[speakeasy]

(09-28-2011 01:52 PM)Pusscrook Wrote:  

I feel bad for him as well, but it is what is . If the economy doesn't do a 180 damn near , it's over.

Granted, his predecessor left him a nice little gift-box with wonderful gifts of shit, like, 2 wars that were not paid for, medicaid drug prescription bill that was fucked, and an economic crisis that was only rivaled by the depression of 1929. That would have been a lot for any President to deal with. I am sure once he understood the facts, he didn't fuck Michelle for a month.

Now where he fucked himself was in trying to shake up time tested institutions(banks,insurance companies,oil/gas companies, wall street, etc.) very early on, and did not understand( nor was taught) that you can't just force feed your shit down the throats of people who move the economy along. His intentions were honorable but , that's not how the game is played. Spoon feeding these ideas to those that manipulate your economy was his best bet. I think he got some bad advice on what was priority. WHy would you tackle health care, burn up all that damn valuable time, and the economy is tanking? Why would you focus on EPA regulations that would drive up the cost of energy and goods and services when the economy is tanking? Why would you focus on "don't ask don't tell", when the economy is tanking? WHy would you focus on "green jobs" and renewable energy when the economy is tanking? Again, all these things( and many more) are honorable, but the timing was completely fucked I believe. "It's the economy stupid".

I don't see this as being any kind of referendum based on his race, or his personality. If race was the issue , Herman "monkey face" Cain wouldn't stand a chance with the tea party. They love him. This is about food, rent, mortgage, and every day living. If he could get that turned around, he would be in good shape. I was looking @ the real clear politics polling data and he's holding steady @ an approval rating of around 43%, but that's with all the shit he's been thru ,so , I think if he got that monkey off his back he would win easily.

My pick: Romney ( if the economy stays exactly the way it is come election time)

I pretty much agree with everything you said. Obama himself admits that he made a mistake in tackling health care so early. He spent a lot of political capital on that and has yet to get it back.

I do think Obama was focused primarily on the economy, but people will disagree with what he did. Some people say TARP stopped us from going into the second Great Depression, some say it was just a massive waste of tax dollars and the banks should've been allowed to fail at the whim of the free market(the Ron Paul position). Honestly, I really don't know. I was always torn on that issue. But it does look as though his bailout of the auto-industry was a success. My dad is a retired auto-worker on pension and was scared shitless that GM was going to go under and he'd lose his pension. So Obama earned my dad's vote for 2012. The money was paid back and the big three are now making money again.

I think the lack of jobs is due to the lack of demand in the economy. The globalized economy, the rise of Asia, the free flow of industry to markets with cheaper labor and the downward pressure on wages that places on the middle class, and low interest rates for too long. This was bound to blow up in our face. We masked it over for many years by making the average guy feel wealthy with a stock bubble in the 90s and then the housing bubble in the Bush years. But now that these things are popped, we see the emperor has no clothes. This is the real economy we've had all along that the bullshit and funny money were masking. This is the dead mouse that the cat delivered to Obama's door in '08. I think his role the past few years hasn't been so much creating jobs(which is totally unrealistic given prevailing conditions), but trying to stop us from losing them at an even higher rate than we otherwise would be by using stimulus programs. Even upon his taking of office, when you looked at the population growth, the number of new college grads coming into the workforce, you could clearly see that even if Obama did a DECENT job, there's just no fucking way in hell he could've created enough jobs to deal with the growth as well as the backlog of people who feel off the stats because they gave up looking. The true unemployment rate is likely about double the official number. Even if not a single job was lost, we'd still be going backward because you need to add something like 100,000 jobs a month just to keep up with population growth alone.

I realize that ultimately people will blame the president if things are going bad, but I think we need to realize that this problem is far bigger than any one man and in a globalized economy, what China does to their yuan has a direct impact on some factory guy in Ohio, and we can't exactly tell China what to do. It took us decades of bad policies to get to this position and it might take just as long to get out. Or perhaps we simply won't get out, period. Maybe this shitty economy is just the new normal. In places like Spain, France and Italy, having 10%+ unemployment is pretty much the norm. They're used to it. If they have 9% unemployment they're doing good. Maybe that's finally caught up to us as we lose our sole financial superpower status and have to compete with Asia. It was a good run for the last 50 years and the party may now be over.