea, but still got passed. And then it was time to deal with the debt..well, unless we’re talking about taxes.
Obama could have refused to extend the Bush tax cuts on income over $250,000, but if he did Republicans would ensure tax cuts for everyone would end. Obama made a deal keeping all the tax cuts and getting an extension of unemployment benefits, that otherwise wouldn’t have happened. Later Republicans refused to raise the debt ceiling until they got spending cuts. For fear of a economic catastrophe, Obama again caved.
Both of these examples show not only was Obama’s focus on the economy, but that he acted in a way more consistent with fixing it than his opposition.
A third example would be his dealing of Wall Street. Lets say a crew of firefighters show up to a house fire. They discover the fire is the result of a meth lab explosion. They wouldn’t ignore the fire because it was the result of illegal, immoral, and dangerous behavior. The firefighters would be guilty of something similar-not acting when inaction means danger for the whole community. They would deal with the fire and prevent it from spreading. Punishment would come later (Yeah, I‘m waiting for that too).
If you don’t think it was an emergency, a financial fire, or if you think we shouldn't have bailed out the banks, well we tried that. Albeit very briefly. It didn't go well.
From 9/12-9/17/08 as Lehman Brothers (a smaller bank) collapsed without government intervention the stock market dropped over 7%. What’s worse? Later as the first attempt at passing the bank bailout stimulus failed the stock market had its largest single day drop ever, falling almost 7%, or $1.2 trillion (9/29/08)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_daily_changes_in_the_Dow_Jones_Industrial_Average
If it wasn't an emergency, then why did 58 Representatives change their minds and days later vote for the stimulus bill they had just voted down?
To help prevent a bigger catastrophe for everyone the banks were bailed out. Just as the bank's financial problems, when exposed, became America's financial problems, punishment of banks, though vindicating, would be masochistic because it would again punish all of America.
The stimulus, which spans two presidents and is extremely complicated, has many misconceptions (in part because of those two factors). Here are some potentially surprising facts about it.
-Both the bank and auto bailouts were started by Bush.
-It was not as expensive as people think.
-Job loss stopped and growth (though insufficient) began.
85% of Republicans in the house voted for the original stimulus.
http://projects.washingtonpost.com/congress/110/house/2/votes/42/
The senate passed it 81 to 16.
Some familiar names voted for it-Paul Ryan, Mitch McConnell, John Boehner, John McCain, Eric Cantor, Michelle Bachmann, Lindsey Graham. In fact one person who didn’t vote for it was Obama (He didn’t vote at all. Must have been running for president or something)
http://www.senate.gov/legislative/LIS/roll_call_lists/roll_call_vote_cfm.cfm?congress=110&session=2&vote=00010
As to the cost of the most disliked elements of the stimulus-the bailouts:
“The Congressional Budget Office…reduced that (final expected cost of TARP) to $66 billion. Now Treasury reckons that taxpayers will lose less than $50 billion at worst, but at best could break even or even make money. Its best-case assumptions, however, assume that A.I.G. and the auto companies will remain profitable and that Treasury will get a good price as it sells its corporate shares in coming years. Whatever the final losses from housing, auto companies, A.I.G. or smaller banks, those will be offset by taxpayers’ profits from the big banks…They have repaid their loans and Treasury has collected about $25 billion more from dividends. Many smaller banks hold on to their loans, however,”
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/01/business/01tarp.html
For the auto portion specifically:
“the $80 billion financial bailout…has cost taxpayers at least $14 billion….To put it in perspective, $14 billion is….roughly two months of operating expenses for the U.S. military in Afghanistan”
http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/politics/2011/06/how-much-did-the-auto-bailout-cost-taxpayers/
-Also, the stimulus (including Obama's ARRA portion) was largely tax cuts (which if you ask Republicans is the greatest job creator).
“According to the Congressional Budget Office, tax cuts in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 reduced revenues by $253 billion between 2009 and 2011 – about a third of the budgetary cost of the stimulus package.
Further tax cuts agreed to by President Obama in 2010 added another $354 billion to the deficit in 2011 and a similar amount this year. Thus about $1 trillion of the deficit since 2009 came from tax cuts.”
http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/08/14/blaming-obama-for-george-w-bushs-policies/
This leads into some perplexing arithmetic. When tax cuts are a central feature of a stimulus package attached to Obama this is considered astronomic, debt-exploding spending, but when the spendaholic proposes to eliminate some of the tax cuts, the issue is to Republicans not worth pursuing, apparently having a negligible effect on the debt.
-Influence of the stimulus on the economy
“The private sector has actually added jobs since Obama was sworn in -- 427,000 of them, to be exact. For context, remember that the private sector lost 170,000 jobs during George W. Bush's eight years.
Of course, it's not really fair to blame Obama -- or Bush -- for jobs lost in their first few months before their policies took effect. If we more sensibly look at private sector payrolls after their first six months in office, then Obama has created 3.1 million jobs and Bush created 967,000 jobs.”
http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/08/a-full-fact-check-of-niall-fergusons-very-bad-argument-against-obama/261306/
Made by Obama, but generally validated by abc
http://abcnews.go.com/WNT/video/bush-obama-cost-america-million-jobs-republicans-democrats-george-barack-loss-ron-claiborne-11998507
Next onto Obamacare which has been called both a distraction from the economy and a job killer. Both seem wrong. Containing the massive and expanding cost of health care is directly linked to our economy. While the Congressional Budget Office said about Obamacare-
-FactCheck.org calls the job killer claim a “whopper”
http://www.factcheck.org/2012/02/gops-job-killing-whopper-again-2/
Many new health care jobs should be created as many more people will have access. In fact insurance companies will get millions of new customers, which is why many liberals are upset with Obamacare. They want a public option to reign in private insurance abuse.
So his spending on the stimulus and Obamacare isn’t as drastic as some would make it out to be. In perspective:
The “roughly $2 trillion swing (from projected surplus to actual debt) as coming from four broad categories: the business cycle, President George W. Bush’s policies, policies from the Bush years that are scheduled to expire but that Mr. Obama has chosen to extend, and new policies proposed by Mr. Obama.
The first category — the business cycle — accounts for 37 percent of the $2 trillion swing. It’s a reflection of the fact that both the 2001 recession and the current one reduced tax revenue, required more spending on safety-net programs…
About 33 percent of the swing stems from new legislation signed by Mr. Bush. That legislation, like his tax cuts and the Medicare prescription drug benefit…
Mr. Obama’s main contribution to the deficit is his extension of several Bush policies, like the Iraq war and tax cuts for households making less than $250,000. Such policies — together with the Wall Street bailout, which was signed by Mr. Bush and supported by Mr. Obama — account for 20 percent of the swing.
About 7 percent comes from the stimulus bill that Mr. Obama signed in February. And only 3 percent comes from Mr. Obama’s agenda on health care, education, energy and other areas. “
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/10/business/economy/10leonhardt.html
http://www.nytimes.com/imagepages/2011/07/24/opinion/sunday/24editorial_graph2.html?ref=sunday
Yet here’s the dominant and Republican narrative- Obama’s extravagant spending is hurting the economy. We need to stop him. This message (we’ll call it A) was extremely effective-endless filibustering, Republicans regaining the House, stimulus is an expletive, the debt is the national focus, passing the Budget Control Act that is expected to save $2.1 trillion over the next 10 years (All of that we’ll call B). Message A was so effective Republicans are running on it again. As if B not only didn’t happen, but completely ignoring that B’s occurrence makes A invalid.
It makes some sense though. Cycling through A and B sounds better than C-We claimed A, tried austerity (B) and the economy is still bad.
Here’s some additional reporting on his spending.
“Total government spending under his watch had the steepest annual decline in three decades. Imagine total government employees fell by the fastest rate in more than 60 years. Imagine that in his last two years, federal spending and federal employment grew by the slowest annual rate since the 1950s.
Now open your eyes. Welcome to Austerity USA. Total government employment -- that's federal, state, and local -- has indeed fallen by the sharpest annual rate since the 1940s. It's now
at 2006 levels and declining.
Total government spending has fallen by the sharpest rate since the 1970s. It is now at 2008 levels and declining.
Meanwhile in Washington, federal spending (which has grown every year since then 1960s) is increasing at its slowest pace in half a century, and federal employment is in true decline. Eighteen months removed from the start of the Census, it's shrinking at its fastest rate since the mid-1950s.”
http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/02/barack-obama-austerity-president/252319/
http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-505123_162-57400362/is-obama-really-spending-and-regulating-more/
If feels when watching TV like I’m the only person who thinks Obama is reasonable and, given the circumstances, impressive. I hope he just had an off day.
Bonus Myth Buster.
Obama is driving up oil prices by denying access to oil and imposing steep environmental regulations. This accusation ignores that the price of oil is set by world markets and that if we’re paying more for gas everyone else is too. Oh, and then there’s the fact that, under Obama, we're for the first time actually exporting more oil than importing.
http://science.time.com/2012/03/08/0-44-million-barrels-per-day/
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