Welcome to Obamaville

[nathanm]

So what do you do, refuse to fight back until we have enough cash to fight a war?  Which conflict has the United States ever been in that had a predictable end date and fixed projected costs so we could know how much to save up for.  We'd be speaking Japanese in the western 1/2 of the U.S. and German in the eastern half if we didn't fund WWII by debt.  I think we are all pretty much in agreement that invading Iraq was a costly mess.  Let's move along from there and ask then, why if President Obama is so fiscally responsible, did he just authorize sending another 30,000 troops to Afghanistan.  We certainly don't have the cash on hand to do that without raising debt.

You are way over-simplifying how a stimulus is supposed to work.  By all accounts, this has in no way lived up to the promise that was sold to us originally.

I didn't say that at all. Iraq was a completely optional war. If someone is actively bombing us or whatever, that's a completely different situation. Yet another fine example of false equivalence there. Wars of aggression should not be bought with debt. They, by definition, are no immediate imperative.

Note I didn't say that Obama was fiscally responsible, I said that his position is internally consistent. I don't particularly agree with the decision to escalate the war in advance of the withdrawal, however, I at least understand the motivation.

And really, I'm not oversimplifying how stimulus works. You conjure money (by borrowing it) and spend it to artificially maintain the economy while whatever structural reforms are made and the private sector gets back on its feet. Pretty simple.

While it hasn't lived up to the goal of keeping unemployment below 10%, it defies logic to believe that it hasn't had a major impact on employment. The fact of the matter is that 4 or 5 trillion dollars vanished last fall and we only replaced a trillion or so (actually, not even that much yet). Thankfully, all the money the government has thrown around has been enough to stave off significant deflation. That way lies madness.

[rwarn17588]

So what do you do, refuse to fight back until we have enough cash to fight a war? 

Iraq being an alleged "petri dish" (your words) is not a good enough reason to start a war.

Afghanistan is a justifiable war because that's where bin Laden and al-Qaida were. Iraq was not justifiable because neither one was there. It's that simple.

[rwarn17588]

You are way over-simplifying how a stimulus is supposed to work.  By all accounts, this has in no way lived up to the promise that was sold to us originally.

But doing nothing, whether it's TARP or the stimulus, would have made the recession far worse, with jobless levels approaching Depression-era levels. Even a deficit hawk like Coburn admitted this in a town-hall meeting while defending his "yes" vote on TARP.

Without the stimulus, I'm fairly certain, from reading a lot about it, you'd be looking at jobless rates in the high teens. Having lived in a region 25 years ago that saw 17 percent unemployment, I can tell you that such a situation is extremely ugly and despairing, and I have no desire to see that again.

When you've got a country that's suddenly has less cash on hand and the economy is threatening to go into an outright panic, the last thing you need to do is to tighten up the federal purse strings and make the situation far worse.

I'm as sympathetic to deficit hawks as the next person. But there's a time and a place to cut federal spending, and right now ain't it.

[guido911]

Man, that is lame.

Hey, who asked you anything.

[Conan71]

But doing nothing, whether it's TARP or the stimulus, would have made the recession far worse, with jobless levels approaching Depression-era levels. Even a deficit hawk like Coburn admitted this in a town-hall meeting while defending his "yes" vote on TARP.

Without the stimulus, I'm fairly certain, from reading a lot about it, you'd be looking at jobless rates in the high teens. Having lived in a region 25 years ago that saw 17 percent unemployment, I can tell you that such a situation is extremely ugly and despairing, and I have no desire to see that again.

When you've got a country that's suddenly has less cash on hand and the economy is threatening to go into an outright panic, the last thing you need to do is to tighten up the federal purse strings and make the situation far worse.

I'm as sympathetic to deficit hawks as the next person. But there's a time and a place to cut federal spending, and right now ain't it.

As much as we dislike war (I don't know anyone that "likes" it other than military contractors and the occasional kook), many people tend to forget it unfortunately becomes an important engine in the economy.  Not all of the billions spent on a foreign war winds up in the countries where we have a presence.  A large chunk goes right into the economy here at home.  I'm not trying to justify warfare one way or the other by that comment, but this is a reality which is often over-looked.

Not all segments are being well-served by the stimulus.  The construction industry has gotten a disproportionate amount of stimulus funding in the way of road projects, water treatment plants, work on military bases, etc.  As a result we will wind up with better infrastructure and this was a formula that worked under the WPA model, but unfortunately, construction type jobs don't help those displaced from IT or financial careers, per se.  The whole premise of number of jobs saved or created by the stimulus is an absolute group grope if you've really been reading up on the topic and finding out about job creation in counties and congressional districts which don't exist and how few jobs are created per $1mm spent.

If you believe the "stimulus" is anything more than vote buying and quid-pro-quo, I'll sell you back that beach front property in Oakhurst I recently bought from you.

[Red Arrow]

Iraq being an alleged "petri dish" (your words) is not a good enough reason to start a war.

The world would certainly be a lot better place if Saddam were still in charge.

You can fill in the ways:

1.

[buck]

This sign was posted in Colorado Springs, which is ultra-conservative, a "little Oklahoma" if you will

[we vs us]

If the beach in Oakhurst has a swim up bar, I'm sold.  

Look, there's no way to craft a perfectly "fair" stimulus package, ie one that serves every industry.  They got the most money out the door in the quickest manner they could, and honestly it still wasn't quick enough or as wide based as they needed.  It was a pile for everyone, from the people who didn't want it at all to the people who wanted much more (this, btw, is Obama's curse:  to please none of the people none of the time).

I agree with you to a point.  There's not a lot of white collar stimulus going around, but I'm not sure you could pull something like that off when you have yahoos like Guido hollering about scientists "mapping rat poop" or "studying the sexual behaviors of co-eds."  Despite all that, Obama pushed through billions of dollars to digitize our medical records, and that's certainly not done by guys driving steamrollers.

But nathan made the core point that no one on the right really wants to address:  trillions of dollars evaporated overnight.  How do you fix that? That's money gone from not only business but governments large and small too.  Things that make us a stable nation went away in a puff of smoke, and while I don't think anyone believed it was an existential threat it definitely would've been a body blow. So is the answer . . . tax cuts?  

[guido911]

But nathan made the core point that no one on the right really wants to address:  trillions of dollars evaporated overnight.  How do you fix that? That's money gone from not only business but governments large and small too.  Things that make us a stable nation went away in a puff of smoke, and while I don't think anyone believed it was an existential threat it definitely would've been a body blow. So is the answer . . . tax cuts?  

We could try doing something about all those "law-abiding illegals" you support living in this country.

[we vs us]

We could try doing something about all those "law-abiding illegals" you support living in this country.

Which will immediately help the economy how?

[FOTD]

Go ahead.... be impatient. It fits.

[USRufnex]

They are busy not reminding you that Obama got his nearly $1 TRILLION stimulus bill that he promised if passed unemployment would not exceed 8%. Remember that Mr. History? Now he is talking about another stimulus which implicitly infers that the first one failed. Still won't matter to you since your bottom-feeding rear end will not be paying for it.

Dear Wannabe-turdblossom,

Here's the real story....

President Obama Predicts Unemployment Will Hit 10% This Year
June 16, 2009 4:39 PM
http://blogs.abcnews.com/politicalpunch/2009/06/president-obama-predicts-unemployment-will-hit-10-this-year.html

Jake Tapper and Karen Travers report: In an interview with Bloomberg News' Al Hunt today, President Obama says he thinks unemployment will hit 10% this year.

Will unemployment reach 10%? asks Hunt.

"Yes," says the president.

Before the end of this year? asks Hunt.

"Yes," says the president.

"I think that what you've seen is that the pace of job loss has slowed," Mr. Obama says, "and I think that the economy is going to turn around. But as you know, jobs are a lagging indicator. And we've got to produce 150,000 jobs every month just to keep pace."

But, he said, "we will end up seeing recovery shortly."

In January, the incoming administration predicted in a white paper study that without a huge stimulus package, unemployment would reach just over 8%, and would be contained at under 8% with a stimulus package.

(When asked about this discrepancy, one of the authors of the study – Jared Bernstein, the top economic adviser to Vice President Biden – recently said that "when we made our initial estimates, that was before we had fourth-quarter results on GDP, which we later found out was contracting at an annual rate of 6 percent, far worse than we expected at that time."  The bottom line, Bernstein said, is that without the stimulus the unemployment rate "would have been between 1.5 and 2 points higher than it otherwise will be.")

Hunt's interview with the president today was scheduled as a way of setting up the president's announcement tomorrow of greater financial regulations and a new government organization, the Consumer Financial Protection Agency, which will have a mission to regulate credit, savings, payment and other consumer financial products and services, and to protect consumers who use those institutions.

Does Wall Street "get it"? Hunt asks the president.

"Wall Street seems to maybe have a shorter memory about how close we were to the abyss than I would have expected," the president says, chuckling. "All we're doing is cleaning up after the mess that was made."

-Jake Tapper and Karen Travers

AUGUST 20, 2009
Stimulus Remains Unpopular Even as It Boosts Growth
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB125070781745443839.html

The case that fiscal stimulus was a mistake altogether is weak. A decade ago, economists counseled that politicians should leave recession-fighting to the Federal Reserve and its interest-rate cuts. With the average length of a post-World War II recession at 10 months, downturns usually ended before Congress acted.

This time was, truly, different. The recession was more than a year old when Mr. Obama took office, the Fed already had cut interest rates to zero and the economy was still in free fall.

Wall Street Journal Debunks Wall Street Journal on Recovery Act
Posted by Jared Bernstein on December 01, 2009 at 02:55 PM EST
http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2009/12/01/wall-street-journal-debunks-wall-street-journal-recovery-act

There's a new report out from the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) on the economic impact of the Recovery Act. I'll get to the findings in a second, but somebody over at the Wall St. Journal's editorial page has a whole lot of explaining to do.

Here what CBO found:

Between its inception in February of this year and the end of September, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act has:

   * Saved or Created up to 1.6 Million Jobs (midpoint estimate: 1.1 million)
   * Added up to 3.2% to the Growth of Real GDP (midpoint estimate: 2.2%)
   * Reduced the Unemployment Rate by as Much as 0.9 Percentage Points (midpoint estimate: 0.6 ppt)

Now, these numbers may look familiar to you... they're about what we and other analysts have been citing all along (e.g., see Tables seven and eight in this CEA report).

On the other hand, if you read the Wall St. Journal, these numbers will surprise you. Or, to be more precise, if you read the editorial page, you'll be in the dark. If you read the front page in today's WSJ, you'll learn the facts about the CBO report noted above in the context of an article that documents the importance of stimulus projects to construction workers. In fact, the article worries about jobs cuts once the stimulus fades.

So, how does this square with lines like these from Journal editorials?

   "No matter how hard or imaginatively the administration spins, the reality is that the stimulus has been the economic bust that critics predicted it would be." –November 19, 2009

   "...the largest obstacle to turning this recovery into a durable expansion is now the very 'stimulus' programs that were sold as a way to ensure recovery." –October 30, 2009

    "We aren't getting much bang for our $787 billion stimulus bucks." –November 25, 2009

   "It's hard to imagine a more complete repudiation of Keynesian stimulus than the evidence of the last year's job market." –November 7, 2009

   "[The Recovery Act has not] made even the smallest dent in employment." –November 7, 2009

   "The White House says the stimulus created as many as one million new jobs, but this is single-entry economic bookkeeping." –November 7, 2009

They don't square at all, of course, because the editorial board is more interested in scoring political points by discrediting the Recovery Act's jobs impact than they are in reading their own paper's reporting.   And let's be clear: while the new CBO findings are a welcome addition, these facts have been out there for months, including from an earlier CBO report last March (their updated findings are actually slightly improved).

We're not asking for a free ride. We have and will continue to take great pains to provide information about the impact of the Recovery Act with more transparency than has ever been associated with a project of this magnitude.  Editorialists have every right to use that information to evaluate the impact of the act and to suggest ways that its performance could be improved upon.

But I doubt you'll see that from the WSJ. Unless, that is, they start reading their own reporting.

Jared Bernstein is Chief Economist to Vice President Biden and Executive Director of the Middle Class Task Force

http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/promises/subjects/politifacts-top-promises/?page=1

[USRufnex]

The world would certainly be a lot better place if Saddam were still in charge.

You can fill in the ways:

1.

See, I thought we were fighting Iraq because they had a hand in 9/11?..... oh, wait..... weapons of mass destruction?..... oh wait..... the smoking gun becomes a "mushroom cloud?"......

The world would certainly be a lot better place if Ahmadinejad were still in charge.

You can fill in the ways.

1.

****U.S. 2009 Monthly Spending in Iraq - $7.3 billion as of Oct 2009
U.S. 2008 Monthly Spending in Iraq - $12 billion

[Conan71]

Hey Ruf,

Go Google yourself.   

XOXO,

Conan

[Red Arrow]

See, I thought we were fighting Iraq because they had a hand in 9/11?..... oh, wait..... weapons of mass destruction?..... oh wait..... the smoking gun becomes a "mushroom cloud?"......

The world would certainly be a lot better place if Ahmadinejad were still in charge.

You can fill in the ways.

1.

****U.S. 2009 Monthly Spending in Iraq - $7.3 billion as of Oct 2009
U.S. 2008 Monthly Spending in Iraq - $12 billion

Are you saying that the monthly spending in Iraq is down $4.7 billion/mo because Ahmadinejad is still in charge in Iran?  Sounds like more "pay no attention to the man behind the curtain" to me.  I don't see the relationship between Ahmadinejad and my question about if the world would be better if Saddam were still running Iraq.

With regard to Saddam, I was thinking of:

$10,000 bonuses to families of suicide bombers that went to Israel
The swamp gas that accidently killed a lot of Iraqi citizens
The money the US spent protecting the no-fly zones (admittedly a lot less than the war) and the reason for them in the first place.
One of the historical persons whose philosophy that Saddam believed in was a World War II leader whose name we cannot say here because it is politically incorrect.
His friendly relations with his neighbors
The games of catch he forced his citizens to play with fast moving lead projectiles for whatever reason suited him at the time
The kind, loving way he raised at least two of his sons
His humane treatment of citizens in custody of "the state"
The way he distributed humanitarian aid from the world to his people
His handling of the oil for aid (or whatever it was called)
Draining the swamp

We will never know what would have been had we and a few other countries left him alone but I don't miss him.  He could have avoided the invasion by bending a bit to not just us but several countries. The main countries supporting Saddam had ... guess what... big oil contracts and military equipment contracts with Iraq.  I think there were some peaceful nuclear development contracts too.  His arrogance and whatever goes with that cost him his country and life.  There is no question that "our side" was ill prepared to handle events after the invasion.  I won't claim to have had a better solution.

Sometime after we are all long gone, a less involved judgement will be made whether it was the right thing to do.