If jobs come back this year, how will the right smear Obama?

  • Thread starter Thread starter Guns Guns Guns
  • Start date Start date
\\(())// said:
We know how Bush did on employment.

We know how Bush did on economic growth.

It's history.

But Obama is still in office.

"Doing something about it" means avoiding the errors Bush made; cutting taxes and spending the surplus.
Click to expand...


Right on......seven years of success for Bush, until the congress and Democratic policy took us into the abyss......
 
bravo said:
Right on......seven years of success for Bush, until the congress and Democratic policy took us into the abyss......
Click to expand...


The first major economic initiative pursued by Bush was a massive tax cut for the rich, enacted in June of 2001.

Those with incomes over a million got a tax cut of $18,000—more than 30 times larger than the cut received by the average American.

The inequities were compounded by a second tax cut, in 2003, this one skewed even more heavily toward the rich.

Together these tax cuts, when fully implemented and if made permanent, mean that in 2012 the average reduction for an American in the bottom 20 percent was a scant $45, while those with incomes of more than $1 million saw their tax bills reduced by an average of $162,000.

The Bush administration crowed that the economy grew—by some 16 percent—during its first six years, but the growth helped mainly people who had no need of any help, and failed to help those who need plenty. A rising tide lifted all yachts.

Inequality widened in America, and at a rate not seen in three-quarters of a century. A young male in his 30s during the dark Bush years had an income, adjusted for inflation, that was 12 percent less than what his father made 30 years earlier.

5.3 million more Americans were living in poverty when Bush left office than were living in poverty when Bush became president.

In breathtaking disregard for the most basic rules of fiscal propriety, the Bush administration continued to cut taxes even as it undertook expensive new spending programs and embarked on a financially ruinous “war of choice” in Iraq. A budget surplus of 2.4 percent of gross domestic product (G.D.P.), which greeted Bush as he took office, turned into a deficit.

Agricultural subsidies were doubled between 2002 and 2005. Tax expenditures—the vast system of subsidies and preferences hidden in the tax code—increased more than a quarter. Tax breaks for the president’s friends in the oil-and-gas industry increased by billions and billions of dollars.

During the Bush years the percentage of G.D.P. spent on research and development outside defense and health fell. Little was done about our decaying infrastructure—be it levees in New Orleans or bridges in Minneapolis.

Although it railed against entitlement programs for the needy, the administration enacted the largest increase in entitlements in four decades—the poorly designed Medicare prescription-drug benefit, intended as both an election-season bribe and a sop to the pharmaceutical industry. As internal documents later revealed, the true cost of the measure was hidden from Congress. Meanwhile, the pharmaceutical companies received special favors. To access the new benefits, elderly patients couldn’t opt to buy cheaper medications from Canada or other countries. The law also prohibited the U.S. government, the largest single buyer of prescription drugs, from negotiating with drug manufacturers to keep costs down. As a result, American consumers pay far more for medications than people elsewhere in the developed world.

You’ll still hear some argue that the administration’s tax cuts were meant to stimulate the economy, but this was never true. The bang for the buck—the amount of stimulus per dollar of deficit—was astonishingly low.

Therefore, the job of economic stimulation fell to the Federal Reserve Board, which stepped on the accelerator in a historically unprecedented way, driving interest rates down to 1 percent.

In real terms, taking inflation into account, interest rates actually dropped to negative 2 percent. The predictable result was a consumer spending spree.

Looked at another way, Bush’s own fiscal irresponsibility fostered irresponsibility in everyone else. Credit was shoveled out the door, and subprime mortgages were made available to anyone this side of life support. Credit-card debt mounted to a whopping $900 billion by the summer of 2007. “Qualified at birth” became the drunken slogan of the Bush era. American households took advantage of the low interest rates, signed up for new mortgages with “teaser” initial rates, and went to town on the proceeds.

All of this spending made the economy look better for a while; the president could (and did) boast about the economic statistics. But the consequences for many families would become apparent within a few years, when interest rates rose and mortgages proved impossible to repay. The president undoubtedly hoped the reckoning would come sometime after 2008.

http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2007/12/bush200712



 
Onceler said:
It's funny how literal you guys are w/ time. Bravo always makes this argument, as well. Bush was actually good w/ the economy, because the economy was good until the very end of his tenure.

That's like saying Enron's management was exceptional right up until the day they collapsed.
Click to expand...

doesn't really matter......Obama was handed a bad economy and then he turned it into a really bad economy......if he had done something to make anything better there might be some reason to tolerate him for four more years.....as it is he's stuck campaigning on a "give me four more years to do what I haven't started doing yet" platform.......
 
Onceler said:
You sure did. Your first knee-jerk reaction was to defend the guy - you were probably "jazzed" about him.

Then, when you realized how untenable his position was, you backed off. But it was too late to save face.

You love Republicans.
Click to expand...

what difference does it make.....whichever candidate we end up with, he only needs to beat Obama......
 
\\(())// said:
George Bush left the White House with a dismal economic record. By almost every measure — GDP growth, jobs, median incomes, financial-market performance — he stacks up as probably the least-successful President on the economic front since Herbert Hoover. ​
Click to expand...
would that make him the least successful president before Obama?......​
 
A far better title for this thread would have a capital 'J' and an 's' on 'come'. It might confuse the loony evangelists though!
 
I'd be perfectly happy with the Santorum rocket or Gingrich rocket as well.......as for the failed Bush policies.....well, they look pretty good after three years of failed Obama policies......
 
PostmodernProphet said:
I'd be perfectly happy with the Santorum rocket or Gingrich rocket as well.......as for the failed Bush policies.....well, they look pretty good after three years of failed Obama policies......
Click to expand...

Only to an idiot.

Between March 2006 and March 2007 personal-bankruptcy rates soared more than 60 percent. As families went into bankruptcy, more and more of them came to understand who had won and who had lost as a result of the president’s 2005 bankruptcy bill, which made it harder for individuals to discharge their debts in a reasonable way. The lenders that had pressed for “reform” had been the clear winners, gaining added leverage and protections for themselves; people facing financial distress got the shaft.


China alone holds more than $1 trillion in public and private American I.O.U.’s. Cumulative borrowing from abroad during the six years of the Bush administration amounts to some $5 trillion.

http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2007/12/bush200712
 
\\(())// said:
PiMP is riding the Romney Rocket.

Romney is offering more failed Bush policies.
Click to expand...
That's the problem I have with Romney. I think Romney is a very competent and experienced chief executive in both the private and public sector but if he's saddled with a far right wing agenda by folks like PiMP, Falias, Dweebway, Pavo and the rest of the right wing lunatic fringe how can he be trusted to govern competently and in the peoples interest? I have serious questions about Romney in this regard.

I'm looking at this Republican primary as a possibly a comeback by the Rockefeller Republicans and the party finally distancing themselves from these extremist and going back to being the party that governs competently. One can only hope.
 
PostmodernProphet said:
I'd be perfectly happy with the Santorum rocket or Gingrich rocket as well.......as for the failed Bush policies.....well, they look pretty good after three years of failed Obama policies......
Click to expand...
Only if your a moron of staggering proportions. Keep drinking the Kool-Aid pal. It was Bush who got us into this hole. It was Bush's combination of being asleep at the wheel, unwilingness or inability to enforce the law, his taking a marginal electoral victory as a rubber stamp approval for a far right wing agenda for our nation, his asinine xenophobic cowboy over reach in foreign affairs, his out right deceiving and lying our nation into an immoral foreign war, that put this country into the hole it's been in.

As for failed policies. Obama saved our financial institutions, averted a Great Depression, saved our auto industry, began modernizing our archaic and inadequate health care system, ended the immoral war in Iraq and found and killed Osama bin Ladin which his predecessor failed to do for 7 years and has steered out nation back into economic growth and employment gains after saving this nation from the Bush recession.

If that's you're idea of failure then thank fucking God for Obama's failures!!!
 
Mott the Hoople said:
Only if your a moron of staggering proportions. Keep drinking the Kool-Aid pal. It was Bush who got us into this hole. It was Bush's combination of being asleep at the wheel, unwilingness or inability to enforce the law, his taking a marginal electoral victory as a rubber stamp approval for a far right wing agenda for our nation, his asinine xenophobic cowboy over reach in foreign affairs, his out right deceiving and lying our nation into an immoral foreign war, that put this country into the hole it's been in.

As for failed policies. Obama saved our financial institutions, averted a Great Depression, saved our auto industry, began modernizing our archaic and inadequate health care system, ended the immoral war in Iraq and found and killed Osama bin Ladin which his predecessor failed to do for 7 years and has steered out nation back into economic growth and employment gains after saving this nation from the Bush recession.

If that's you're idea of failure then thank fucking God for Obama's failures!!!
Click to expand...

you are truly a kool aid drinking hack. it was all bush's fault, but obama saved us. right...bush didn't bailout the banks and bush never bailed out the auto companies....

LOL
 
Mott the Hoople said:
Only if your a moron of staggering proportions. Keep drinking the Kool-Aid pal. It was Bush who got us into this hole. It was Bush's combination of being asleep at the wheel, unwilingness or inability to enforce the law, his taking a marginal electoral victory as a rubber stamp approval for a far right wing agenda for our nation, his asinine xenophobic cowboy over reach in foreign affairs, his out right deceiving and lying our nation into an immoral foreign war, that put this country into the hole it's been in.

As for failed policies. Obama saved our financial institutions, averted a Great Depression, saved our auto industry, began modernizing our archaic and inadequate health care system, ended the immoral war in Iraq and found and killed Osama bin Ladin which his predecessor failed to do for 7 years and has steered out nation back into economic growth and employment gains after saving this nation from the Bush recession.

If that's you're idea of failure then thank fucking God for Obama's failures!!!
Click to expand...

I agree with everything you stated apart from the if in "Only if your a moron of staggering proportions"
 
Mott the Hoople said:
That's the problem I have with Romney. I think Romney is a very competent and experienced chief executive in both the private and public sector but if he's saddled with a far right wing agenda by folks like PiMP, Falias, Dweebway, Pavo and the rest of the right wing lunatic fringe how can he be trusted to govern competently and in the peoples interest? I have serious questions about Romney in this regard.

I'm looking at this Republican primary as a possibly a comeback by the Rockefeller Republicans and the party finally distancing themselves from these extremist and going back to being the party that governs competently. One can only hope.
Click to expand...

I have this "far right wing agenda" called living within your means.......and I remember Rockefeller very well.....Rockefeller republicans were the reason we needed a Reagan and everyone should hope that type of Republican is gone forever........
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top