Obama vs Romney 2012 - CDC Election

[Mr. Ambien]

I'm a Canadian. And it is simply an empirical fact that if Nader had not run, Gore would have been president. Google the state by state vote totals some time.

[Tearloch7]

What's also an empirical fact by your loose terminology is if Bush had not run, Gore would have been President. Damn other people besides Gore running.

What I really laughed at is "Bush turned Clinton's surplus into debt", "Gore wouldn't have created this mess", "US government borrowing costs them nothing in the long run".

What I don't see you saying, due to Sharpshooter-like fellating of the Democratic party is.. "Clinton's surplus was a single budget year through which the Republican Congress grinded his balls to pass a fiscally responsible budget, overall Clinton ran the highest debt to date by the end of his Presidency" , or "Clinton eased lending regulations that helped artificially blow up the housing market", or "I can't believe I just posted that kind of stupidity blaming third parties for messiah Gore's 2000 loss". Hard to not believe you're American with how butthurt you are about that, but then again I see fellow Canadians also sucking up to the Democratic party for no good reason, so you're in good company.

[Common sense]

Condescension .. what a surprise ..

[Jaimito]

Jennifer Granholm was Canadian born, and she was stirring the pot .. love that lady!! .. Schweitzer is a real smart guy too .. throwing that GOP rhetoric back at em had got to raise their hackles, so to speak ..

[Mr. Ambien]

Rarely do I find a headline humourous but:

http://www.cnn.com/2....html?hpt=hp_t2

Obama speaks to Americans as adults

I lol'd.

What more, that article articulates, in a not-so-overt fashion, why parties are more like sports teams, combining the fanaticism of sports teams with politics and politicians is asking for a disaster. Politicians successfully branded themselves like the Marlboro Man for you to personally associate with and forget you're hiring them for a job, instead cheer them on like they're your team. Problem #1.

[Sharpshooter]

Cleaning Up the Economy

By PAUL KRUGMAN

Published: September 6, 2012

Bill Clinton’s speech at the Democratic National Convention was a remarkable combination of pretty serious wonkishness — has there ever been a convention speech with that much policy detail? — and memorable zingers. Perhaps the best of those zingers was his sarcastic summary of the Republican case for denying President Obama re-election: “We left him a total mess. He hasn’t cleaned it up fast enough. So fire him and put us back in.”

Great line. But is the mess really getting cleaned up?

The answer, I would argue, is yes. The next four years are likely to be much better than the last four years — unless misguided policies create another mess.

In saying this, I’m not making excuses for the past. Job growth has been much slower and unemployment much higher than it should have been, even given the mess Mr. Obama inherited. More on that later. But, first, let’s look at what has been accomplished.

On Inauguration Day 2009, the U.S. economy faced three main problems. First, and most pressing, there was a crisis in the financial system, with many of the crucial channels of credit frozen; we were, in effect, suffering the 21st-century version of the bank runs that brought on the Great Depression. Second, the economy was taking a major hit from the collapse of a gigantic housing bubble. Third, consumer spending was being held down by high levels of household debt, much of which had been run up during the Bush-era bubble.

The first of these problems was resolved quite quickly, thanks both to lots of emergency lending by the Federal Reserve and, yes, the much maligned bank bailouts. By late 2009, measures of financial stress were more or less back to normal.

This return to financial normalcy did not, however, produce a robust recovery. Fast recoveries are almost always led by a housing boom — and given the excess home construction that took place during the bubble, that just wasn’t going to happen. Meanwhile, households were trying (or being forced by creditors) to pay down debt, which meant depressed demand. So the economy’s free fall ended, but recovery remained sluggish.

Now, you may have noticed that in telling this story about a disappointing recovery I didn’t mention any of the things that Republicans talked about last week in Tampa, Fla. — the effects of high taxes and regulation, the lack of confidence supposedly created by Mr. Obama’s failure to lavish enough praise on “job creators” (what I call the “Ma, he’s looking at me funny!” theory of our economic problems). Why the omission? Because there’s not a shred of evidence for the G.O.P. theory of what ails our economy, while there’s a lot of hard evidence for the view that a lack of demand, largely because of excessive household debt, is the real problem.

And here’s the good news: The forces that have been holding the economy back seem likely to fade away in the years ahead. Housing starts have been at extremely low levels for years, so the overhang of excess construction from the bubble years is long past — and it looks as if a housing recovery has already begun. Household debt is still high by historical standards, but the ratio of debt to G.D.P. is way down from its peak, setting the stage for stronger consumer demand looking forward.

And what about business investment? It has actually been recovering rapidly since late 2009, and there’s every reason to expect it to keep rising as businesses see rising demand for their products.

So, as I said, the odds are that barring major mistakes, the next four years will be much better than the past four years.

Does this mean that U.S. economic policy has done a good job? Not at all.

Bill Clinton said of the problems Mr. Obama confronted on taking office, “No one could have fully repaired all the damage that he found in just four years.” If, by that, he meant the overhang of debt, that’s very much the case. But we should have had strong policies to mitigate the pain while households worked down their debt, as well as policies to help reduce the debt — above all, relief for underwater homeowners.

The policies we actually got were far from adequate. Debt relief, in particular, has been a bust — and you can argue that this was, in large part, because the Obama administration never took it seriously.

But, that said, Mr. Obama did push through policies — the auto bailout and the Recovery Act — that made the slump a lot less awful than it might have been. And despite Mitt Romney’s attempt to rewrite history on the bailout, the fact is that Republicans bitterly opposed both measures, as well as everything else the president has proposed.

So Bill Clinton basically had it right: For all the pain America has suffered on his watch, Mr. Obama can fairly claim to have helped the country get through a very bad patch, from which it is starting to emerge.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/07/opinion/krugman-cleaning-up-the-economy.html?_r=2&partner=rss&emc=rss

[Zamboni_14]

Bush won Florida by 750 votes (officially). Nader got 97,000 votes.

But no, voting for Nader didn't have any negative consequences whatsoever. Keep believing that!

[Sharpshooter]

last time I checked... it didn't. Nader lost, thus he didn't make any policies that hurt the american people.

[Common sense]

The 97,000 ballots cast for him prevented many policies that would have helped the american people from coming into fruition.

Though to be honest, I doubt that would have prevented the election from being manipulated into a Bush win anyways. They bought themselves an election, and then when they almost lost it, they stole it and implemented their 8 year dine n' dash before handing the mess to the black guy to clean up.

[Zamboni_14]

The 97,000 ballots cast for him prevented many policies that would have helped the american people from coming into fruition.

Though to be honest, I doubt that would have prevented the election from being manipulated into a Bush win anyways. They bought themselves an election, and then when they almost lost it, they stole it and implemented their 8 year dine n' dash before handing the mess to the black guy to clean up.

[Sharpshooter]

Americans could have limited it to 4. Where's that argument?

[Columbo]

I'm going to disagree... slightly... on the idea of the media's job being to explain how things will effect people. When the media tries to explain things, that's when they have a total failure. People like Maddow, Hannity, Beck, etc. do that all the time, and that's where the biggest lies/spin comes from. Don't get me wrong, I don't mind having an opinion based show... but don't allow it to be advertised as "fact" or give them "freedom of the press" if it's nothing but slander and spin. Make them put their necks out there when they toss out things like "Obama's trip to India cost tax payers $2 billion." I don't care what source you got that from... if it isn't true and you report it (say it as "FACT") you shouldn't be protected from misleading the population and should possibly face some kind of punishment (fine, suspended, fired, etc.)

[mrawfull]

But like I was saying before, I can look at politifact and see that Paul Ryan saying that Obama stole $716 from medicare is rated "mostly untrue" but I still won't have a clue about what Obamacare means for me and my family, nor what Ryan is proposing or what his plan might mean. How does it really help me understand anything? It's not enough info, and no one has time to read the 2000-page Obamacare document (and this is for just one issue!) Like it or not, people need some form of media analysis to get the whole story on politics. I have no solution to this, except to try to find the "best" most honest examples of reporting I can find.

[RUPERTKBD]

Strange how the job market is still crap (crappy low income part time jobs replacing middle class full time jobs), the middle class gap and thus income gap in general is still widening, the primary beneficiaries of bailout money were shareholders and high up corporate douchebags given a golden parachute. The addition of toxic debt and long term interest to the federal government's books (to throw on top of the other interest pile that is going to surpass defence spending soon enough) was not worth the short term stupidity. Unfortunately people have become so accustomed to government interfering in the economy so much they don't know what a terrible intervention is.. and this was amongst the most catastrophic ones to go with bailing out the financials. No lesson learned, a larger debt.. yay pro middle class thing!

[Mr. Ambien]

This doesn't make a lot of sense. You were criticizing Obama for the bailout of the auto industry, which as Boxie pointed out saved thousands of jobs, yet you also criticize his record on jobs.

It may be that the unemployment situation is bad, but it would be far worse without the bailouts, which in the case of the auto industry have proved to be absolutely the right thing to do.

Feel free to complain about the lack of new job creation, but whining about the auto bailout in the same breath makes no sense, other than to show that you're just looking for things to complain about.

This is the real puzzler. Fool me once.....

[Tearloch7]

"Stupidity and sheer ignorance"? .. pot-kettle? .. insulting cretinous statements? .. I thought there were rules about personal attacks?

[boxiebrown]

They could have, but then they swiftboated Kerry and pulled out all the stops and dirty tricks in their playbook to get Bush re-elected. Where's your memory?

Then you're a sadist.

[boxiebrown]

1. I criticized both Obama and Bush for their bailouts of the auto industry and the financials. You Obama sycophants seem to forget it wasn't Obama who started the bailouts.

2. The economy and unemployment situations would be immediately worse and they should be because the economy needed to normalise from the effects of an enormous bubble created by government to artificially grow the economy. You really should take a couple economics courses to understand what effects government intervention has on an economy.

3. No bailouts would have resulted in those people losing their jobs, but that's okay too. Why? Because an economy that can sustain itself without government holding it up is a far better scenario for the long run than what you see now, where government is so up to their eyeballs in debt the amount of interest payments per fiscal year is going to, in a few years, be higher than inflated defense spending, and debt will be surpassing GDP, hence why the US's credit is plummeting on fears it won't be able to pay back it's debts it continues to accumulate in the long run for your so cheered on government sustained economy. So no, the bailouts have not been proven whatsoever to be the right thing to do. The stupidity and sheer ignorance of your statement almost knocked me out of my chair laughing.

4. Your spiel about job creation and the bailout makes zero sense, and likely you failed to read what I was responding to to get an idea of what I was posting.

[Mr. Ambien]

As I said, completely ignorant and utterly callous.

[johngould21]

1. I criticized both Obama and Bush for their bailouts of the auto industry and the financials. You Obama sycophants seem to forget it wasn't Obama who started the bailouts.

2. The economy and unemployment situations would be immediately worse and they should be because the economy needed to normalise from the effects of an enormous bubble created by government to artificially grow the economy. You really should take a couple economics courses to understand what effects government intervention has on an economy.

3. No bailouts would have resulted in those people losing their jobs, but that's okay too. Why? Because an economy that can sustain itself without government holding it up is a far better scenario for the long run than what you see now, where government is so up to their eyeballs in debt the amount of interest payments per fiscal year is going to, in a few years, be higher than inflated defense spending, and debt will be surpassing GDP, hence why the US's credit is plummeting on fears it won't be able to pay back it's debts it continues to accumulate in the long run for your so cheered on government sustained economy. So no, the bailouts have not been proven whatsoever to be the right thing to do. The stupidity and sheer ignorance of your statement almost knocked me out of my chair laughing.

4. Your spiel about job creation and the bailout makes zero sense, and likely you failed to read what I was responding to to get an idea of what I was posting.