2012 Elections in the USA

[QUOTE=Jackson;426857]I know that this is hard for you to envision, but the fact is that Cantor and McConnell fought to stop Obama because they genuinely thought that the Obama Stimulus Program was a waste of money. As it turns out, they were right.[/QUOTE][QUOTE=Esten; 426929]Given that Republicans made a pact to oppose Obama on everything, it's hardly credible they opposed the Stimulus just because they didn't agree with it. The Stimulus was 1/3 tax breaks, so Republicans should have at least been able to support that part. Even the US Chamber of Commerce said a big Stimulus package was needed, surely Republicans could have backed an organization representing American business. It turns out the USCoC was right, and multiple economists have concluded the Stimulus was a success.

So it's abundantly clear that Republican opposition to the Stimulus was a case of 'party over country'.[/QUOTE]I agree with Jackson. This is why,

[url]http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10000872396390444813104578016873186217796.html?mod=googlenews_wsj[/url]

An excerpt, because you have to read to the end to get their line of reasoning,

"In reality, the biggest difference between this recovery and others hasn't been the nature of the crisis, but the nature of the policy prescriptions. Mr. Obama's chief anti-recession idea was a near trillion-dollar leap of faith in the Keynesian "multiplier" effect of government spending. It was the same approach that didn't work in the 1930s, didn't work in the 1970s, didn't work in 2008, and didn't work in such other nations as Japan. It didn't work again in 2009.

Ronald Reagan also inherited an economy loaded with problems. The stock market had been flat for 12 years, inflation rates neared 14%, and mortgage rates almost 20%. The recession he endured in 1981-82 to cure inflation sent unemployment to 10.8%, higher than Mr. Obama's peak of 10%. But the business and jobs recovery by early 1983 was rapid and lasted seven years.

Reagan used tax-rate cuts, disinflationary monetary policy and deregulation to reignite growth—more or less the opposite of the Obama policy mix. Liberals tried to explain the Reagan boom that they said would never happen by arguing that there was nothing unusual about the growth spurt after such a deep recession. So why didn't that happen this time? "

[QUOTE=Doppelganger; 426925]Member you just can not get your facts straight. Here is the link to the BLS, you and Obama share a trait, neither one of you has been formally introduced to the truth.

[url]http://data.bls.gov/timeseries/LNS14000000[/url]

Member I am only repeating what your boy Obama promised. What no answer to his lies, come on you can up with some sort of wild ass excuse I know you can[/QUOTE]I already acknowledged that the forecasts of unemployment were significantly low, both before and after the Stimulus. An incorrect forecast is not a lie, it's an incorrect forecast. YOU claiming unemployment was 7. 3% when Obama took office, now THAT, is a lie. That doesn't mean squat though, with respect to whether or not the stimulus worked. The shape of the unemployment curve is what tells that story: The passage of the stimulus, and the first expenditure of funds under it on projects, corresponds directly with the first inflection point in the curve, where the slope of the dramatically increasing unemployment is significantly decelerated for the first time in Q2 of 2009. And 7 months later, in Q4 of 2009, which is exactly when it would be expected given the employment numbers well known 6-12 month lag on economic conditions, Unemployment finally is actually dropping, as 150K or so jobs are added to the economy for the first time in well over 1. 5 years, a trend that continues to this day. The curve does not lie, although you, apparently have no problem lying (or else, perhaps, you don't comprehend the actual data?. But I tend to believe that you are being disingenuous here, rather than stupid).

I used that link for the data I quoted. The fact is, you claimed that unemployment was 7.3% When Obama took office. He took office END of January 2009. 7.3% was the unemployment rate for December of 2008, according to that link. At the beginning of January, it was 7.8, and at the beginning of February, it was 8.3% and growing at 1/2 percent per month. Which means, that when Obama took office 3 weeks into January, it was AT LEAST 7.8, and as much as 8.3%. Which makes YOUR claim that he took office when the rate was 7.3%, to be factually incorrect. Read the data series in that link, and actually look at the curve that is shown - the Unemployment number crosses 8% and is continuing to rise upward at the beginning of January in 2009 - BEFORE Obama took office. It establishes that your claim is factually false, by at least 1/2, and as much as 1 percent. That being said, this is still a canard - the issue is not the specific rate, it's what happened to the rate once the stimulus actually kicked in. And what happened was, job losses IMMEDIATELY decelerated, and by 7 months out, jobs were being gained, and continued to be gained in each subsequent month in the private sector to this day. Yes, they were fewer jobs than hoped, but that is because the stimulus was architected to address a less severe spate of unemployment than we actually had - as reflected by that too low 8% forecast you keep harping on and misrepresenting as a lie, rather than simply the erroneous forecast it was, from Republican, Democratic, and impartial economists, all of whom missed the number by at least 1%.

In any case, you continue to argue an irrelevant strawman in that 8% number. And not JUST a bogus strawman, but an impossible metric by it's very definition, since Unemployment was already WELL above 8% before the stimulus was even passed, and well above 9% before the first dollar of stimulus was ever actually even spent. The forecast being too low, does not in any way alter the fact that the stimulus did what it was designed to do, as the curve makes clear. The stimulus worked, by knocking unemployment down from well over 9.5%, to just above 8%. Had it been larger, as the actual unemployment problem was larger than forecast, it's effect would have been even greater.

Of course, it's hardly surprising that Doppleganger is playing fast and loose with the actual factual data - despite it being right there in front of him - that's exactly what Romney and Ryan have been doing as well. It seems to be a pathological trait of conservative Republicans, that when their narrative is at odds with the truth, well, then, the truth be damned while the righties are weaving a story that they like the sound of.

You did not disappoint with your dodging of the origianl question regarding Obama and the Stimulus with total B / S.

Where is your defense of Obama's own promises in his own words regarding the upper level of unempolyment if the Stimulus was enacted and the rate of unemployment he promised by this date. You don't even dispute his promise of cutting the deficit by 50% during his first term, when he entered office the deficite was $10. 5 Trillion, now it's over $16 Trillion and growning. Answer? You don't really have one for a failed president and a failed policy.

You are just like Team Obama, crowed about 94, 000 jobs created in August while sweeping under the carpet the 368, 000 people who fell out of the work force. We have argued this point on the board before, sure unemployment is coming down not because the economy is creating jobs but because the BLS keeps reducing the size of the workforce, which is at a 30 year low. If you counted all the folks who want a job but can not fine one the unemployment rate is way over 10, more like 14 to 15.

I guess the next thing you are going to tell me is how it's a good thing the workforce is decreasing in size as it means more people now need to depend on the government, free food, free housing, free cell phones, free money!

[QUOTE=Doppelganger; 426937]You did not disappoint with your dodging of the origianl question regarding Obama and the Stimulus with total B / S.

Where is your defense of Obama's own promises in his own words regarding the upper level of unempolyment if the Stimulus was enacted and the rate of unemployment he promised by this date. You don't even dispute his promise of cutting the deficit by 50% during his first term, when he entered office the deficite was $10. 5 Trillion, now it's over $16 Trillion and growning. Answer? You don't really have one for a failed president and a failed policy.

You are just like Team Obama, crowed about 94, 000 jobs created in August while sweeping under the carpet the 368, 000 people who fell out of the work force. We have argued this point on the board before, sure unemployment is coming down not because the economy is creating jobs but because the BLS keeps reducing the size of the workforce, which is at a 30 year low. If you counted all the folks who want a job but can not fine one the unemployment rate is way over 10, more like 14 to 15.

I guess the next thing you are going to tell me is how it's a good thing the workforce is decreasing in size as it means more people now need to depend on the government, free food, free housing, free cell phones, free money![/QUOTE]

A missed forecast is not a promise, broken or otherwise. Could Obama have done better? Of course, but you continue to harp on a missed forecast that reflected a failure by just about everyone to grasp the serious of the crisis that Obama inherited at the time he inherited it. Would the USA have been worse off economically had McCain won? Clearly, yes it would - McCain had no grasp whatsoever about what was going on, and the folks who led his Economic team were some of the key folks that CAUSED the financial collapse, such as Phil Gramm, who actually authored the law repealing Glass-Steagall, and who presided over the sub-prime collapse as a major VP in charge of the collateralized mortgage business at at UBS, a line of business that was enabled by the Gramm-Leach-Bliley act, and that was the catalyst to the financial crisis. I simply ask myself, am I better off than I was 4 years ago when the last election was playing out? And the answer is, yes, by far. My personal net wealth has been largely restored to the level it was prior to the financial collapse under Bush. As I said, Obama is no Clinton. But sadly, Romney's policies are very much a return to what Bush brought us, which was a complete economic collapse.

I said earlier, that I was disappointed in Obama. Particularly in his failure to leverage the American public and it's opinion against Republican intransigence in Congress, but I am thoroughly terrified with what Romney and his policies would bring for the vast majority of Americans. I certainly prefer staying the course we are on, and a weak, but still real recovery, to reverting back to the disaster we had under Bush, where government does nothing other than cut the safety net and taxes to the richest Americans, and that is the choice Americans have.

The Job Creators with their Tax Breaks are NOT CREATING JOBS!

THAT IS THE TRUTH!

So, tell us Why THEY should Get Them?

[QUOTE=Doppelganger; 426925]Member you just can not get your facts straight. Here is the link to the BLS, you and Obama share a trait, neither one of you has been formally introduced to the truth.

[url]http://data.bls.gov/timeseries/LNS14000000[/url]

Member I am only repeating what your boy Obama promised. What no answer to his lies, come on you can up with some sort of wild ass excuse I know you can[/QUOTE]

[QUOTE=WorldTravel69; 426949]The Job Creators with their Tax Breaks are NOT CREATING JOBS!

THAT IS THE TRUTH!

So, tell us Why THEY should Get Them?[/QUOTE]I agree. Tax breaks for businesses should be eliminated and their tax rates should be lowered. If there were a reasonable, fair, stable set of rules and Congress and the President weren't handing out special favors to campaign contributors and constituents, we'd be light years ahead. There would be more jobs.

Member#2041, most Republicans will never be completely honest about the success of the Stimulus, because it's too central to their core belief about limited government. They don't believe the government can effectively help the economy, despite abundant analyses that TARP and the Stimulus saved the United States from a far worse economic condition.

The 8% prediction was made by Christina Romer in January 2009, but the layoffs then accelerated much more than economists were forecasting. This threw off the baseline in Stimulus forecasts, but otherwise the predicted effects were pretty much on target. Later in 2010, Romer said [i]"One could have presented it differently. If we'd only talked about the effect of the stimulus on the change in unemployment [instead of predicting the unemployment rate itself]... it would have been better." [/i]

[url]http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/08/06/AR2010080606271.html[/url]

Republicans spend much less time refuting the claim that the Stimulus created or saved millions of jobs, because there are numerous economic analyses out there supporting this claim. It's easier to make people think of the Stimulus as a failure by focusing on the 8% prediction. This is a Republican deception that must be exposed at every opportunity.

[QUOTE=Tiny12; 426930][url]http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10000872396390444813104578016873186217796.html?mod=googlenews_wsj[/url]

An excerpt, because you have to read to the end to get their line of reasoning,

"In reality, the biggest difference between this recovery and others hasn't been the nature of the crisis, but the nature of the policy prescriptions. Mr. Obama's chief anti-recession idea was a near trillion-dollar leap of faith in the Keynesian "multiplier" effect of government spending. It was the same approach that didn't work in the 1930s, didn't work in the 1970s, didn't work in 2008, and didn't work in such other nations as Japan. It didn't work again in 2009.[/QUOTE]WSJ is a right-wing news organization with the same owner as Fox News. Furthermore, this looks like an opinion piece not an economic analysis. Relying on one such article is like me presenting an opinion piece from HuffPost as proof. Tiny, I thought your research was more robust than that. If you want the truth about economic issues you need to look at what a broad spectrum of economists say, not Rupert Murdoch's News Corp media.

Look up the Chicago Booth poll of 40 economists on the 2009 stimulus. 92 percent agreed that the stimulus succeeded in reducing the jobless rate. On the harder question of whether the benefit exceeded the cost, more than half thought it did, one in three was uncertain, and fewer than one in six disagreed.

The USA Economic Policy Debate Is a Sham
[url]http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-07-23/the-u-s-economic-policy-debate-is-a-sham.html[/url]

John Williams of Shadowstats. Com keeps the real government statistics as they were calculated prior the the numerous adulturations over the years. [url]http://www.shadowstats.com/[/url]

According to Williams, there has been an actual net loss of jobs during the term of the Obama adminstration. Yet the BLS, bureau of lying statistics has done another recalculation and decided that even more jobs have been created in the last 4 years. The level of statistical lying in the Obama administration is starting to rival what occured under Reagan when the OMB would project 10% GDP growth so that the Gramm-Rudman budget cuts would not take effect.

[QUOTE=Doppelganger; 426937]You did not disappoint with your dodging of the origianl question regarding Obama and the Stimulus with total B / S.

Where is your defense of Obama's own promises in his own words regarding the upper level of unempolyment if the Stimulus was enacted and the rate of unemployment he promised by this date. You don't even dispute his promise of cutting the deficit by 50% during his first term, when he entered office the deficite was $10. 5 Trillion, now it's over $16 Trillion and growning. Answer? You don't really have one for a failed president and a failed policy.

You are just like Team Obama, crowed about 94, 000 jobs created in August while sweeping under the carpet the 368, 000 people who fell out of the work force. We have argued this point on the board before, sure unemployment is coming down not because the economy is creating jobs but because the BLS keeps reducing the size of the workforce, which is at a 30 year low. If you counted all the folks who want a job but can not fine one the unemployment rate is way over 10, more like 14 to 15.

I guess the next thing you are going to tell me is how it's a good thing the workforce is decreasing in size as it means more people now need to depend on the government, free food, free housing, free cell phones, free money![/QUOTE]

[QUOTE=Member #2041;426883]Something that they learned from the Republicans during the Clinton and Bush administrations.[/QUOTE]Member this is the last time I will waste effort responding to you. Do you really think that evading Senate rules started in the last 10-20 years? If so, I have some ecologically sensitive land in Florida which I would like to show you. Someone can look up which particular Senator developed and implemented this idea, but it really doesn't matter. Your baseless answer did not address the main issue which is that one of the most signifcant pieces of legislation in the last several years was passed by virtue of evading Senatorial rules. The policies of both parties that the ends justify the means is a symptom of our dying political system.

[QUOTE=Esten; 426957]WSJ is a right-wing news organization with the same owner as Fox News. Furthermore, this looks like an opinion piece not an economic analysis. Relying on one such article is like me presenting an opinion piece from HuffPost as proof. Tiny, I thought your research was more robust than that. If you want the truth about economic issues you need to look at what a broad spectrum of economists say, not Rupert Murdoch's News Corp media.

Look up the Chicago Booth poll of 40 economists on the 2009 stimulus. 92 percent agreed that the stimulus succeeded in reducing the jobless rate. On the harder question of whether the benefit exceeded the cost, more than half thought it did, one in three was uncertain, and fewer than one in six disagreed.

The USA Economic Policy Debate Is a Sham.

[url]http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-07-23/the-u-s-economic-policy-debate-is-a-sham.html[/url][/QUOTE]Esten, you place too much emphasis on what the majority believes. Getting off the subject, sometimes I think you think government should rule based on polls and what the majority wants. This would be anathema to the founding fathers, who believed in personal liberty.

I agree that the stimulus reduced the jobless rate. I don't believe it was worth the cost. We're awash in debt. This gets back to what Member 2041 and I were arguing about. Other countries have gone through recessions worse than ours over the last 20 years and they emerged without having mortgaged their futures. They spent less and ended up with better results, including lower unemployment. Actually, after the 1998 Asian economic crisis, some of the countries had to do things that were the opposite of what Keynes would have recommended during a recession. They raised interest rates and got rid of subsidies and lowered government spending. The IMF and/or the market made them do it. They emerged with vibrant economies, and growth rates and unemployment rates that we'd envy. As the WSJ pointed out, interest rates went up to 14% when Reagan was president, but we still ended up with a vibrant recovery.

Japan did something similar to what we're doing. It has very large public debt and a stagnant economy, over 20 years after the crash.

The Huffington Post isn't in the same league with the WSJ.

[url]http://www.cbo.gov/sites/default/files/cbofiles/ftpdocs/117xx/doc11706/08-24-arra.pdf[/url]

Yes, there are assumptions made in the econometric modelling.

============================

http://factcheck.org/2012/09/romneys-stump-speech/

[QUOTE=Miami Bob; 426998][url]http://www.cbo.gov/sites/default/files/cbofiles/ftpdocs/117xx/doc11706/08-24-arra.pdf[/url]

Yes, there are assumptions made in the econometric modelling.[/QUOTE]I just scanned it so may be missing something. FOR THIS PARTICULAR PROGRAM it looks like we went $814 billion more into debt for a temporary increase in GDP (total goods and services generated by the USA) of about $850 billion, using midpoints in their table. I'm not an economist but know something about business and investments. And a $814 billion investment for a temporary $850 billion increase in sales is a pretty bad deal. You'd go bankrupt pretty quickly doing that on a much smaller scale. Using midpoints again, the gross wages through the years in the table of those who were employed who otherwise would not have been might be around $250 billion, which again is much less than we spent.

This was published in August, 2010. It's old.

[QUOTE=Dccpa;426972]Member this is the last time I will waste effort responding to you. Do you really think that evading Senate rules started in the last 10-20 years? If so, I have some ecologically sensitive land in Florida which I would like to show you. Someone can look up which particular Senator developed and implemented this idea, but it really doesn't matter. Your baseless answer did not address the main issue which is that one of the most signifcant pieces of legislation in the last several years was passed by virtue of evading Senatorial rules. The policies of both parties that the ends justify the means is a symptom of our dying political system.[/QUOTE]No, of course I don't believe this started in the past 20 years. But I DO believe that it is only during this time that the Democrats got nearly as good / ruthless / disciplined at it as the Republicans have been for much longer.

Good Morning.
Just a little something to think about.