So, what has Obama done in a year?

[irwincur]

Don't forget the organic garden...

 

[StageLeft]

The stimulus has done exactly what it was projected to do in terms of job and economic growth. The fact that the administration, the CBO, and scads of economists, mis-projected baseline unemployment is irrelevant to the actual effect of the stimulus bill.

Strictly speaking, no it didn't do what it was projected to do. Its projection, literally, was right there in the chart. And it did not do it.

I see a chart with soft estimate

No. A soft estimate is "will save or create jobs" with large ranges and no specifics. Based on a soft estimate, per wolfe9999's argument perhaps the stimulus was successful, but that chart is absolutely not soft, it is very specific.

 

[Red Dawn]

We could still be headed that way. I dont think the plane has pulled out of the free-fall just yet.

Well you let me know when there's a run on the banks because they were allowed to fail.

 

[woolfe9999]

Strictly speaking, no it didn't do what it was projected to do. Its projection, literally, was right there in the chart. And it did not do it, so on it did not do what it was projected to do.

I'm sorry, but this is a rather elementary point of logic. It's like saying you are going to remove 2 inches of water from a jar, and since you believe there are 9 inches of water in the jar, you project that your action will result in 7 inches of water in the jar. But it turns out there were actually 11 inches of water in the jar, so your action resulted in 9 inches of water rather than the 7 you projected. Yet in either scenario, you still removed 2 inches of water from the jar, which is exactly what you said you would do.

Now, if you think that this logic is flawed, then you need to acknowledge the logic then refute it. However, what you are doing, instead, is pretending to ignore. Focusing on a misprojection of the baseline while ignoring the accurate projection of the actual impact of the bill is sophistry at best. If you want to persist with it, fine. You are beyond rational discussion.

- wolf

 

[Patranus]

Something working and something being successful are two different things.

According to the Obama administration for the "stimulus" to be successful, unemployment wouldn't go above 8%.

 

[woolfe9999]

Something working and something being successful are two different things.

According to the Obama administration for the "stimulus" to be successful, unemployment wouldn't go above 8%.

Where did the administration say that this benchmark of 8% had to be met for the bill to be a success, or the obverse, that the bill could be considered a failure if we didn't hit the 8%? It wouldn't make any sense, but if they said, then they said.

- wolf

 

[Patranus]

Where did the administration say that this benchmark of 8% had to be met for the bill to be a success, or the obverse, that the bill could be considered a failure if we didn't hit the 8%? It wouldn't make any sense, but if they said, then they said.

- wolf

The administration said if you pass this "stimulus" package, unemployment wouldn't go above 8%.

It is not above 10%.

 

[woolfe9999]

The administration said if you pass this "stimulus" package, unemployment wouldn't go above 8%.

It is not above 10%.

I had my hopes up there. Your last post had a kernel of logic to it, if what you had said was correct. Instead, you are again repeating the original argument and pretending it hasn't been debunked already.

- wolf

 

[Zebo]

You think? I believe that it kept us from nose diving into another Great Depression.

It's a extend and pretend. You don't solve debt problems with more debt but by restructuring the debt (forgiveness) and/or earning more and paying it down (deleveraging). The next bubble is the govt bubble and will make GD look like roaring 20's as our dollar crashes

 

[PJABBER]

It's a extend and pretend. You don't solve debt problems with more debt but by restructuring the debt (forgiveness) and/or earning more and paying it down (deleveraging). The next bubble is the govt bubble and will make GD look like roaring 20's as our dollar crashes

My worry as well.

I keep watching the action with Treasuries. Sometimes it keeps me up at night.

 

[blackangst1]

A year later and even Salon calls him mediocre, and just shy of reminding us he really isnt all that different despite campaign promises, and calls him a failed leader. Very telling if you ask me.

http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2010/01/20/obama_s_first_year_feldt/index.html

A Disturbing Failure to Lead

In the face of towering challenges, Obama's accomplishments have been mediocre
By Gloria Feldt

Every new president sweeps in on a wave of promised change then disappoints his base when confronted by governing’s harsh reality. President Obama crested at such a high water mark that his plunge has been especially disheartening.

True, Obama faces so many enormous problems that he deserves some slack. Feminist Majority’s Ellie Smeal ticked off to me a dozen positive things he’s done for women and the AAUW congratulates him for forming the President’s Council on Women and Girls, nominating Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court and signing the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act.

Still, he’s failed to exercise three essential aspects of leadership, not so much by what he’s done as by how he has done it:

He’s resisted staking out a concrete, decisive agenda. The first responsibility of a leader is to create meaning, and the executive’s most important power is to set the agenda. Having seen President Clinton falter on healthcare by presenting a full-blown bill to Congress, Obama presented no bill; hence the committee-designed "camel." Now, nobody’s happy.

He hasn't asked for sacrifice in a tough time. Franklin D. Roosevelt recruited business leaders to work for a dollar a year creating ways to increase employment; Obama recruited business leaders, drawing full pay, whose ties to the failed financial industry make their solutions suspect. Though he's likened to JFK, Obama hasn't issued "ask not" challenges such as the Peace Corps or moon shot. There’s nobility in pulling together to solve big problems; leaders elevate our aspirations beyond our own personal needs. Obama did it during the primary with his speech on race. He should do it now.

He hasn't tethered his actions to principles espoused during his campaign. At the netroots conference last summer, close advisor Valerie Jarrett made clear that if progressives wanted this president to expend political capital, even if he’d supported their pet policies in the campaign, they must mobilize visible support. True, advocates should activate their constituencies. But this "show me you can deliver support then we'll act on our principles" message is calculation worthy of the most callous Chicago pol. With health reform, he’s delicately danced around whether he wanted or didn't care about a public option. Was pandering to Olympia Snowe to get a faux bipartisan health bill fruitful? Hardly. She opposed it in the end, and the delay brought daily dimunition of his power. Similarly, his misbegotten "Common Ground" effort on abortion and jettisoning the Freedom of Choice Act, which he’d previously declared a top priority, squandered pro-choice goodwill. Have anti-choice Common Grounders helped pass the stimulus or health reform? No. Still, Obama threw women under the bus, by not vigorously opposing Stupak and Nelson antiabortion amendments.

Obama's presidency is young. Perhaps he’ll grow in willingness to stake out his agenda and lead America to its higher self. I take to heart author Courtney Martin’s point that Obama is exercising leadership when he says citizens must lead ourselves by participating in the process not just during elections, but every day.



And from another author also on Salon:

As though he believes that the best way to redress a ruinous, massive private-sector theft is to rehabilitate the thieves by putting them to work as Cabinet members and high-ranking public policy officials, Obama has licensed the bungling robber barons who managed to gamble away the loot amassed in their attempt to fleece the world to recoup their squandered booty by "borrowing" from the taxpayers and homeowners (lots of them former homeowners by now) the money that they failed to grab the first time -- and then lending, with interest, the borrowings back to them!

But that’s just abomination No. 1 from this year-long experiment in reverse-progressivism that no new belated "tax" on Wall Street fortunes can hope to render more acceptable. There’s also the nearly trillion-dollar jobs program that set a new record for high-speed wealth destruction through widespread cronyism, sham accounting and bureaucratic self-enrichment. The effort climaxed in a propaganda fest touting the countless positions that it created (but really, upon investigation, didn’t create; or certainly not in the numbers that were announced) while also taking credit for all the jobs that still existed but hypothetically wouldn't exist if the whole failed project hadn’t been tried.

 

[mect]

I'm sorry, but this is a rather elementary point of logic. It's like saying you are going to remove 2 inches of water from a jar, and since you believe there are 9 inches of water in the jar, you project that your action will result in 7 inches of water in the jar. But it turns out there were actually 11 inches of water in the jar, so your action resulted in 9 inches of water rather than the 7 you projected. Yet in either scenario, you still removed 2 inches of water from the jar, which is exactly what you said you would do.

Now, if you think that this logic is flawed, then you need to acknowledge the logic then refute it. However, what you are doing, instead, is pretending to ignore. Focusing on a misprojection of the baseline while ignoring the accurate projection of the actual impact of the bill is sophistry at best. If you want to persist with it, fine. You are beyond rational discussion.

- wolf

The only problem is, how do you distinguish between there being initially 11 inches of water in the jar and removing two inches and there initially being 9 inches in the jar and removing 0 inches, especially when you don't know how much was there to start, how much you removed, or how much is left in the end. While I agree you can't just use the graphs to say the stimulus was a failure, it does make one question the conclusion that 2 inches was removed if they were unable to get the initial status correct.

 

[OutHouse]

Printed a bunch of money, bailed out his friends in big business and local government, alienated all of his supporters, save the die-hard hate mongering Democrats (many of whom are on this forum), sent 30,000 additional troops to be shot at by men living in caves, caused two Democrats to lose their governor's races and one Democrat to lose her senate race. Lets see, he also went on Jay Leno and took a $250,000.00 vacation to NYC on the taxpayer's dime while people were losing their jobs and standing in unemployment lines.

dont forget about unemployment over 10%

 

[werepossum]

The only problem is, how do you distinguish between there being initially 11 inches of water in the jar and removing two inches and there initially being 9 inches in the jar and removing 0 inches, especially when you don't know how much was there to start, how much you removed, or how much is left in the end. While I agree you can't just use the graphs to say the stimulus was a failure, it does make one question the conclusion that 2 inches was removed if they were unable to get the initial status correct.

Well said. This is the problem in a nutshell. Demos are left arguing that without the stimulus package we would have headed into a depression, but that line of logic can never be proven. We could just as easily have spent a couple hundred billion on hookers and blow and argued that without our comprehensive hookers and blow program, things would be even worse. To revise & extend your analogy since we do know our starting point, Obama said there are now six inches of water in the boat due to a hole we can't measure and unless we spend almost eight hundred billion there will be nine inches of water in the boat, but if we do spend it there will be only eight inches of water in the boat. Having appropriated the almost eight hundred billion and actually spent roughly two hundred billion, we now find that there are ten inches of water in the boat, and Obama is saying "Boy, ain't it great that my plan worked!" But we have no way of knowing if without the stimulus there would in fact be eleven inches of water in the boat, or nine, or still ten. The only thing we know for sure is that Obama can't measure how fast the boat is sinking. I don't necessarily fault him for that, as the economy is extremely complicated and I don't know anyone else could have done any better, but continually moving the goal posts as your team gets pushed off the field is meaningless.

 

[woolfe9999]

The only problem is, how do you distinguish between there being initially 11 inches of water in the jar and removing two inches and there initially being 9 inches in the jar and removing 0 inches, especially when you don't know how much was there to start, how much you removed, or how much is left in the end. While I agree you can't just use the graphs to say the stimulus was a failure, it does make one question the conclusion that 2 inches was removed if they were unable to get the initial status correct.

Well, you know you removed two inches when the available objective data says you removed two inches.

http://www.cbo.gov/ftpdocs/106xx/doc...tter.2.2.shtml

There is of course uncertainty in the numbers but any error could cut either way.

Not getting the initial status correct was about projecting the base out in the future. The administration's baseline was pretty much a mainstream economic projection of what unemployment would have been with no government action. It was in the middle of a range of projections from most optimistic to most pessimistic. It turned out the most pessimistic projections were correct, in this particular case. The truth is - very few economists can project employment within a point or even two out 8 months in a volatile environment, and most economists were wrong in this case. Economic projections are complicated and I don't think you can fault the administration for going to the middle of a range of projections.

The best way to understand the fallacy of this argument is to consider the reverse scenario. Suppose the optimistic projections were correct, and instead of 8% unemployment with the stimulus we had 6.5%. If the dems were to claim that the stimulus was entirely responsible for that and that it had performed better than expected, when the real truth was that the private sector baseline had performed better than expected, the dems would be claiming false credit, wouldn't they? Guess what, they probably *would* claim this and they'd be full of shit, committing the same fallacy of confusing the baseline with the actual performance of the stimulus as critics of the stimulus are doing now.

- wolf

 

[mect]

Well, you know you removed two inches when the available objective data says you removed two inches.

http://www.cbo.gov/ftpdocs/106xx/doc...tter.2.2.shtml

There is of course uncertainty in the numbers but any error could cut either way.

Not getting the initial status correct was about projecting the base out in the future. The administration's baseline was pretty much a mainstream economic projection of what unemployment would have been with no government action. It was in the middle of a range of projections from most optimistic to most pessimistic. It turned out the most pessimistic projections were correct, in this particular case. The truth is - very few economists can project employment within a point or even two out 8 months in a volatile environment, and most economists were wrong in this case. Economic projections are complicated and I don't think you can fault the administration for going to the middle of a range of projections.

The best way to understand the fallacy of this argument is to consider the reverse scenario. Suppose the optimistic projections were correct, and instead of 8% unemployment with the stimulus we had 6.5%. If the dems were to claim that the stimulus was entirely responsible for that and that it had performed better than expected, when the real truth was that the private sector baseline had performed better than expected, the dems would be claiming false credit, wouldn't they? Guess what, they probably *would* claim this and they'd be full of shit, committing the same fallacy of confusing the baseline with the actual performance of the stimulus as critics of the stimulus are doing now.

- wolf

Like I said, I agree the graphs don't really prove anything, but, while I'm not an economist, I have a hard time believing that they can really separate the baseline due to the complexity of the system. In other words, I am not convinced that they can really determine they have removed two inches from the data that they have. At least in science, unless you can directly measure the background, I would be very hesitant to claim that a data set that didn't match a simulation was due to the background being off, and would definitely not claim the results support the initial theory. That is my problem with the claims. Essentially, the claims are irrefutable because whatever the market does, they can claim the model was correct. It is assumed to be correct. That to me is not a useful model. That is of course the difficulty with economics is that you can't isolate variable and rigorously test any given theory, but have to compare dissimilar situations and assume they are the same or at least try to predict what effect differences will have. It reminds me of the classic joke told about scientific modeling, "If we assume this elephant is a sphere...".

Anyways, at the end of the day, I must concede to economists, but it does seem that many economists have been critical of the stimulus package at least. Granted, you can find people critical of pretty much anything done in government. I do agree that an initial bailout was necessary, and that a stimulus package was probably helpful, however I do not agree that the money necessarily went to the most beneficial projects. From my own naive perspective, I would agree that the economy is better off than it would have been if nothing at all were done, however, I think that the economy could have been handled better. And a dollar will buy you a burger off the value menu.

 

[her209]

Nominated the first Latina to the SCOTUS.

 

[colonel]

show how republicans say NO and they behave like toddlers with legislation

 

[Patranus]

Nominated the first Latina to the SCOTUS.

If you want to play race politics.

The intent of my original questions was policy matters like health care, not bull shit "made up" stuff like giving a meddle to Harvey Milk or being the first President to use Twitter.

So far we have credit card legislation and a "stimulus" that is still debatable.

 

[woolfe9999]

If you want to play race politics.

The intent of my original questions was policy matters like health care, not bull shit "made up" stuff like giving a meddle to Harvey Milk or being the first President to use Twitter.

So far we have credit card legislation and a "stimulus" that is still debatable.

The Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act
Beginning the process of withrawal from Iraq

- wolf

 

[Budmantom]

He's shown that most of the rightwing really are old racist white people who love teabagging each other.

Doesn't that make them Democrats?

 

[Robor]

Doesn't that make them Democrats?

Your not funny or witty response doesn't even make sense.

 

[Budmantom]

show how republicans say NO and they behave like toddlers with legislation

Who needs Republicans when you have a super majority?, who cares what they do..... the dumb-ass libs have all the numbers yet they haven't got anything done besides whining about Republicans standing in the way.

 

[aphex]

Before I waste my time, do you want to have an honest discussion? If you've already made up your mind I'd rather not bother.

Agreed, no need to feed the troll.

 

[Jiggz]

I had my hopes up there. Your last post had a kernel of logic to it, if what you had said was correct. Instead, you are again repeating the original argument and pretending it hasn't been debunked already.

- wolf

So if even if the unemployment was above 100% the stimulus bill was still a success (as far as your comprehension is concerned) since it was NEVER mentioned the said bill would be a failure if unemployment was above 8%! I see! OK keep reaching up there sweetheart just make sure you do not say "failure"!