When we all heard his speeches during the 2008 campaign, it was something akin to the Lesley Gore’s Sunshine, Lollipops, and Rainbows. He promised more transparency and a return of civility in politics. He was everything George Bush wasn’t, which provided the hot air that led him to the presidency. Bush did run deficits and the orgy of spending and corruption scandals that plagued Republicans in 2006, that were not forgotten in 2008, allowed Democrats to control the narrative on a key Republican issue: Taxes and Spending. The “tax and spend label” that usually sinks liberal candidates, or at least makes the race a competition, faded away. Obama vowed to cut the deficit in half by the end of his first term and that was music to the ears of independent voters sick of Dubya. However, when the ballots closed that miserable day in November, Barack Obama rode that wave of “hope and change” into 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue on a flawlessly executed campaign that ushered in our first black president. However, after a $800 billion dollar stimulus, a trillion dollar new entitlement program, stagnant economic growth, a volatile job market, and high unemployment, the banner of hope and change is looking more like a Kafka-esque nightmare. We’ve all transformed into beetles.
As for the so-called “stimulus,” we should thank the president. He finally and irrevocably proved that government spending doesn’t spur economic growth and, therefore, killed the cornerstone of Keynesian economics. We’ve had eleven recessions and recoveries in the past sixty years and, as Harvey Golub wrote in the Wall Street Journal yesterday:
This recovery is near the bottom of all 11. Cumulative nonfarm job growth is just 1.9% 34 months into recovery, the ninth-worst performance and well below the average job growth of 6.5%. Cumulative GDP growth is just 6.8% 11 quarters into this recovery, less than half the average (15.2%) and the worst of all 11…fiscal policy, under the control of the president and his party, increased expenditures by about $700 billion per year since 2008 and launched a spending package of about $800 billion (along with various “targeted” temporary tax reductions), all of which resulted in an increase in national debt of over $5 trillion. In other words, we borrowed $5 trillion, for which we will pay interest for who knows how long, in order to stimulate the economy now.
If something that hurts Obama can be spun in such a way as to negate its impact, they may report it– with the spin, of course.
If something that hurts Obama is impossible to spin, then they ignore it entirely and hope no one hears about it, or that anyone who hears about it takes the press’ silence as meaning the story has been debunked.
For example: The fact that Wright says an Obama crony offered him $150,000 to stop preaching until after the 2008 election. It can’t be spun, so it simply gets embargoed.
The economy is a tricky thing for the press– they can’t ignore it, since it is on everyone’s mind. Which means they’ll have to spin it– even if such spin is sort of absurd.
With that in mind:
Is GOP trying to sabotage economy to hurt Obama?
By CHARLES BABINGTON | Associated Press – Sat, May 19, 2012
WASHINGTON (AP) — Are Republican lawmakers deliberately stalling the economic recovery to hurt President Barack Obama’s re-election chances? Some top Democrats say yes, pointing to GOP stances on the debt limit and other issues that they claim are causing unnecessary economic anxiety and retarding growth.
The latest Democratic complaint came after House Speaker John Boehner said Tuesday that when Congress raises the nation’s borrowing cap in early 2013, he will again insist on big spending cuts to offset the increase. Boehner, R-Ohio, continues to reject higher tax rates, which Democrats demand from the wealthy.
That led Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., to say Boehner is virtually assuring another debt-ceiling crisis as bad or worse than the one that shook financial markets nine months ago.
President Obama’s budget suffered a second embarrassing defeat Wednesday, when senators voted 99-0 to reject it.
Coupled with the House’s rejection in March, 414-0, that means Mr. Obama’s budget has failed to win a single vote in support this year.
Republicans forced the vote by offering the president’s plan on the Senate floor.
Democrats disputed that it was actually the president’s plan, arguing that the slim amendment didn’t actually match Mr. Obama’s budget document, which ran thousands of pages. But Republicans said they used all of the president’s numbers in the proposal, so it faithfully represented his plan.
Sen. Jeff Sessions, Alabama Republican, even challenged Democrats to point out any errors in the numbers and he would correct them — a challenge no Democrats took up.
“A stunning development for the president of the United States in his fourth year in office,” Mr. Sessions said of the unanimous opposition.
This is a follow up to mypostyesterday. Kalifornia is really boned. And the masses are out protesting and will likely get violent. Enjoy your Communist holiday.
The weekend produced a spate of dang-this-is-bad articles on the economic situation in California. Steven Greenhut’s for the Orange County Register is entitled “California to middle class: drop dead.” At The Daily Beast, Joel Kotkin laments that “As California Collapses, Obama Follows its Lead.” (H/t – and a “Read it, people!” shout-out – to Ed Driscoll at PJM.)
But what does all this look like in terms of numbers? What’s the how much and where and whom of the Golden State collapse? Perhaps the most interesting and telling thing is that it really is as bad as it looks. And the reasons are pretty much what you’d expect. Here’s the California story, in numbers.
According to a March 2012 report, 855,000 is how many private-sector jobs California has lost since the recession started four years ago. (H/t: California Political News & Views.) The state today enjoys an unemployment rate of 11%, compared with the official national average of 8.3%
Texas, by contrast, has added 139,800 jobs, posting the biggest absolute gain among the 50 states. (California’s is the biggest absolute loss.) Texas’ unemployment rate is 7.1%. Number 3 on the job-growth list? The District of Columbia, with 21,000 added private-sector jobs. Government is big business.
California’s superwealthy progressives seem intent on destroying middle-class jobs.
Few states have offered the class warriors of Occupy Wall Street more enthusiastic support than California has. Before they overstayed their welcome and police began dispersing their camps, the Occupiers won official endorsements from city councils and mayors in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Oakland, Richmond, Irvine, Santa Rosa, and Santa Ana. Such is the extent to which modern-day “progressives” control the state’s politics.
But if those progressives really wanted to find the culprits responsible for the state’s widening class divide, they should have looked in a mirror. Over the past decade, as California consolidated itself as a bastion of modern progressivism, the state’s class chasm has widened considerably. To close the gap, California needs to embrace pro-growth policies, especially in the critical energy and industrial sectors—but it’s exactly those policies that the progressives most strongly oppose.
Even before the economic downturn, California was moving toward greater class inequality, but the Great Recession exacerbated the trend. From 2007 to 2010, according to a recent study by the liberal-leaning Public Policy Institute of California, income among families in the 10th percentile of earners plunged 21 percent. Nationwide, the figure was 14 percent. In the much wealthier 90th percentile of California earners, income fell far less sharply: 5 percent, only slightly more than the national 4 percent drop. Further, by 2010, the families in the 90th percentile had incomes 12 times higher than the incomes of families in the 10th—the highest ratio ever recorded in the state, and significantly higher than the national ratio.
I’m not an economist and don’t claim to be one, but, I know failure when I see it. And every time Keynesian economics has been tried, it has failed miserably.
Here’s an article from CATO that should remind you of that very fact.
There’s an old saying that insanity is doing the same thing over and over again while expecting different results. This certainly is a good description of Keynesians, who relentlessly push more government spending as some sort of magic potion for the economy – notwithstanding a record of failure.
The latest example if Larry Summers, the former economist for the Obama White House, who says Europeans need to make government bigger.
Here is some of what he writes for today’s Washington Post.
European efforts to contain crisis have fallen short. …Much of what is being urged on and in Europe is likely to be not just ineffective but counterproductive to maintaining the monetary union, restoring normal financial conditions and government access to markets, and reestablishing economic growth. The premise of European policymaking is that countries are overindebted and so unable to access markets on reasonable terms, and that the high interest rates associated with excessive debt hurt the financial system and inhibit growth. The strategy is to provide financing while insisting on austerity, in hopes that countries can rein in their excessive spending enough to restore credibility, bring down interest rates and restart economic growth.
The good news is that Summers recognizes that there has been “excessive spending.” The bad news is that he uses the wrong definition of austerity.
We know that many on the racist right have tried to play up Papa Obama’s deficit spending as having no end in sight. But, through my sources at DNC, I have been given inside knowledge of Papa Obama’s theory on deficit spending. Papa Obama has actually found a universal constant to spending.
Apparently, he has based it on another’s work but not as smart as Papa Obama to see the big picture
E= MC2
where:
E= socialist egalitarianism
M= Gross National Product
C= speed of spending- which is a constant
It is so simple and beautiful
Let us approximate on our current deficit spending to show us how this works
Yea. I’ve abandoned all hope and now side with the liberals. Tax the rich! Tax them until those rich bastards are poor bastards. No. Really. Just kidding. You can breathe now. Have a look at this, especially if you’re one of those progressive assholes that thinks taxing the rich will solve all of our nation’s financial woes. Morons.
The left does this shit all the time. It’s time that the right, the majority, does the same. Boycott the appeasers of the left. Use their own tactics against them.
Let’s stipulate: Activists on the left are free to exercise their rights of speech and assembly to boycott businesses whose politics they oppose. Conversely, activists on the right are free to exercise the power of their pocketbooks and refrain from supporting businesses that shun their values.
So, what are you waiting for, conservatives? There are coordinated shakedowns taking place right now that involve some of America’s most prominent companies who’ve chosen to surrender to progressive bullying and race-card opportunism. Silence is complicity.
On Tuesday, McDonald’s told liberal magazine Mother Jones that the company had “decided to cut ties with ALEC, the corporate-backed group that drafts pro-free-market legislation for state lawmakers around the country.”
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