President Obama Re-Elected - Page 462

On September 07 2012 04:19 dvorakftw wrote:

Lovely partisan spin along with all the "no compromise" talk that ignore the fact that there was a deal on the table before Obama decided to demand an addition $400 billion in tax increases to those already agreed on. To be fair, Obama had zero executive experience at that point and almost no meaningful political experience so he didn't realize Democrats normally do that kind of backstab after the initial agreement is done, not before.

On September 07 2012 03:51 JonnyBNoHo wrote:


What if you can't make the payment? If you simply owe it to yourself my question is laughable. But in the real economy not being able to repay a debt has consequences -- often destructive ones.

Why was the fall in home prices a bad thing? People should have been glad - homes were on sale! Unfortunately the debt tied to those homes made the fall in home prices a problem. Rigid mortgage payments were not serviceable after people were laid off. Home values were not sufficient during foreclosure to cover loan principals. Because of this banks lost a ton of money and the resulting crisis was not pretty.

So yes, debt can be a problem for future generations because you are forcing them to agree to very rigid commitments. If those commitments cannot be made, then there will be destructive consequences. Sounds like a burden to me.

["Brooks: ...] Back then, there was a moral horror at the thought of debt. No matter how bad the economic problems became, progressive-era politicians did not impose huge debt burdens on their children. That ethos is clearly gone."

As a country we cannot impose huge debt burdens on our children. It is impossible, at least if we are referring to government debt. The reason is simple, at one point we will all be dead. That means that the ownership of our debt will be passed on to our children. If we have some huge thousand trillion dollar debt that is owed to our children, then how have we imposed a burden on them? There is a distributional issue -- Bill Gates children may own all the debt -- but that is within generations, not between generations. As a group, our children's well-being will be determined by the productivity of the economy (which Brooks complained about earlier), the state of the physical and social infrastructure and the environment.

One can make the point that much of the debt is owned by foreigners, but this is a result of our trade deficit, which is in turn caused by the over-valued dollar. Brooks never said a word about the trade deficit or the value of the dollar, so insofar as there may be a real issue of indebtedness for our children, it is not even on Brooks radar screen.

http://www.cepr.net/index.php/blogs/beat-the-press/david-brooks-is-projecting-his-self-indulgence-again?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed: beat_the_press (Beat the Press)

On September 07 2012 04:25 JonnyBNoHo wrote:


That should be inarguable

On September 07 2012 03:05 JonnyBNoHo wrote:


The problem with Republican tax cuts is that they do the easy part (the tax cut) but neglect the hard part (spending cuts). Reagan's excuse was jacking military spending to fight to cold war, Bush's excuse was 9/11 - but they're junk excuses.

IMO the tax cuts are fine policies they just can't be expected to pay for themselves.

New jobs numbers released on Friday came in lower than expected, dealing a blow to President Barack Obama’s reelection campaign a day after the president closed out the Democratic National Convention in Charlotte, N.C., by asking voters to give his administration four more years to get the economy on the right track.

The economy added 96,000 jobs in August, pushing unemployment down to 8.1 percent, the Labor Department reported Friday.

The jobs figure missed most mainstream forecasts for August, with analysts’ predictions hovering around 125,000.
The drop in the unemployment rate from 8.3 percent to 8.1 percent serves as somewhat of a silver lining for the Obama campaign but it was mostly due to more workers leaving the labor force.

In his speech Thursday night, Obama made his case for a second term by arguing his plan for improving the economy needs more time given the problems the country faced when he took office.

“You didn’t elect me to tell you what you wanted to hear. You elected me to tell you the truth,” he said in his speech to the convention in Charlotte, N.C. “And the truth is, it will take more than a few years for us to solve challenges that have built up over decades.”

Republicans have made the high unemployment rate a centerpiece of their campaign against Obama saying the economy should be in much better health by now following a recession that ended in 2009.

“Just hours after President Obama asked America for a second term, we received a clear reminder that he has yet to keep his No. 1 promise to fix the economy,” Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus said in a statement Friday.
“The indisputable message of today’s job report: We’re not creating jobs fast enough, and we’re certainly not better off than we were four years ago.”

Republicans concede that the economy was in bad shape by the time Obama took office but contend his policies, including the president’s signature health care law, have held back growth.

The figures released on Friday will most likely do little to change the heated rhetoric on the campaign trail.
Earlier this week at a POLITICO luncheon at the convention, White House communications director Dan Pfeiffer said the White House had no plans to change its message based on the latest jobs figures.

Pfeiffer argued that while the monthly jobs figures may get a lot of attention in Washington, voters consider a variety of factors when weighing the state of the economy.

“To the average person, the economy is a very personal thing,” he said.

The economy typically requires between 100,000 and 125,000 new jobs per month to keep pace with new workers entering the labor market.

On average in 2012, the economy is adding 139,000 jobs per month, according the Labor Department’s Bureau of Labor Statistics. In 2011, that figure was 153,000.

“Report was much weaker than anticipated,” David Greenlaw, an economist with Morgan Stanley, said in a Twitter post. “Jobs, hours and earnings were all bad.”

Labor also revised its July jobs figure to 141,000 down from its initial figure of 163,000 jobs.

When it comes to the fate of the economy over the next few months, the heated rhetoric of the campaign serves mostly as background noise. The real game is being played by central bankers in the United States and Europe.

On Thursday, the European Central Bank announced plans to buy government bonds as part of its latest effort to stem the damage from the continent’s debt crisis, which is also serving as a drag on the U.S. economy.

Following the announcement, the Dow Jones Industrial Average shot up more than 240 points to close on Thursday at its highest point since late 2007.

Next week, the Federal Reserve’s policy setting committee will gather for a highly anticipated meeting to decide what steps the U.S. central bank may take to boost the economy. This meeting of the Federal Open Market Committee on Sept. 12 and 13 is one of only two left before the November elections.

On September 07 2012 22:28 RCMDVA wrote:

Jobs number is bad.

Mostly because 368,000 people left the workforce...and no longer count. That's why the UI went down from 8.3 to 8.1.

Barack Obama is deeply overexposed and often boring. He never seems to be saying what he's thinking. His speech Thursday was weirdly anticlimactic. There's too much buildup, the crowd was tired, it all felt flat. He was somber, and his message was essentially banal: We've done better than you think. Who are you going to believe, me or your lying eyes?

There were many straw men. There were phrases like "the shadow of a shuttered steel mill," which he considers writerly. But they sound empty and practiced now, like something you've heard in a commercial or an advertising campaign.

It was stale and empty. He's out of juice.

Beneath the funny hats, the sweet-faced delegates, the handsome speakers and the babies waving flags there was something disquieting. All three days were marked by a kind of soft, distracted extremism. It was unshowy and unobnoxious but also unsettling.

There was the relentless emphasis on Government as Community, as the thing that gives us spirit and makes us whole. But government isn't what you love if you're American, America is what you love. Government is what you have, need and hire. Its most essential duties—especially when it is bankrupt—involve defending rights and safety, not imposing views and values. We already have values. Democrats and Republicans don't see all this the same way, and that's fine—that's what national politics is, the working out of this dispute in one direction or another every few years. But the Democrats convened in Charlotte seemed more extreme on the point, more accepting of the idea of government as the center of national life, than ever, at least to me.

The fight over including a single mention of God in the platform—that was extreme. The original removal of the single mention by the platform committee—extreme. The huge "No!" vote on restoring the mention of God, and including the administration's own stand on Jerusalem—that wasn't liberal, it was extreme. Comparing the Republicans to Nazis—extreme. The almost complete absence of a call to help education by facing down the powers that throw our least defended children under the school bus—this was extreme, not mainstream.

The sheer strangeness of all the talk about abortion, abortion, contraception, contraception. I am old enough to know a wedge issue when I see one, but I've never seen a great party build its entire public persona around one. Big speeches from the heads of Planned Parenthood and NARAL, HHS Secretary and abortion enthusiast Kathleen Sebelius and, of course, Sandra Fluke.

"Republicans shut me out of a hearing on contraception," Ms. Fluke said. But why would anyone have included a Georgetown law student who never worked her way onto the national stage until she was plucked, by the left, as a personable victim? What a fabulously confident and ingenuous-seeming political narcissist Ms. Fluke is. She really does think—and her party apparently thinks—that in a spending crisis with trillions in debt and many in need, in a nation in existential doubt as to its standing and purpose, in a time when parents struggle to buy the good sneakers for the kids so they're not embarrassed at school . . . that in that nation the great issue of the day, and the appropriate focus of our concern, is making other people pay for her birth-control pills. That's not a stand, it's a non sequitur. She is not, as Rush Limbaugh oafishly, bullyingly said, a slut. She is a ninny, a narcissist and a fool.

And she was one of the great faces of the party in Charlotte. That is extreme. Childish, too.

Something else, and it had to do with tone. I remember the Republicans in Tampa bashing the president, hard, but not the entire Democratic Party. In Charlotte they bashed Mitt Romney, but they bashed the Republican Party harder. If this doesn't strike you as somewhat unsettling, then you must want another four years of all war all the time between the parties. I don't think the American people want that. Because, actually, they're not extreme.

Bill Clinton is The Master. That is stipulated. Almost everyone in the media was over the moon about his speech. It was a shrewd and superb moment of political generosity, his hauling into town to make the case, but it was a hack speech. It was the speech of a highly gifted apparatchik. All great partisan speeches include some hard and uncomfortable truths, but Mr. Clinton offered none. He knows better than so much of what he said. In real life he makes insightful statements on the debt, the deficit and the real threat they pose. He knows more about the need for and impediments to public-school reform than half the reformers do. He knows exactly why both parties can't reach agreement in Washington, and what each has done wrong along the way. But Wednesday night he stuck to fluid fictions and clever cases. It was smaller than Bill Clinton is.

Still, he gave the president one great political gift: He put Medicaid on the table. He put it right there next to the pepper shaker and said Look at that! People talk Medicare and Social Security, but, as Mr. Clinton noted, more than half of Medicaid is spent on nursing-home care for seniors and on those with disabilities such as Down syndrome and autism. Will it be cut?
....
Romney-Ryan take note: this will arrive as an issue.

On September 07 2012 22:58 HellRoxYa wrote:


Of course, no people entered the workforce?

On September 07 2012 23:54 JonnyBNoHo wrote:

It's a net figure. Some entered, some exited and on balance the survey says 368,000 left.

The rule of thumb I've heard is that the US needs somewhere a bit below 200K jobs added each month just to keep pace with population growth. So at the current rate of job creation the unemployment situation will never be fixed.

On September 07 2012 23:09 xDaunt wrote:
I agree with Peggy Noonan's take on the convention.
+ Show Spoiler +

On September 08 2012 00:49 karpo wrote:


That reads more like a totally 100% biased rant than a real article. I actually read the "I agree with ..." part of your post before i went to get a cup of coffee but i knew EXACTLY what would be the content even before reading it.

On September 08 2012 00:48 paralleluniverse wrote:

Which is why I felt Obama's speech was wimpish and empty. There was no defense of his stimulus, no call for more actions to create jobs. Of course, I have no doubt that his campaign advisers have told him that "stimulus" is a dirty word. Leave it to Clinton to defend his record.

But, hey, throw out another $4 trillion in tax cuts to the rich and that will fix everything.

In related news, today, Krugman predicts that economic recovery should pick up over the next few years because there's been notable progress on household deleveraging: https://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/07/opinion/krugman-cleaning-up-the-economy.html

On September 08 2012 01:59 xDaunt wrote:
Unless war with Iran breaks out, nothing is going to happen economy-wise until after the election. Businesses are going to sit on their capital reserves until then.