Politics Obama - Actually doing a good job?

redux · May 18, 2012

Baraka_Guru said: ↑

Where are these examples from? Are these actual case studies? Can we not simply look at cost of living/inflation numbers?
Click to expand...

it is Acian logic....start with a pre-determined conclusion, then create and toss out an anecdote to fit and see if it sticks.

Or we could rely on data from Bureau of Economic Analysis...like the fact that economic growth from 2001 to 2007 averaged 2.39 percent a year (and down to an average 1.66 percent if the 07-09 recession is include.) -- the lowest in 50 years.

There is no evidence that the Bush tax cuts stimulated anything.

pig · May 18, 2012

redux said: ↑

There is no evidence that the Bush tax cuts stimulated anything.
Click to expand...

Didn't stimulate anything?

Some people got very stimulated. I'm stuck wondering if we should start the vassal system up again, and if so how do we assign proper title?

Baraka_Guru · May 19, 2012

Trickle Flow-up economics. It works.

rogue49 · May 20, 2012

Interesting perspective on how this war was negotiated and interpreted earlier on in the administration...

Charting Obama’s Journey to a Shift on Afghanistan
By DAVID E. SANGER

It was just one brief exchange about Afghanistan with an aide late in 2009, but it suggests how President Obama’s thinking about what he once called “a war of necessity” began to radically change less than a year after he took up residency in the White House.

Not long before, after a highly contentious debate within a war cabinet that was riddled with leaks, Mr. Obama had reluctantly decided to order a surge of more than 30,000 troops. The aide told Mr. Obama that he believed military leaders had agreed to the tight schedule to begin withdrawing those troops just 18 months later only because they thought they could persuade an inexperienced president to grant more time if they demanded it.

“Well,” Mr. Obama responded that day, “I’m not going to give them more time.”

A year later, when the president and a half-dozen White House aides began to plan for the withdrawal, the generals were cut out entirely. There was no debate, and there were no leaks. And when Mr. Obama joins the leaders of other NATO nations in Chicago on Sunday and Monday, the full extent of how his thinking on Afghanistan has changed will be apparent. He will announce what he has already told the leaders in private: All combat operations led by American forces will cease in summer 2013, when the United States and other NATO forces move to a “support role” whether the Afghan military can secure the country or not.

Mr. Obama concluded in his first year that the Bush-era dream of remaking Afghanistan was a fantasy, and that the far greater threat to the United States was an unstable, nuclear-armed Pakistan. So he narrowed the goals in Afghanistan, and narrowed them again, until he could make the case that America had achieved limited objectives in a war that was, in any traditional sense, unwinnable.

“Just think how big a reversal of approach this was in just two years,” one official involved in the administration debates on Afghanistan said. “We started with what everyone thought was a pragmatic vision but, at its core, was a plan for changing the way Afghanistan is wired. We ended up thinking about how to do as little wiring as possible.”

The lessons Mr. Obama has learned in Afghanistan have been crucial to shaping his presidency. Fatigue and frustration with the war have defined the strategies his administration has adopted to guide how America intervenes in the world’s messiest conflicts. Out of the experience emerged Mr. Obama’s “light footprint” strategy, in which the United States strikes from a distance but does not engage in years-long, enervating occupations. That doctrine shaped the president’s thinking about how to deal with the challenges that followed — Libya, Syria and a nuclear Iran.

In interviews over the past 18 months, Mr. Obama’s top national security aides described the evolution of the president’s views on Afghanistan as a result of three rude discoveries.

Mr. Obama began to question why Americans were dying to prop up a leader, President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan, who was volatile, unreliable and willing to manipulate the ballot box. Faced with an economic crisis at home and a fiscal crisis that Mr. Obama knew would eventually require deep limits on Pentagon spending, he was also shocked, they said, by what the war’s cost would be if the generals’ counterinsurgency plan were left on autopilot — $1 trillion over 10 years. And the more he delved into what it would take to truly change Afghan society, the more he concluded that the task was so overwhelming that it would make little difference whether a large American and NATO force remained for 2 more years, 5 more years or 10 more years.

The remaking of American strategy in Afghanistan began, though no one knew it at the time, in a cramped conference room in Mr. Obama’s transition headquarters in late 2008. Gen. Douglas E. Lute, who had spent the last two years of the Bush administration trying to manage the many trade-offs necessary as the Iraq war consumed troop and intelligence resources needed in Afghanistan, arrived with a PowerPoint presentation.

The first slide that General Lute threw onto the screen caught the eye of Thomas E. Donilon, later President Obama’s national security adviser. “It said we do not have a strategy in Afghanistan that you can articulate or achieve,” Mr. Donilon recalled three years later. “We had been at war for eight years, and no one could explain the strategy.”

So in the first days of his presidency, Mr. Obama asked Bruce O. Riedel, a former C.I.A. officer with deep knowledge of the region, to lead a rapid review. At the time, the president was still speaking in campaign mode. He talked about remaking “an economy that isn’t dominated by illicit drugs” in Afghanistan and a “civilian surge” to match the military effort. But he said little about the Riedel team’s central insight: that Pakistan posed a far greater threat.

“If we were honest with ourselves, we would call this problem ‘Pak/Af,’ not ‘Af/Pak,’ ” Mr. Riedel said shortly after turning in his report. But the White House would not dare admit that publicly — even that rhetorical reversal would further alienate the Pakistanis.

Mr. Obama agreed with Mr. Riedel, but thought the review did not point clearly enough toward a new strategy. To get it right, the president ordered up a far more thorough process that would involve everyone — military commanders and experts on civilian reconstruction, diplomats who could explore a negotiation with the Taliban, and intelligence officials who could assess which side of the war the Pakistanis were fighting on.

But he also began to reassess whether emerging victorious in Afghanistan was as necessary as he had once proclaimed. Ultimately, Mr. Obama agreed to double the size of the American force while training the Afghan armed forces, but famously insisted that, whether America was winning or losing, the drawdown would begin in just 18 months.

“I think he hated the idea from the beginning,” one of his advisers said of the surge. “He understood why we needed to try, to knock back the Taliban. But the military was ‘all in,’ as they say, and Obama wasn’t.”

The president’s doubts were cemented as the early efforts to take towns like Marja in Helmand Province took months longer than expected. To Mr. Obama and his aides, Marja proved that progress was possible — but not on the kind of timeline that Mr. Obama thought economically or politically affordable.

“Marja looks a lot better than two years ago,” one senior official said at the end of last year. “But how many Marjas do we need to do, and over what time frame?”

The tight group of presidential aides charged with answering questions like that — of redefining the mission — began meeting on weekends at the end of 2010. The group’s informal name said it all: “Afghan Good Enough.”

“We spent the time asking questions like: How much corruption can we live with?” one participant recalled. “Is there another way — a way the Pentagon might not be telling us about — to speed the withdrawal? What’s the least we can spend on training Afghan troops and still get a credible result?”

By early 2011, Mr. Obama had seen enough. He told his staff to arrange a speedy, orderly exit from Afghanistan. This time there would be no announced national security meetings, no debates with the generals. Even Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates and Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton were left out until the final six weeks.

The key decisions had essentially been made already when Gen. David H. Petraeus, in his last months as commander in Afghanistan, arrived in Washington with a set of options for the president that called for a slow withdrawal of surge troops. He wanted to keep as many troops as possible in Afghanistan through the next fighting season, with a steep drop to follow. Mr. Obama concluded that the Pentagon had not internalized that the goal was not to defeat the Taliban. He said he “believed that we had a more limited set of objectives that could be accomplished by bringing the military out at a faster clip,” an aide reported.

After a short internal debate, Mr. Gates and Mrs. Clinton came up with a different option: end the surge by September 2012 — after the summer fighting season, but before the election. Mr. Obama concurred. But he was placing an enormous bet: his goals now focus largely on finishing off Al Qaeda and keeping Pakistan’s nuclear weapons from going astray. Left unclear is how America will respond if a Taliban resurgence takes over wide swathes of the country America invaded in 2001 and plans to largely depart 13 years later.

This article is adapted from “Confront and Conceal: Obama’s Secret Wars and Surprising Use of American Power,” to be published by Crown on June 5.
Click to expand...

rogue49 · May 22, 2012

I heard a good analogy from Bobcat Goldthwait for much of America's attitudes towards the Obama's efforts during the past few years.

"It's like a bunch of people are taking a plane to Disneyland...

Then all of a sudden, the plane starts diving towards the ground.
And this one guy, he takes over flying from the pilot, because the pilot doesn't seem to be doing the trick
And the guy actually pulls the plane out of the dive and somehow safely lands somewhere on a nice grassy field near civilization
And the people are disappointed, yelling "BUT we were going to Disneyland and you didn't get us there!!!""

EventHorizon · May 25, 2012

i saw him speak a few days ago and i have to hand it to him, he finds a way to make the current problems seem conquerable while countering the "America is in decline" arguments. i was really disappointed at how few friends applauded the Commander In Chief, but i was still pretty impressed.

Joniemack · May 26, 2012

Economically speaking, things are improving and this week's rise in the consumer confidence index -to it's highest level since 2007 - is either an indicator that consumers have more disposable income now, or the Democrats and Obama are gaining some momentum over the right wing "America is in decline" machine. Either way the economic numbers look promising, which is good for Obama. Rather than focusing on divisive social issues or maintaining the portrayal of Republicans as corporate ass lickers, all the Obama campaign needs to do is continue to drive home the economic truth. Romney's only position will remain one of defense - - if Obama can maintain hold of the ball.

Baraka_Guru · May 26, 2012

Joniemack

Things have been pointing in that direction for a while. Leading economic indicators have been generally positive for many months now (years, even). One obvious one is the S&P 500. If you haven't looked recently, the index has recovered substantially since its drop in 2007-2009 and has been flirting with historical highs recently. I would go into more detail with other indicators, but I've already done so in previous threads.

What may happen soon (if it's not happening now) is coincident indicators may start reflecting what leading indicators have been pointing to. The problem is that Joe Blow doesn't give a shit about leading indicators. Only economists, manufacturers, investors, etc., do. Joe Blow cares about unemployment, inflation, cost of living, income, wages, etc. Coincident indicators include the number of employees on payrolls, personal income levels, industrial production, and manufacturing/trade sales. Basically: lower unemployment, a rise in average incomes, and making and selling shit. The increased consumer confidence may reflect the outlook regarding these things.

Come election time, if unemployment continues to drop, if retail sales stay strong or grow, if manufacturing continues to grow, etc., the Republicans will have to rely on their usual propaganda to get elected. If they had to rely on facts, they'd have to explain how these things could possibly happen during Obama's "failed presidency."

The financial community is expecting some positive numbers with some upcoming reports in about a week. Many things have been looking up and are expected to be looking up: existing home sales, auto sales, etc. (which usually contribute to retail sales). The signs are pointing to a gradually increasing recovery. We may be heading out of the trough soon, and it may coincide with the election.

rogue49 · May 29, 2012

A fascinating perspective.

I also find it interesting the alternative headline for this article,
"Obama's Leadership in War with Al Qaeda"

It's almost as if a traditionally "liberal" newspaper (nytimes) is having conflicts of interest in reporting on Obama.
Each one offers a different tone...same article though.
One "noble", the other "tabloid"...

Secret ‘Kill List’ Proves a Test of Obama’s Principles and Will

rogue49 · Jun 2, 2012

And things get more interesting for Obama...and not in a good way.
Is this just a hiccup or something to address?
I know Summer is going to be a pain in his ass...fighting with the House, catering to the Dems, crossing his fingers with the Supreme Court
and all the while having to please the masses, actually do something productive...and finally deal with his opponent.

Jobs numbers remind Obama that he must do more than just attack
By Dan Balz,

Friday’s dismal jobs report and some unexpected words from Bill Clinton delivered a bracing reminder to President Obama and his advisers that the election remains primarily a referendum on his record and that their path to victory may lie less in trying to discredit Republican Mitt Romney and more in winning a battle of ideas with their Republican rival.

The latest report — just 69,000 jobs were added last month — was far worse than forecasters had predicted and undermined the administration’s contention that the economy is truly on a path to recovery. Administration officials pointed out that the economy added jobs for the 27th consecutive month. The weakness of that response underscored the challenge facing the president as he seeks to convince voters that he has the tools and the political wherewithal to fix what still ails the economy.

The troubles for Obama hit a day after the two campaigns staged dueling political spectacles. The Obama campaign chose the steps of the state Capitol in Boston to attack Romney’s record as governor. Romney went to the doorsteps of the bankrupt solar energy company Solyndra to attack Obama’s record as president.

As made-for-cable theater, the events attracted plenty of attention but not necessarily for the right reasons. Both were gimmicks. Friday’s anemic numbers from the Labor Department refocused the campaign where the voters live, on the fundamental issue of the overall state of the economy.

The Labor Department’s monthly report could not have come at a worse moment for the president, given the relatively weak jobs growth of the two previous months. History suggests that voters’ perceptions of the economy, and therefore the performance of the incumbent, begin to lock in several months before an election.

By that measure, Obama has little time to show progress. The economy appears to have fallen into another spring slump, after signs in the winter that suggested the recovery was genuinely taking hold. And the president may have only limited ability to affect the biggest looming danger to the U.S. economy, which is the situation in Europe. It is no wonder that analysts say the president’s prospects for reelection are no better than 50-50.

The president’s campaign has appeared wedded to a strategy of trying to discredit Romney. That began with attacks on his role at Bain Capital, the private equity firm where he made his fortune. Obama’s advisers believe it will have the desired effect on voters, but so far there is very little evidence that attacks on Bain are changing minds. Current polls continue to be extremely close.

The Bain attacks have caused grumbles from Democrats who have friends and allies in the private equity world, but those complaints did not deter the president’s Chicago team from pressing forward. What Bill Clinton said Thursday on CNN may give them greater pause — though Republicans may have rushed too quickly to embrace the former president.

Clinton said Romney has a “sterling” record in business. He also said that private equity is a legitimate part of the economy and that not all investments in failing companies turn out to be winners. He further said the combination of Romney’s experience in business and in Massachusetts means he is ready to serve as president.

“I don’t think that we ought to get into the position where we say, ‘This is bad work. This is good work,’ ” Clinton said on the “Piers Morgan Tonight” program that was being hosted by movie producer Harvey Weinstein. “The man who has been governor and had a sterling business career crosses the qualification threshold.”

That was interpreted as a signal to the Obama team to ratchet back on attacks that Republicans have characterized as anti-business and anti-free-enterprise. Obama’s advisers have argued that the Bain attacks were not aimed at business broadly but only at Romney’s qualifications and values. Clinton seemed to knock down the wisdom of that approach.

But the former president may not have been as far off message as the instant interpretations suggested — or as much as Romney and the Republicans want to believe. After all, in the same interview, he predicted that Obama would win reelection — and by five or six points, which is a more bullish projection that most Democrats will say publicly.

Here’s what else he said after suggesting that the issue of private equity’s value should be off the table: “I think the real issue ought to be, what has Gov. Romney advocated in the campaign that he will do as president? What has President Obama done and what does he propose to do? How do these things stack up against each other?”

Obama has spent time pointing at what he has done that he believes makes him deserving of a second term, from preventing another Great Depression to saving the auto industry to enacting health-care legislation to putting in place a foundation for future growth. His advisers think voters don’t really know the totality of the record he has established and are trying to remind them.

What Obama hasn’t yet done is offer any clear idea of what his second term would be about. He argues that the country should not go back, but what his real goals are for a possible second four years in office remain cloaked largely in campaign generalities.

The meager jobs report puts additional pressure on him to do more than bemoan the possible consequences of turning the White House over to the Republicans. If he is campaigning on a new agenda to lift the economy, most voters couldn’t describe it. If he hopes to come out of the campaign with a mandate for particular policies, he hasn’t talked much about them.

If Clinton seemed to undermine a key element of the president’s campaign strategy, he may also have baited a trap for Romney. In giving Romney a pass on the question of whether his business and governmental records qualify him to be president, he also has suggested that Romney must do more than simply criticize Obama’s record to win the voters’ trust.

Romney has not broken with broad outlines of the tax-cutting policies of former president George W. Bush’s eight years in office. He wants to go further, with deeper tax cuts. Bush’s policies did not produce economic growth or job creation to match Clinton’s record in the 1990s, and his term concluded with the collapse of the economy.

Romney says he will tame the federal deficit and rein in spending, which Bush failed to do. But he has yet to detail all the hard choices that would entail. Nor has he shown that he could create broad support for his policies or do a better job than the incumbent to make the divided and polarized political system work more effectively.

Clinton was urging both candidates to step up in ways they haven’t yet. The latest jobs report created a new sense of urgency for them to do so.
Click to expand...

Baraka_Guru · Jun 2, 2012

Coincidence?

A shaky global economy reels on U.S., Europe, China woes - The Globe and Mail

Brazil economy's disappoints again in first quarter - The Globe and Mail

India's economic growth slides to 9-year low - BusinessWeek

Tully Mars · Jun 3, 2012

SuburbanZombie said: ↑

The Democrats had the majority in the House and Senate for the first 2 years of his presidency and he still couldn't get anything done.
Click to expand...

This majority you speak of are you referring to 2007 when the Dems officially held 51 seats in the Senate but that included two Independents and two vacancies (IL and MN?)

The reality anymore is you need 60 full seats to have a majority that can pass any agenda you propose. 51 or in this case more like 49 will get you nothing but deadlocked.

Baraka_Guru · Jun 4, 2012

There's an idea going around stating that Obama's administration has basically set up a Republican economy. That should bode well for his re-election, right?

OP-ED COLUMNIST
This Republican Economy
By PAUL KRUGMAN
New York Times
Published: June 3, 2012

What should be done about the economy? Republicans claim to have the answer: slash spending and cut taxes. What they hope voters won’t notice is that that’s precisely the policy we’ve been following the past couple of years. Never mind the Democrat in the White House; for all practical purposes, this is already the economic policy of Republican dreams.

So the Republican electoral strategy is, in effect, a gigantic con game: it depends on convincing voters that the bad economy is the result of big-spending policies that President Obama hasn’t followed (in large part because the G.O.P. wouldn’t let him), and that our woes can be cured by pursuing more of the same policies that have already failed.

For some reason, however, neither the press nor Mr. Obama’s political team has done a very good job of exposing the con.

What do I mean by saying that this is already a Republican economy? Look first at total government spending — federal, state and local. Adjusted for population growth and inflation, such spending has recently been falling at a rate not seen since the demobilization that followed the Korean War.

How is that possible? Isn’t Mr. Obama a big spender? Actually, no; there was a brief burst of spending in late 2009 and early 2010 as the stimulus kicked in, but that boost is long behind us. Since then it has been all downhill. Cash-strapped state and local governments have laid off teachers, firefighters and police officers; meanwhile, unemployment benefits have been trailing off even though unemployment remains extremely high.

Over all, the picture for America in 2012 bears a stunning resemblance to the great mistake of 1937, when F.D.R. prematurely slashed spending, sending the U.S. economy — which had actually been recovering fairly fast until that point — into the second leg of the Great Depression. In F.D.R.’s case, however, this was an unforced error, since he had a solidly Democratic Congress. In President Obama’s case, much though not all of the responsibility for the policy wrong turn lies with a completely obstructionist Republican majority in the House.

That same obstructionist House majority effectively blackmailed the president into continuing all the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy, so that federal taxes as a share of G.D.P. are near historic lows — much lower, in particular, than at any point during Ronald Reagan’s presidency.

As I said, for all practical purposes this is already a Republican economy.

As an aside, I think it’s worth pointing out that although the economy’s performance has been disappointing, to say the least, none of the disasters Republicans predicted have come to pass. Remember all those assertions that budget deficits would lead to soaring interest rates? Well, U.S. borrowing costs have just hit a record low. And remember those dire warnings about inflation and the “debasement” of the dollar? Well, inflation remains low, and the dollar has been stronger than it was in the Bush years.

Put it this way: Republicans have been warning that we were about to turn into Greece because President Obama was doing too much to boost the economy; Keynesian economists like myself warned that we were, on the contrary, at risk of turning into Japan because he was doing too little. And Japanification it is, except with a level of misery the Japanese never had to endure.

So why don’t voters know any of this?

Part of the answer is that far too much economic reporting is still of the he-said, she-said variety, with dueling quotes from hired guns on either side. But it’s also true that the Obama team has consistently failed to highlight Republican obstruction, perhaps out of a fear of seeming weak. Instead, the president’s advisers keep turning to happy talk, seizing on a few months’ good economic news as proof that their policies are working — and then ending up looking foolish when the numbers turn down again. Remarkably, they’ve made this mistake three times in a row: in 2010, 2011 and now once again.

At this point, however, Mr. Obama and his political team don’t seem to have much choice. They can point with pride to some big economic achievements, above all the successful rescue of the auto industry, which is responsible for a large part of whatever job growth we are managing to get. But they’re not going to be able to sell a narrative of overall economic success. Their best bet, surely, is to do a Harry Truman, to run against the “do-nothing” Republican Congress that has, in reality, blocked proposals — for tax cuts as well as more spending — that would have made 2012 a much better year than it’s turning out to be.

For that, in the end, is the best argument against Republicans’ claims that they can fix the economy. The fact is that we have already seen the Republican economic future — and it doesn’t work.
Click to expand...

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/04/opinion/krugman-this-republican-economy.html

Tully Mars · Jun 4, 2012

Nothing Paul Krugman writes, states or does will benefit Obama. In the eyes of the GOP faithful he's an idiot and whatever he says the opposite is obviously true.

Baraka_Guru · Jun 4, 2012

Tully Mars said: ↑

Nothing Paul Krugman writes, states or does will benefit Obama. In the eyes of the GOP faithful he's an idiot and whatever he says the opposite is obviously true.
Click to expand...

Obviously. All socialists are liars.

Tully Mars · Jun 4, 2012

Now you're getting it you're just forgetting anyone who disagrees with the hard right agenda is a commie or at a minimum a socialists. Often they're a commie and Nazi... at the same time. Apparently these morons have never heard the term oxymoron .

rogue49 · Jun 4, 2012

Baraka_Guru said: ↑

Obviously. All socialists are liars.
Click to expand...

I think he has labeled himself, a liberal. (Bravely and unabashly considering the US these days)
"Socialist" is to the GOP today as "Communist" was to the conservatives of yesteryear.
A label for anyone not conservative or going along their way.
I guess since conservative movement has gone over even more to the right, then Socialists are what Communists were.
Except one used to be in China, North Korea & Russia...and the others mostly in Western Europe (our allies)

Whatever, he's still a capitalist...and one that worked for the Reagan administration at that...but they ignore this.

Per Wikipedia... (whatever, it's easy)

Krugman has advocated free markets in contexts where they are often viewed as controversial. He has written against rent control in favor of supply and demand, likened the opposition against free trade and globalization to the opposition against evolution via natural selection, opposed farm subsidies, argued that sweatshops are preferable to unemployment, dismissed the case for living wages, argued against mandates, subsidies, and tax breaks for ethanol, and questioned NASA's manned space flights. Krugman has also criticized U.S. zoning laws and European labor market regulation.
Click to expand...

But still unquestionably Liberal...wha???
This shades of grey stuff is "complicated"

rogue49 · Jun 10, 2012

Now, no matter what or who...this is nice news.
That it happens under Obama, well kudos to him.
Let's see how it spins...

Seems to reflect the actual policy & protocol being encouraged & enforced that I saw while in the EOP/OMB

**BTW - Here's the link to the article, take a look at the comments underneath.
The author rips apart his critics with some serious facts and formal links to those.

Who Is The Smallest Government Spender Since Eisenhower? Would You Believe It's Barack Obama?
Forbes | Rick Ungar

It’s enough to make even the most ardent Obama cynic scratch his head in confusion.

Amidst all the cries of Barack Obama being the most prolific big government spender the nation has ever suffered, Marketwatch is reporting that our president has actually been tighter with a buck than any United States president since Dwight D. Eisenhower.

Who knew?

Check out the chart –

So, how have the Republicans managed to persuade Americans to buy into the whole “Obama as big spender” narrative?

It might have something to do with the first year of the Obama presidency where the federal budget increased a whopping 17.9% —going from $2.98 trillion to $3.52 trillion. I’ll bet you think that this is the result of the Obama sponsored stimulus plan that is so frequently vilified by the conservatives…but you would be wrong.

The first year of any incoming president term is saddled—for better or for worse—with the budget set by the president whom immediately precedes the new occupant of the White House. Indeed, not only was the 2009 budget the property of George W. Bush—and passed by the 2008 Congress—it was in effect four months before Barack Obama took the oath of office.

Accordingly, the first budget that can be blamed on our current president began in 2010 with the budgets running through and including including fiscal year 2013 standing as charges on the Obama account, even if a President Willard M. Romney takes over the office on January 20, 2013.

So, how do the actual Obama annual budgets look?

Courtesy of Marketwatch-
- In fiscal 2010 (the first Obama budget) spending fell 1.8% to $3.46 trillion.
- In fiscal 2011, spending rose 4.3% to $3.60 trillion.
- In fiscal 2012, spending is set to rise 0.7% to $3.63 trillion,
according to the Congressional Budget Office’s estimate of the budget that was agreed to last August.
- Finally in fiscal 2013 — the final budget of Obama’s term — spending is scheduled to fall 1.3% to $3.58 trillion.
Read the CBO’s latest budget outlook.

No doubt, many will wish to give the credit to the efforts of the GOP controlled House of Representatives. That’s fine if that’s what works for you.

However, you don’t get to have it both ways. Credit whom you will, but if you are truly interested in a fair analysis of the Obama years to date—at least when it comes to spending—you’re going to have to acknowledge that under the Obama watch, even President Reagan would have to give our current president a thumbs up when it comes to his record for stretching a dollar.

Of course, the Heritage Foundation is having none of it, attempting to counter the actual numbers by pretending that the spending initiated by the Bush Administration is the fault of Obama. As I understand the argument Heritage is putting forth —and I have provided the link to the Heritage rebuttal so you can decide for yourself—Marketwatch, in using the baseline that Obama inherited, is making it too easy on the President.

But then, with the Heritage Foundation being the creator of the individual mandate concept in healthcare only to rebut the same when it was no longer politically convenient, I’m not quite sure why anyone believes much of anything they have to say any longer. With their history of reversing course for convenience, I can’t help but wonder, should they find themselves reviewing the spending record of a President Romney four years from today, whether they might be tempted to use the Obama numbers as the baseline for such a new Administration.
Click to expand...

Joniemack · Jun 11, 2012

rogue49 said: ↑

This shades of grey stuff is "complicated"
Click to expand...

So who do we trust? Economists who are no better than the talking heads on Fox News or MSNBC telling the faithful what they want to hear or the guy out there who formulates opinions based on his knowledge and expertise and shares them regardless of whether or not they are in conflict with a party line?

Krugman is only a liberal in contrast with extreme right-wing supply-siders like Laffer and Kudlow who look primarily to preserve wealth and power. Straighten the picture on the wall and politically Krugman's probably more of a centrist. From an economics standpoint? He's another Keynesian monetarist looking to save capitalism from itself.

He's definitely no socialist.

Lish · Jun 11, 2012

looks like the Obama girl is no longer his biggest fan

Obama Girl no longer has a crush on B | News.com.au

Log in or Sign up

Politics Obama - Actually doing a good job?

redux Very Tilted

pig Slightly Tilted Donor

Baraka_Guru Möderätor Staff Member

rogue49 Tech Kung Fu Artist Staff Member

rogue49 Tech Kung Fu Artist Staff Member

EventHorizon assuredly the cause of the angry Economy..

Joniemack Beta brainwaves in session

Baraka_Guru Möderätor Staff Member

rogue49 Tech Kung Fu Artist Staff Member

rogue49 Tech Kung Fu Artist Staff Member

Baraka_Guru Möderätor Staff Member

Tully Mars Very Tilted

Baraka_Guru Möderätor Staff Member

Tully Mars Very Tilted

Baraka_Guru Möderätor Staff Member

Tully Mars Very Tilted

rogue49 Tech Kung Fu Artist Staff Member

rogue49 Tech Kung Fu Artist Staff Member

Joniemack Beta brainwaves in session

Lish Very Tilted

Log in or Sign up

Politics Obama - Actually doing a good job?

redux Very Tilted

pig Slightly Tilted Donor

Baraka_Guru Möderätor Staff Member

rogue49 Tech Kung Fu Artist Staff Member

rogue49 Tech Kung Fu Artist Staff Member

EventHorizon assuredly the cause of the angry Economy..

Joniemack Beta brainwaves in session

Baraka_Guru Möderätor Staff Member

rogue49 Tech Kung Fu Artist Staff Member

rogue49 Tech Kung Fu Artist Staff Member

Baraka_Guru Möderätor Staff Member

Tully Mars Very Tilted

Baraka_Guru Möderätor Staff Member

Tully Mars Very Tilted

Baraka_Guru Möderätor Staff Member

Tully Mars Very Tilted

rogue49 Tech Kung Fu Artist Staff Member

rogue49 Tech Kung Fu Artist Staff Member

Joniemack Beta brainwaves in session

Lish Very Tilted

Useful Searches