First,
Joseph Siglitz on the economyGiven the complexity of the economic system, the difficulties in predicting how expectations will be altered, and the pervasive irrationalities in the market, there is no way the impact of any economic policy could be ascertained with certainty. There may be some circumstances in which the effect of monetary policy can be accurately gauged. But recessions of this depth come only once every 75 years. What is true in normal times may be of little relevance now, especially as central banks engage in unusual measures such as QE.
Many economists warned it would come to this, but if the media, corporations and country didn't take them seriously, why are they surprised that the media and corporations are pushing back hard against this administration?
The mortgage crisis is a relatively
new phenomenon and the solution is not going to be a quick or easy fix.
The greedy corporations have
no intention of
cooperating unless they get their way.
President Obama has spent the past 20 months trying to put the country back on the right track. He's being attacked by Republicans, who are accusing him of causing (not failing to address but causing) the crisis. From the left, he's being accused of appeasing them.
The worst recession since the Great Depression is the result of decades of deregulation and failed policies. Yet President Obama is expected to fix a completely broken economy in less than two years.
Well, the President gets praise for doing what had to be done. This was a time for urgent action, not grandstanding.
Al Franken<...>
But let's remember how we got here. The month Barack Obama was sworn in we lost 750,000 jobs in this country. With all due respect to the President, I think his analogy that the economy was a car in a ditch when he took office is just a little too static. Here's my analogy, which, in my opinion, is both more kinetic and, frankly, far more accurate.
When the President took office, not only had the car gone into a ditch, the car had flipped over and was rolling down a steep embankment. We, the American people, were in the back seat, and the Bush Administration had removed all the seat belts, so we were all flying around the interior of this car as it was rolling and flipping and careening down this steep embankment, headed to a 2,000 foot cliff. And at the bottom of that cliff were jagged rocks. And alligators.
Now, at noon on January 20th, 2009, as the car was careening toward the cliff, George W. Bush jumped out of the car.
President Obama somehow managed to dive in through the window, take the wheel and get control of the thing just inches before it went over the precipice. Then, he and Congress starting pushing this wreck back up the embankment. Now you can't push a car up an embankment as fast as it careens down the embankment, especially if some people are trying to push against you. But we got it going in the right direction. And slowly we've gotten ourselves up the embankment, out of the ditch and onto the shoulder of the road.
There. That's what happened.
<...>
The stimulus worked, as many have indicated, including
Paul Krugman, though he continues to say it
was too small.
The fact is that the stimulus worked:
The White House White Board on job trendsYet from day one of his Presidency, Republicans have been determined to throw up obstacles with the goal of seeing President Obama fail.
With enough Senate Republicans to block bills, as they did with the
DISCLOSE Act and attempted to do with many others, did anyone really believe that this Congress was going to run Democrats' way or the highway? There is no escaping some compromise.
The issues are critical and Americans are suffering, and Republicans don't seem to care.
In early summer of this year, Republicans blocked unemployment benefits seven times. Via
Senator Kerry (July)
<...>
“This vote was long overdue for laid-off workers hanging on by their fingernails. It shouldn’t have taken six weeks to get here and two and a half million workers should never have gone this long without unemployment insurance. It took herculean legislative skill by Harry Reid to finally break the logjam and clear the way for passage.
“We’ve got to change this atmosphere in Washington. It’s destructive, it’s poisonous, and it’s lousy for the middle class Americans who bore the brunt of the Wall Street meltdown and future generations which are on the hook for the national debt piled up the last decade. I’ve cast tough votes to tackle deficits and balance the federal budget, and I’m confident we won’t hear the same cries of fiscal austerity next week from the Minority Leader when he will urge his caucus to extend the Bush tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans at a cost of trillions to the national debt. We’ll never fix our economy and address America’s long term economic footing if we don’t insist on an honest debate and a real dialogue about these issues.”
The Emergency Unemployment Compensation program expired at the end of May 2010. Today’s vote extends this program retroactively through November 2010. Approximately, 90,000 claimants in Massachusetts were due to exhaust benefits without this extension. This is the seventh time Senate Republicans have voted nearly unanimously against this extension.
<...>
Again, the President and Congressional Democrats had to compromise to get that passed.
From FDR through today, every President and Congress compromised.
Even Bush, who some now appear to admire for allegedly getting things done, had to compromise, which is why his tax cuts were never made permanent.
Still, despite Republican obstructionism, President Obama, nearing the halfway mark in his first term, has a tremendous record of achievements (updated):
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