This bad:
It’s Rooseveltian, in that the president inherited a bad situation, and made it worse (and continues to do so). Fortunately, we have term limits now, so he can only do the damage for eight years at most, but if the voters are smart, they’ll preempt the extended disaster next year.
Let’s just hope that he isn’t as revered as Roosevelt 80 years later
…but, but, but…he said he has 5 1/2 years left?!! and, and, and…if he’s not re-elected, then, the, the…people will RIOT……it’ll, it’ll, it’ll be JUST like Rodney King alllllll OVER again!!! We can’t possibly have THAT!! The humanity, the humanity.
Can we have that?
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I haven’t heard this particular re-election plan yet. But if we don’t in the next year and some, I’ll eat my MF hat. (Massey Ferguson) And as to the Presidential “inheritance factor’. With the exception of George Washington, just which President DIDN’T inherit some huge crisis, war, overage, shortage, drought, flood or plague… of… locusts from the previous President!?
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On open letter to those following Mr. Barack Hussein Obama.
My suggestion, for anyone going forward from today, who wants to run America starting from a clean slate. Build a Time Machine, go back to the beginning of the country, and run AGAINST Mr. Washington. If you lose, go back again, and again, and again, and run, run, run until you win, win, win.
Seems like quite a simple plan to me.
But simpler still. Run here and now. If you get elected, start by putting on your Big Boy Pants, accept the job you busted your ass fighting all the other candidates for, for two years and DO the DAMNED job!
Quit berating your predecessor, stop playing golf, stay INSIDE the country, don’t let the VP do your work, don’t spend half your time stumping for money for the NEXT election cycle and just DO the DAMNED job!!
Quit comparing the work of the elected officials of the legislative branch of the most powerful country on Earth, to something trivial, like, oh, I don’t know, that of school children’s homework and just DO the DAMNED job!!
If you’ll and just DO the DAMNED job and the people like you, you’ll GET 4 more years!! And if they don’t like you, then the next guy will have to, unpack his skivvies and red power ties at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave, just like YOU did and then HE’LL just have to DO the DAMNED job!!
Hopefully, if we are very, very, extremely lucky, the next guy won’t keep saying, “… Mr. Obama’s Economy…”, “…Mr. Obama’s Schools…’, “…Mr. Obama’s wars…”, “…Mr. Obama’s WTF ever!!! And he’ll just DO the DAMNED job!!!
He won’t be. There was an interesting study on the international political fallout from the Great Depression. In all countries the party in power when it started was tossed out, and in all countries the party in power when it ended was given credit for ending it, with voting patterns affected for many, many decades. Some countries shifted to the right, some to the left, but basically all shifted in an attempt to ease the crisis. If FDR had left office in 1940 and been replaced by a Republican, then the Democrats would probably be remembered as the Depression party because it would’ve ended on a Republican’s watch and both of FDR’s terms would’ve been remembered only for their misery, which is probably how we’ll remember Obama’s term.
On the other hand, Roosevelt was right about the Axis when a lot of people weren’t, and he was probably the best leader of a major power in WWII.
Churchill was a great orator, but he also made a lot of bad strategic and tactical decisions.
Ya, whatever FDR did or didn’t do for the economy he kicked some ass in WWII. If one were to overlook Libya, one could say Obama was doing the same thing except that he doesn’t believe in victory and by the very nature of the Long War victory is not as cut and dry as WWII.
The interesting thing about that chart is how well Bush did but the things Bush did to get out of that recession are not the right solutions to the current one. When Bush tried more tax rebates later in his term, people used the money to pay off credit card and mortgage debts instead of buying goods and services.
No surprise that Obama’s smaller tax rebate would have little to no effect, $250 doesn’t go far to pay the mortgage for one month let alone 12.
That is a scary chart. You’ll note that Obama is different not just in the depth but that every other line is fairly symmetric. The Obama line besides lasting more months shows a different slope down and up. Left alone, you would expect the economy to bounce back eventually. Will it this time?
Obama’s line doesn’t look like any post WW-II recover but it does bear some resemblance to the pre WW-II Great Depression, when FDR’s policies kept making the depression deeper and longer. It’s definitely a line that would make the graph more interesting.
people used the money to pay off credit card and mortgage debts instead of buying goods and service
Ah, the old Keynesian canard. Guess what, wo? it’s wrong. You do not emerge from a recession by stimulating consumer demand.
I’m no lover of the Magic Negro, but to be fair that chart represents the Keynesian missteps of a bunch of presidents and congress as a whole. Bush II shares just as much blame.
@wodun … Roosevelt was smart enough to let the generals fight the war. Unfortunately, he was enamored with Stalin and pretty caved in to most of the things that Stalin wanted.
First he agreed to Elbe river as the boundary for the Russian zone and gave the eastern part of Poland to the Soviet Union. Then he had Ike to slow down the Allied advance into Germany so as to let the Russians capture Berlin.
Wodun, are you saying America would emerge from this recession in better shape if consumers still had all their debt outstanding?
That we’d be better off with people funneling more of their post-recession earnings into paying off both their consumer debt and the built-up interest?
If people use the money they keep to pay down the debt they carried into the recession, that means more of the money they make once things turn up, goes into spurring the economy into strong growth and job creation. It also frees up credit so that employers can borrow at slightly lower rates and not have to divert more of their revenues into interest payments.
The government may not regard paying down personal debt as good for the economy, but everybody else does. Because in the long term it is.
Carl Pham Says:
“Ah, the old Keynesian canard. Guess what, wo? it’s wrong. You do not emerge from a recession by stimulating consumer demand.”
A tax rebate was part of a mix of tactics used by Bush to get us out of a recession and it appeared to be successful. It didn’t work as intended the second time because the economic conditions were different.
McGehee Says:
“Wodun, are you saying America would emerge from this recession in better shape if consumers still had all their debt outstanding?”
No. I was just pointing out that when Bush tried a tax rebate later in his term that people used it to pay off bills.
The first time Bush used the tax rebate people were better off economically and many people treated it as disposable. With the later rebate people were worried about losing their house and used the money more responsibly.
A tax rebate was part of a mix of tactics used by Bush to get us out of a recession and it appeared to be successful.
Could be. The problem is, wo, you don’t know what people did with the extra money. Let’s assume they did something sensible, which had the effect of producing economic growth. But what was it? Was it that a low- to middle-class person ran right out and got a manicure or hired a tutor for his high-school kid failing algebra, which would “stimulate” the right parts of the economy according to Democrats?
Or was it because a journeyman plumber, doing pretty well, finally had enough capital to set up his own shop and hire a couple of other guys to work for him?
The Keynesian folly has been to always assume aggregate demand always drive the economy forward, and the role of capital formation is piddling. (God knows how they square this with the slow or absent economic progress for the first 35,000 years of human history — did Mycenean Greeks really have no appetite for faster sailing ships or cheaper wine?)
It’s an important point, because of fools who claim that Americans “only” paying down debt with increased income is some kind of “waste.” It’s not, of course, if you’re thinking about capital formation. Paying down debt means capital is being accumulated — and we mean genuine capital, the kind that can fuel innovation and growth, not the bogus capital of borrowing at artificially low Fed rates, which is just thieving from the future and (as we see) the royal road to ruin.
The statist folly has always been to assume they knew what people did with their extra money that ended the recession — and therefore, if we organized that, whatever it was, at the government level, it would happen so much more efficiently. It doesn’t matter whether the theory is that you need big “stimulus” or “quantitative easing” and low interest rates, whether it’s financial or monetary. It’s the same old “Fatal Conceit,” to quote the master.
The gross misrepresentation of the rest of us by the statists is that they think we like tax cuts because we know where the money will go and think wherever that is will do the job. We don’t know where the money will go. That’s the point. We want to take control (money) away from the center and direct it back to the grass-roots, to the millions of decision-makers close to the ground. We don’t know what they’ll do with it. We just believe whatever they do will be more informed and sensible than what some committee of lawyers in Washington would do with it.
How about a law which states that no one must repay their consumer debts? Surely that will make the perpetual motion machine work this time…
Carl Pham Says:
“Could be. The problem is, wo, you don’t know what people did with the extra money.”
Fair enough.
“It’s an important point, because of fools who claim that Americans “only” paying down debt with increased income is some kind of “waste.””
I agree with this but with the first rebate from Bush, people had more choices. They could have hired a tutor, paid down their debt, or bought a kegerator. With the rebate later in his term people had less choices because they were staring the housing collapse in the face and while many paid down their debts it didn’t go very far.
I guess you are saying that Bush didn’t need to have a tax rebate in addition to the other things he did and that its effects are uncertain but maybe it wasn’t all bad because it put the purchasing power in the hands of individuals.
My point was that the first time it was successful or at least part of a successful strategy, the second time it wasn’t, and even less successful for Obama.
A tax rebate was part of a mix of tactics used by Bush to get us out of a recession and it appeared to be successful. It didn’t work as intended the second time because the economic conditions were different.
As I see it, the housing bubble came about in large part due to the attempts that were made to “get out” of the 2000-2001 recession (including the dot com bubble and 9/11 issues) which was very serious in its own right. While various quirks of law and regulation made real estate particularly susceptible, the easy credit from the Fed made the bubble far bigger than it would have otherwise been. Keep in mind that there was also an auto bubble which imploded as well (GM and Chrysler facing bankruptcy as a result).
The question asked is actually a very interesting and vital one. Who is smarter, the generation of the 1930’s, or the 2010’s? We are well aware of the pathetic nature of our degraded selves in 2011. But the fact is, the 1930’s generation caved, and handed in all the chips earned by previous generations dating back to 1787. Then they re-elected Roosevelt and extended not only their troubles, but ours. It is going to be hard to get under the bar set by those voters. Our problem remains not in stepping over the bar, but in failing to own enough imagination to raise it.
The lesser of two evils is usually the worse evil. I’ll take as much of Obama and the Obots as is necessary to clarify our thinking. “Evils, like poisons, have their uses, and there are diseases which no other remedy can reach.”–Tom Paine