[QUOTE="theone86"]
[QUOTE="limpbizkit818"] And how do you know that is Obama's doing? The thing with Government stimulus is that it is win win for whoever passes it: If the economy gets better, they get full credit. If the economy struggles then o well, it would have been worse without the stimulus. And if it fails then screw it, the government can't really fix the markets. Blame the corporations. Yet one must remember that running deficits now means higher taxes later. With incomes down and the poverty rate up across the nation, raising taxes is going to suck. I wish the President could have put our country in a better position than it is right now. His foreign policy has not helped any of this (increases in the defense budget). But the fact remains that I personally do not feel like Mr. Obama has helped this country in his 3(ish) years in office. Unemployment is higher then the government projected post-stimulus. Cash for Clunkers was a joke and failed to create a long term auto sales boost. The debt problem had gone almost untouched until his party lost the house. Now it's a nightmare trying to get anything done. Blame Republicans all you want, but Obama has to take some responsibility for where we are economically. Also, the US is no closer to energy independence than we were when Obama took office.limpbizkit818
Couple of things. One, every President since Eisenhower, perhaps even before Eisenhower, has increased the military budget, that's nothing unique to Obama. Obama has, however, supported decreases in the military budget that have met with opposition in Congress, I don't see how the blame is exclusively his.
Two, what is this logic amongst conservatives, that if Obama does anything to try to address the economy he is expanding government authority too far, but if he doesn't do anything then he gets reamed because the economy is doing poorly? Is there any scenario where he doesn't get criticized? This is perfectly epitmoized in your statements about cash for clunkers, what do you expect him to do, keep passing bailout after bailout to stimulate auto sales? The problem here is demand, and demand won't rise until the workers have money to spend and put back into the economy, which means hiring has to pick up. That's not something that President Obama can rectify.
Three, there are objective ways of measuring the stimulus. Cash for clunkers, for example, shows a direct correlation between car sales that were not projected to go up by any economist until the program was announced, and immediately after many car dealerships had their business and hiring pick up. You can also look at some government work projects to see that there are jobs being created, and that without those jobs the economy would be in worse shape now than had it not been done at all. This isn't just conjectural mud-slinging, these are objective facts about certain initiatives and what their impact has been on the economy. Here are the jobs that President Obama has created, now where are the jobs that private business is creating?
Running deficits now means higher taxes later? Since when? We've been running defecits since Clinton and for years before he came into office and taxes have only gone down. I highly doubt that an increased 3%, even across the board and ignoring the idea of just raising the top rate, would affect Americans all that much. That means a small bit less money for people who have stability in order to increase the stability of the whole nation, I think it's a fair trade-off.
What do you mean the debt problem has gone untouched? Obama had been speaking about deficit reduction since before the midterms, a huge part of his impetus for medical reform was based on deficit reduction, he's put forward proposals for cutting military spending, for cutting oil subsidies, for raising taxes by a marginal amount, for reforming the tax code, and all of these things have consistently been rejected by Republicans. In fact, Paul Ryan's own estimates of the savings that would be created by his medicare and medicaid reform rely on OBAMACARE for a huge chunk of the savings, and at the same time he is criticizing the President for demagoging. Same thing with energy independence, it's the Republicans who are blockading efforts to wean the nation off oil. How can you possibly blame the President for that? What do you expect him to do?
It's easy to blame Obama's foreign policy for the need for an ever increasing defense budget. The fact that every president has spent more on the military than his predecessor is part of the problem. And did Obama correct this? No, he continued to to perpetrated it.
I see no reason for your statement about conservatives. What other people think about Obama has no bearing on my statements or what I think. I said nothing of expanding government authority too far. This is irrelevant.
You're objective ways to measure the stimulus are far to short term. The cash for clunkers is a great example. You say that " many car dealerships had their business and hiring pick up" yet if you go look at the numbers for the months following the pick up you would see a large decline in sales. All the cash for clunkers program did was push future car sales to the present. There is no net gain in the economy. People took advantage of a short term deal and the program cost the government money.
Most of the stimulus jobs are short term. I would love for you to post some of the "objective facts about certain initiatives and what their impact has been on the economy."
Ofcourse running a deficit means higher taxes. Did I say the taxes would have to be raised right away? No, but you even say that they will have to go up, even if only for the rich. Now I don't know for sure what type of tax or how much they will need to increased in the future, but they do have to go up. There is no way around that fact that the US is going to need to increase tax revenue in the coming years. I highly doubt only the top earners are going to feel the effects of American's growing debt.
This is what I mean by saying the debt problem has gone untouched. Great, Obama TALKED about solving the problem. So have a lot of other politics. But honestly he has done little to nothing to correct the problem and I don't see why I should vote for 4 more years of talk. I am not going to get into the healthcare thing, as I personally believe it's going to cost us more money. The CBO is almost always wrong with their estimates. It's great that he talked about theoil subsidies, yet even their repeal would hardly affect the budget shortfall (although I support such a move). It's a great talking point but not really the big issue. The fact is that the debt has gotten larger durning Obama's presidency. If he was serious about it he would have done something. Instead he's going to wait until right before the election and make it look like he cares to get some votes.
I would love for you to list what Obama has seriously done (outside of talk) aboutenergy independence. Both parties seem committed to keeping the US on oil, but I don't see why I can't criticize the president for that. Why is your first defense for him "Well the Republicans want oil too!" I don't care what the Republicans want. I am sure you rememeber the President's remarks in Brazil (about how ready the US is to buy their oil). I think he has shown over and over that he is not the leader this nation needs to tackle such a large problem.
All of these issues have led to a weak presidency. The biggest problem facing the country when (and the reason why) Obama was elected was the economy. Three years later and it's still the same problem.
I'm just stating facts. There seems to be a huge obsession with Obama in this country, beyond a typical infatuation/dislike for the president, and I'm just trying to point out that increased military spending isn't unique to Obama, rather it's a fundamental facet of U.S. foreign policy regardless of the president. As for him continuing to perpatrate it, I've seen more proposals to cut military spending from him than any other recent president, and every time he proposes something like that he gets lambasted, such as when he discontinued an order for a line of fighter jets deemed superfluous and got reamed by conservatives for it. This is yet another example of not ever being able to do anything right. You're cutting defense contracts? How could you, you're putting our nation in jeopardy! What's that, you're increasing military spending? See, we told you all, same old, same old.
So what do you suggest he do then? Take over private industry? You criticize him for an unsucessful bailout, but then you turn around and criticize him for not doing enough to fix the economy, you're talking out of both sides of your mouth.
You act as if that money from cash for clunkers simply disappeared. The money goes into the car dealerships, the car dealerships pay salaries with it, and those salaries get spent in other areas of the economy. Of course it's temporary, no one said it wasn't, but that's the idea of the bailout, a temporary influx of cash to stimulate spending in the short term. If the government could continue pumping money into the industry until the economy stabilized, or pump a ton of money into many different industries then it might work more as you desire, but those are just ridiculously bad ideas for any number of reasons, one of which being that it will incur even higher debt. The CFC program worked exactly like it was supposed to and the uptick in sales did help the economy in the short term, but government cannot just "fix" the economy with a snap of the fingers, businesses have to employ people so that demand stays high.
What I mean is that we've been running defecits for decades now and not even glancing at raising taxes, that periods where the national defecit is increased are generally accompanied by a decrease in taxes. I never said that was a good thing, but I think that's going to have to be a fact of life everyone in America needs to get accustomed to until they resolve to vote people into office who are willing to raise taxes. Believe me, I'm all for raising taxes. In fact, restoring ALL income tax rates to their pre-Bush levels would achieve the same savings as the Ryan plan, and that's not even taking into consideration that some of the savings in the Ryan plan are going to happen regardless of what happens with taxes so long as Obamacare isn't overturned.
Ooooh, a debt clock, lots of big, scary numbers. I won't say it isn't disturbing, but in the end fairly meaningless in terms of this conversation. That's the way it's always been, people have always looked at the debt numbers and been appalled and said it can't possibly go higher, and then the next guy comes into office and it goes higher. Obama has done plenty to address the debt. He's passed healthcare legislation that will reduce government expenditures over the next decade, and he's supported legislation to decrease the deficit by cutting military spending, raising taxes, andmaking sensible cuts to entitlement programs. He's facing a Republican controlled House, though, where nothing he supports is going to get voted through simply on principle, and a Senate where even if the vote mattered, which it doesn't, he doesn't have the sixty votes necessary to get anything through it. The Republicans are playing by a strategy of political gridlock precisely because they are counting on people like you to just look at the situation and throw your hands up. I really don't care if you vote for Obama or not, but going back to the original thought of this paragraph, if you think that debt clock is going to change under a Republican then you've got another thing coming, and frankly I think he would've gotten a lot more done had the Republicans shown even the slightest inclination of willingness to negotiate on any number of issues. Time after time, though, they come out with statements like, "I don't know the meaning of the word comprimise!" What exactly do you expect him to do when Congress won't support anything he endorses?
On energy independence, he's backed a plan cutting oil subsidies (failed in the Congress), he increased subsidies to green energy intiiatives before the mid-terms, he's constantly been pushing for more greenhouse gas regulation (something the Republicans have sworn to defeat in the Congress), and he's tried to support the EPA while Republicans are wagin an ideological war on it. Again, I don't know how you can put all the blame for all this on one man, he isn't the only person in Washington, you know.
How do you expect the Presidency to be strong when his party loses control of the House after holding a big majority the previous term? I don't buy into the idea that the mid-terms were a referrendum on Obama and his policies at all, but honestly you have to expect a President to be a little gun-shy after that. The message his administration took from that was that Americans weren't ready for what seemed to be unilateral change, and so he took it upon himself to try and be more affable to Republicans, to try and negotiate. That's a tough situation, I think he obviously knew that there would be no real negotiations with Republicans, but he also knew that he risked seeming callous to public opinion and alienating himself from even more voters if he acted as if the mid-terms didn't matter.
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