Re: Obama XI: Turn And Face The Strange
So I hear the message from conservatives...why can't I criticize Obama without Bush being brought into it?
Its not that these two are necessarily connected. The problem is that as the criticisms are leveled against Obama...there are no solutions, no fixes, no ability to solve problems on the right. Conservatives have not shown they can effectively govern this country. That's where the W administration enters into the topic. Its hard to comprehend the number of ways this country was damaged by 2009...including many Americans having lost decades of wealth.
Next charge by conservatives is...ya, but Obama has been a bad president also.
How? Health care? Comes down to personal opinion...but this country is not even technically worse off. Spending? Again based the way the last decade unfolded, the US economy was in a very dangerous and fragile situation...nobody was spending, nobody was hiring. Somebody had to do both...and the govt did. Frankly, the country's economic plan has been remarkably successful. Assuming we can now start to reign in spending, all indications are that Obama will in fact be a very successful president. The key is that all the constant complaining about Obama is about things that may happen under unfavorable circumstances rather than with Bush which did happen and could well happen again under conservatives if/when they get back in.
ASSUMING spending will be reigned in? There hasn't been any talk of reigning in spending; in fact, the idea of a VAT has been tossed around......which would only increase government spending on the backs of ALL Americans. And no one is hiring now, considering that the unemployment rate has held around 9-10% even through the spring hiring season. You'd be hard-pressed to explain to the millions of unemployed Americans that Obama's economic plan has been "remarkably successful". GDP went up a couple of points, but when you consider that hiring was flat, all you're looking at is higher productivity from the same number of workers.
Here's the dirty little secret: The economy took a digger because the government got involved, not despite involvement; the abandonment of conservative principles by the Bush Administration contributed in large part to the problem. You can drone on and on about CDSs and MBSs, but the bottom line is that people defaulted on mortgages, which made everything down the line from there worthless. Fannie/Freddie continue to hemmorage cash while simultaneously being pushed by politicians to further loosen their already lax lending criteria. Granted, banks were involved in risky practices--and those practices were made possible by government regulation, not despite regulation, as Fannie/Freddie MBSs made up the majority of those types of securities.
I'm in no way defending Bush's fiscal policies--he spent too much and despite being stonewalled by Barney Frank & Co. should have pushed harder on reigning in Fannie/Freddie. In addition, Greenspan shouldn't have kept rates as low as they were for as long as they were--that action alone would have helped avert many of the foreclosures that started the downward financial spiral. Of course, the stimulus passed last year has done very little for the average American--unless they happened to be a government employee whose job was propped up for another year, or a union construction worker that found temporary work on government-funded projects (of course, those jobs are drying up as well).
However, China has recently cut back drastically on the purchase of U.S. government-issued securities, and that alone will continue to push bond rates higher--10-year bond rates have jumped over 1% since January '09; while that sounds insignificant, one point is a lot of money when you look at the amounts being borrowed by the current administration. I'm going to assume you're not well-versed on fiscal policy, because the current trajectory of government spending is not sustainable--and the implementation of a VAT would only worsen the situation by burdening the vast majority of Americans with backbreaking additional costs. And now, the increased spending by the current administration threatens the government's credit rating, which could drastically increase the federal debt via higher interest rates. And with business getting essentially zero help from the federal government in the way of tax cuts or credits, just wait until later this year when the commercial real estate market goes **** up......it's going to be a bloodbath.
