 Pres. Obama |
It’s not my fault!
“That wasn’t me,” President Barack Obama said on his 100th day in office, disclaiming responsibility for the huge budget deficit waiting for him on Day One.
It actually was partly him _ and the other Democrats controlling Congress the previous two years _ who shaped the latest in a string of precipitously out-of-balance budgets.
And as a presidential candidate and president-elect, he backed the twilight Bush-era stimulus plan that made the deficit deeper, all before he took over and promoted spending plans that have made it much deeper still.
A look at some of his claims Wednesday:
OBAMA: “We began by passing a Recovery Act that has already saved or created over 150,000 jobs.” _ from news conference.
THE FACTS: This assertion is flawed on several levels. For starters, the U.S. has lost more than 1.2 million jobs since Obama took office, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Even if Obama’s stimulus bill saved or created as many jobs as he says, that number is dwarfed by the number of recent job losses.
OBAMA: “Number one, we inherited a $1.3 trillion deficit. … That wasn’t me. Number two, there is almost uniform consensus among economists that in the middle of the biggest crisis, financial crisis, since the Great Depression, we had to take extraordinary steps. So you’ve got a lot of Republican economists who agree that we had to do a stimulus package and we had to do something about the banks. Those are one-time charges, and they’re big, and they’ll make our deficits go up over the next two years.” — in Missouri.
THE FACTS: Congress, under Democratic control in 2007 and 2008, controlled the purse strings that led to the deficit Obama inherited. A Republican president, George W. Bush, had a role, too: He signed the legislation.
Obama supported the emergency bailout package in Bush’s final months — a package Democratic leaders wanted to make bigger.
What? He’s actually claiming that he and his party didn’t have control of Gov spending for the last 2 years? Really?
150,000 jobs saved or created? Name them…
This isn’t that hard folks. Rep and Dem’s are both one in the same. The two parties are there to make you feel like someone is on your side.
I bet all of the new 150,000 jobs were government jobs. I guess at at cost of $800,000,000,000 then each new government job cost $5.3 million each. Wonderful.
It’s beginning to smell a lot like another one term Democratic presidency.
“150,000 jobs saved or created? Name them…”
Well since he’s been in office the Troll industry has been thriving.
#5 You bet. Look at all the trolls and criminals he appointed to his Admin. Good call.
weak.
sounds like he’s got a grip on the issues, I don’t expect to agree with all his decisions but at least his decision making process is a good one that last decider was such a joke I’d still vote for him over anything the other guys have come on other guys get some one in the game
Bush failed at everything he put hand hand to.
(Well, except tax cuts for the rich)
And the rank-and-file conservatives cheered him along every step of the way.
So, who takes their sniping seriously?
# 7 Stopher2475 said, “weak.”
I wouldn’t call Obama weak. A weasel, yes.
Typical political spin
From this site.
I figured out where he created those jobs. The GDP dropped by 6.1% in the 1st quarter (HUGE).
The 150k jobs were created by states to beef up the staff at Unemployment Offices…
Bullshit. Your very first example is meaningless. The fact that job losses dwarf job preservation does not make obama’s assertion wrong.
Therefore, I stopped reading the other two because you started off with a lie and a reach.
How exactly do you quantify “jobs saved”?
#14 That’s the beauty of it. You can never prove or disprove the assertion. The perfect type of promise for a crooked politician.
I have to say that I think there’s some spin in this post too. Before the stimulus package, the Bush wars doubled the national debt from about 5 to 10 trillion. Before Gulf War II even started, we had hit a debt to GDP ratio that was even higher than the prior record set in October 1929.
Then, you hit Obama for supporting legislation as a senator that he still supports and that, regardless of particular details, is certainly necessary at the gross level.
Remember, business is not spending money. Individuals are not spending money. If the government also stops, so does the economy as a whole. And, when the small green pieces of paper stop moving, so do the goods and services they represent.
http://tinyurl.com/c3w8e2
Dallas has it right as well. If we’re still hemorrhaging jobs, it does not mean that Obama is wrong about staunching the bleeding.
And, let’s compare the size of the stimulus to the size of the Iraq war. It’s a big stimulus. It is about a quarter of what W spent on a useless unwarranted war.
http://tinyurl.com/249ckx
#16 – Me,
First tinyurl is no good. Sorry all. Try this one.
http://tinyurl.com/d8uoq2
Here is the CBO estimate of the actual cost of the stimulus package.
http://blog.heritage.org/2009/02/12/true-cost-of-stimulus-327-trillion/
Look – The Dems did control the house for 2 years, but they were still rubber stamping administration policies. Fact of the matter was – that administration a) promoted the housing bubble to hide the huge deficits it’s false war were causing, something I can cite with numerous URLs, and b) idealistically destroyed all the critical government regulatory functions by redirecting funding, all for the benefit of the oligarchic business community, which I am a part of, allowing fraud to run unchecked for 8 years. The notable beneficiaries of that were entities like Enron, Blackwater, and the entire subprime industry, and the legacy is the worst economic crisis and financial system collapse since 1929. All because folks like Karl Rove and Newt Gingrich are smart, but not wise.
It’s always the other guys fault but yes he and his party had the power of the purse some years before he was elected and their actions are duely recorded. They played a huge role in making this mess and under his able leadership the national dept has more than doubled in his first 100 days in office or I misunderstood the claims on what was being spent.
Considering the “nobody read this before we voted” nature of many of the bills the waste was beyond words.
# The people pushing the housing bubble weren’t Bush and company. That was Barney Frank and a bunch of Dems who wanted everybody to be able to buy their own homes even if they had bad credit. They had control of the Finence Committee among other things so they could and did do what they wanted to do despite weak opposition by Bush.
I’ll even say Frank and friends meant to do good. That they didn’t understand that somebody has to actually pay for things like homes, at the time, is sad.
Worse, I’m not sure they understand that today.
Off topic:
Something is going on, and maybe we are not being told the whole story.
They just announced that ALL schools in the Forth Worth area are closed effective immediately, at least until Monday.
But there have been no recorded cases of Swine/Mexican/H1N1 flu reported in Fort Worth as of right now.
All school based athletic events in all of Texas were canceled indefinitely as of yesterday.
An overabundance of caution, or are we being fed small pieces of a bigger story in order to avoid a panic?
Political points of view gives us a clue as to who your are and what your response is here. He said it.
#18 – Reality Check,
Bush would have been reduced to a twitching mass of Jello by now.
Correction. Bush was a twitching mass of Jello before he took the oaf of office. (deliberate)
You have GOT to be kidding, KD. If you’re dividing blame between Republicans and Democrats — you are simply ignorant of what has been going on in Washington if you don’t understand that the vast, vast majority of it falls on the de-regulating, Wall-Street-conniving Republicans.
To suggest otherwise is so obviously and blatantly dishonest as to not even deserve comment.
#19 – Old King Troll,
You wouldn’t mind posting a real source for that instead of a blog, would you? It may be real. I just want to see a legitimate source before I believe it.
#26 – Wretched Gnu,
Those of us who are self-honest recognize that the deregulation was done by both parties and all administrations since Ronald Reagan. It has been 28 years of voodoo Reaganomics even under Clinton. Whether it’s Foreclosure Phil Graham pushing it, Clinton signing it, or Chuck Schumer totally bought lock stock and barrel by Wall St.
Perhaps it is true that Clinton didn’t deregulate quite as fast as his republican counterparts, but deregulate he did. We must recognize that in this one, the blame has been spread far and wide for a generation.
Reagan changed the paradigm and everyone followed. Reagan has done more to destroy this once great nation than anyone … until W who took it to a whole new level in every possible way, especially with his gutting of the constitution.
deowll –
You don’t have your story quite right.
When Barney Frank and other legislators (both Democratic and Republican) passed legislation that encouraged more minority participation in the housing process, they never imagined that financial institutions would misuse the reforms in the way that they did.
It is NOT individual homeowners that are to blame for the housing crisis… it is the banks themselves and the ‘financial instruments’ that the they created as derivatives to their mortgages. In effect, they played with the system so that one failed mortgage resulted in the equivalent of 30 to 50 failed mortgages through a process called ‘leverage’.
It was lack of lending regulation that caused this crisis, not the actions of individual homeowners. Bankers did things because they could, and knew that they would not be held responsible, because they were not breaking any regulations. And reduced regulation is a paramount tenet of the Republican party.
So lets place blame where it really belongs… not in the hands of individuals trying to improve their lives, but in the hands of institutions that took advantage of a lack of oversight and regulation, and ‘played’ the system regardless of the consequences to American society.
#17, I wouldn’t expect anything less from a thoroughbred Keynesian like Paul Krugman.
Of course, in his FDR example he also neglected to mention other foolish things done, like enacting the National Industrial Recovery Act and the Agricultural Adjustment Act. If a premise of Keynes was that prices aren’t flexible enough to bring markets back to equilibrium, it’s little wonder why that could be. lol.
# 28 Misanthropic Scott
All accurate. BTW – It was NOT Barney Frank, although I do not doubt that it might have been his interest. He had no power! It was Bush administration mouthpieces that constantly and consistently talked about hosing being the main driver of the economy (and the implied subprime business). This is as vivid in my mind as the WMD chants that left my jaw slack, and Congresses buying into the BS that saw it hit the floor.