Obama Oversees Worst Postwar Economic Recovery
August 18, 2012 21 Comments
While President Obama is talking about Mitt Romney’s tax returns, Toure Neblett is accusing (then issuing a sheepish apology) Romney of engaging in the “niggerization” of Obama and the conservative press laugh’s at Joe Biden and speculates about Hillary replacing him, the people are worried about the economy. Our economic recovery is the weakest since World War Two. Our 8.3% unemployment rate is the highest this late in a recovery in history. GDP from the second quarter of 2009 to the second quarter of 2012 grew only 6.8%. The average GDP over the same time span in all other postwar economic recoveries is 15.5%. This is by far the worst economic recovery in history. No wonder Obama wants to talk tax returns rather than his job performance.
People are hurting. You can see it in consumer spending. It nearly mirrors GDP, consumer spending increased in the first three years of the recovery is 6.5%. The average of all other postwar recoveries is an increase of 14%. Income has decreased 0.8% since Obama took office, largely because salaries haven’t increased at the rate of inflation. Nearly 5.2 million Americans have been out of work six months or longer. Our economy lost 8.8 million jobs and have only replaced 4.6 million of them. The Reagan recovery in the 80′s saw 2.8 million jobs lost in the recession but 9.8 million created in the recovery. That’s an increase of 7 million jobs thanks to Reagan’s policies. We’re still waiting for the Obama administration to create conditions for 54% of the jobs lost to be created again. No wonder consumer spending is down.
Obama’s economic policies have failed, which is why he’s talking tax returns and engaging in other smoke and mirrors tactics. His stimulus failed to get the economy roaring again. The new regulations he created have hampered businesses and slowed recovery. Obamacare has done the same thing, creating uncertainty and costing the economy new hires. He’s also created tax uncertainty by refusing to extend the Bush tax cuts. Twice during his administration we’ve had massive tax uncertainty and it has hurt and is hurting the economy. Even Obama’s alleged success in bailing out the auto industry cost taxpayers $25 billion while GM is on the road to bankruptcy again because it’s losing market share. Obama’s bailout only put a band aid on the problem.
Even among Obama’s core constituency there are massive economic problems. Black unemployment has hovered around and above 14% for years. Black youths, particularly males, have massive unemployment well above 25%. This perhaps explains Biden’s attempt to scare blacks with his chains comment and Toure Neblett’s “niggerization” comment. Other than the fact that Obama is black, what reason do blacks have to vote for Obama? His policies have failed. They’re worried about black turnout, which should be no surprise given black unemployment and the complete destruction of the black middle class. Expect more racially charged comments to come out of the Obama campaign and its media surrogates.
Romney is not the savior of the economy. He has a modest plan and a wealth of economic knowledge. What we know is that in the last four years government hasn’t created conditions which are conducive to robust economic recovery. Obama’s policies simply haven’t worked. In just over two months we have an opportunity to make a change. In 1980 Reagan asked the country if they were better off than they were four years ago. It would be wise for Romney to ask us this question again. If the answer is yes, by all means vote for Obama. If the answer is no, Romney offers an alternative economic vision that includes limited governmental growth and lower taxes. Obama’s policies haven’t worked and he’s run out of ideas. We need a change.
About Steven
There isn’t much I can add to your post. We should all take a step back, look at the climate in America, and ask some hard questions. If we look at this honestly, the answer should be obvious.
Look what I found at your link to Forbes: http://www.forbes.com/sites/joannmuller/2012/08/16/leadership-not-another-bailout-will-fix-general-motors/
You know what would help GM? Higher CEO pay and a tax cut for all the executives.
The company has lost billions in stock value and you’re worried about a few million dollars in alleged overcompensation. The fact is that when GM loses marketshare, they’re losing the ability to make money because they have a business that is too large and one that overcompensates its union employees. GM may be earning a short term profit, which they aren’t paying back to the taxpayers. But there’s a reason why their stock price isn’t going up. There are problems on the horizon that could have been taken care of via a regular bankruptcy.
I really just had two points: 1) opinions differ on the future of GM, which you shockingly(!) don’t seem to acknowledge and 2) more pay to, and tax cuts, for rich people (a la Romney/Ryan) isn’t going to fix anything in the micro so it ain’t fixing anything in the macro.
Anytime you’re talking about future performance of a company there are differing opinions. That said, it’s hard to ignore the drop in stock price which suggests that those generally in the know are concerned about GM’s future.
Are Romney/Ryan really offering tax cuts or are they really just offering, for the most part, to make the Bush cuts permanent? If it’s the latter, which it largely is, we’re not talking about tax cuts at all but rather an extension of the current rate indefinitely. Keeping the current rate isn’t a cut.
Wow…step away for 48 hours and the thread goes crrrrraaaaAAAAAaazy!!!
“Are Romney/Ryan really offering tax cuts…”? Yes, yes, yes, a thousand times yes. There are myriad quotes out there from Ryan (and about the Ryan plan) stressing a lowering of rates and a ‘broadening of the base’ (i.e. making poor people pay more). Romney is consistently (at least in this incarnation) talking about reducing taxes. From mittromney.com (for crying out loud): “…marginal rates must be brought down…” and “…Make permanent, across-the-board 20 percent cut in marginal rates.”
You can cut marginal rates without cutting taxes you know. Get rid of any number of deductions and the lowering of rates won’t amount to very much.
“You can cut marginal rates without cutting taxes you know.” Huh? Do you mean without cutting revenues? That is a very different thing than reducing rates, which is explicitly called for by Romney/Ryan.
I understand that there is talk of eliminating loop holes and deductions and such, but Romney/Ryan dodge that entirely by a) offering no specifics and b) punting it to Congress. Ultimately, the ideology of the right is absolutely to shrink size and scope of the federal government – there isn’t room for increasing the total dollars going to the government in that ideology.
That was a poorly worded sentence on my part. You can cut marginal rates but each individual taxpayer can pay the same as they did previously by closing loopholes and eliminating various deductions.
I don’t think conservatives deny that we need to cut the size and scope of the Federal government. Having said that, every time taxes are cut revenue increases because economic output increases. This happened in the 20′s, 60′s, 80′s and 2000′s. As for the Romney/Ryan plan, those two aren’t going to cut the size or scope of the Federal government. At best Romney/Ryan will hit the pause button on Federal growth. But they aren’t going to cut much of anything. Romney is a moderate and Ryan for all talk since Obama was elected about fiscal responsibility, voted for the Rx drug plan, TARP and the auto bailout. He’s hardly a wild eyed government cutter.
The title is misleading here- there is no postwar economy. In 2012 we are spending upwards of 900 billion dollars on defense. If the war on terror never ends, there can be no recovery.
By post-war I mean Word War Two, which is the commonly accepted understanding of postwar in an historical economic sense. Obviously there have been other wars (Korea, Vietnam, War on Terror etc) but none of them have reached the level of WWII. In fact, none of them are even close.
If you have not already done so, I’m inviting you to read my first blog…at Word Press
Hello world! It’s taken me a while to get started here…
http://wp.me/p1x2UC-1
Your position is simplistic, unsupported by facts and relies upon the American “myth” of a great prosperity once enjoyed prior to the government’s interference with individual autonomy and initiative. By Freud’s account, conscious autonomy is a charade. “We are lived,” as he puts it, and yet we don’t see it as such. Indeed, Freud suggests that to be human is to rebel against that vision — the truth. We tend to see ourselves as self-determining, self-conscious agents in all that we decide and do, and we cling to that image. But why? Why do we resist the truth? Why do we wish — strain, strive, against the grain of reality — to be autonomous individuals, and see ourselves as such?
Perhaps Freud is too cynical regarding conscious autonomy, but he is right to question our presumption to it. He is right to suggest that we typically — wrongly — ignore the extent to which we are determined by unknown forces, and overestimate our self-control. The path to happiness for Freud, or some semblance of it in his stormy account of the psyche, involves accepting our basic condition. But why do we presume individual agency in the first place? Why do we insist on it stubbornly, irrationally, often recklessly?
I was reminded of Freud’s paradox by a poignant article in The Times a few months back, which described a Republican leaning district in Minnesota, and its constituents’ conflicted desire to be self-reliant (“Even Critics of the Safety Net Increasingly Depend on It,” Feb. 11). The article cited a study from Dartmouth political science professor Dean Lacy, which revealed that, though Republicans call for deep cuts to the safety net, their districts rely more on government support than their Democratic counterparts.
In Chisago County, Minn., The Times’s reporters spoke with residents who supported the Tea Party and its proposed cuts to federal spending, even while they admitted they could not get by without government support. Tea Party aficionados, and many on the extreme right of the Republican party for that matter, are typically characterized as self-sufficient middle class folk, angry about sustaining the idle poor with their tax dollars. Chisago County revealed a different aspect of this anger: economically struggling Americans professing a robust individualism and self-determination, frustrated with their failures to achieve that ideal.
Why the stubborn insistence on self-determination, in spite of the facts? One might say there is something profoundly American in this. It’s our fierce individualism shining through. Residents of Chisago County are clinging to notions of past self-reliance before the recession, before the welfare state. It’s admirable in a way. Alternately, it evokes the delusional autonomy of Freud’s poor ego.
Leif Parsons
These people, like many across the nation, rely on government assistance, but pretend they don’t. They even resent the government for their reliance. If they looked closely though, they’d see that we are all thoroughly saturated with government assistance in this country: farm subsidies that lower food prices for us all, mortgage interest deductions that disproportionately favor the rich, federal mortgage guarantees that keep interest rates low, a bloated Department of Defense that sustains entire sectors of the economy and puts hundreds of thousands of people to work. We can hardly fathom the depth of our dependence on government, and pretend we are bold individualists instead.
As we are in an election year, the persistence of this delusion has manifested itself politically, particularly as a foundation in the Republican Party ideology — from Ron Paul’s insistence during the primaries that the government shouldn’t intervene to help the uninsured even when they are deathly ill, to Rick Santorum’s maligning of public schools, to Mitt Romney’s selection of Paul Ryan as a running mate. There is no doubt that radical individualism will remain a central selling point of their campaign. Ryan’s signature work, his proposal for the federal budget, calls for drastic cuts to Medicaid, Medicare, Pell grants and job training programs, among others. To no surprise, as The New Yorker revealed in a recent profile of Ryan, the home district that supports him is boosted by considerable government largesse.
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Of course the professed individualists have an easy time cutting services for the poor. But this is misguided. There are many counties across the nation that, like Chisago County, might feel insulated from the trials of the destitute. Perhaps this is because they are able to ignore the poverty in their midst, or because they are rather homogeneous and geographically removed from concentrations of poverty, like urban ghettos. But the fate of the middle class counties and urban ghettos is entwined. When the poor are left to rot in their misery, the misery does not stay contained. It harms us all. The crime radiates, the misery offends, it debases the whole. Individuals, much less communities, cannot be insulated from it.
Thanks to a decades-long safety net, we have forgotten the trials of living without it. This is why, the historian Tony Judt argued, it’s easy for some to speak fondly of a world without government: we can’t fully imagine or recall what it’s like. We can’t really appreciate the horrors Upton Sinclair witnessed in the Chicago slaughterhouses before regulation, or the burden of living without Social Security and Medicare to look forward to. Thus, we can entertain nostalgia for a time when everyone pulled his own weight, bore his own risk, and was the master of his destiny. That time was a myth. But the notion of self-reliance is also a fallacy.
Spinoza greatly influenced Freud, and he adds a compelling insight we would do well to reckon with. Spinoza also questioned the human pretense to autonomy. Men believe themselves free, he said, merely because they are conscious of their volitions and appetites, but they are wholly determined. In fact, Spinoza claimed — to the horror of his contemporaries —that we are all just modes of one substance, “God or Nature” he called it, which is really the same thing. Individual actions are no such thing at all; they are expressions of another entity altogether, which acts through us unwittingly. To be human, according to Spinoza, is to be party to a confounding existential illusion — that human individuals are independent agents — which exacts a heavy emotional and political toll on us. It is the source of anxiety, envy, anger — all the passions that torment our psyche — and the violence that ensues. If we should come to see our nature as it truly is, if we should see that no “individuals” properly speaking exist at all, Spinoza maintained, it would greatly benefit humankind.
There is no such thing as a discrete individual, Spinoza points out. This is a fiction. The boundaries of ‘me’ are fluid and blurred. We are all profoundly linked in countless ways we can hardly perceive. My decisions, choices, actions are inspired and motivated by others to no small extent. The passions, Spinoza argued, derive from seeing people as autonomous individuals responsible for all the objectionable actions that issue from them. Understanding the interrelated nature of everyone and everything is the key to diminishing the passions and the havoc they wreak.
In this, Spinoza and President Obama seem to concur: we’re all in this together. We are not the sole authors of our destiny, each of us; our destinies are entangled — messily, unpredictably. Our cultural demands of individualism are too extreme. They are constitutionally irrational, Spinoza and Freud tell us, and their potential consequences are disastrous. Thanks to our safety net, we live in a society that affirms the dependence and interdependence of all. To that extent, it affirms a basic truth of our nature. We forsake it at our own peril.
Freud? Really? The position of the Tea Party has never been no government. Perhaps some of the more radical Ron Paul libertarian types might argue for that, but no one else will. Government serves a purpose but it’s much more limited than what Obama and the Democrats want.
Government is not the most important, most central body in our lives. Church and family are the closest social groups individuals are part of. A vast bureaucracy in Washington is not supposed be the central focus of our lives, it is not what we are closest to.
Well I wonder who employs more? The government or the church? Being employed makes a pretty close relationship.How many Republicans are so dedicated to limited government that they would vote for a Republican candidate who promised to shut down the very same government program or operation from which they derived their livelihood? Damn few. Self interest trumps any political ideology. Republicans see their economic self interest being served by limiting programs that help the needy so that the truly greedy can keep more for themselves. Pretty short-sided if you ask me. Democrats of course, vote for their self interest too. Democrats need health insurance, food assistance, housing assistance, college tuition assistance and on and on. So self interest is the mother of all politics. Ideology is just an excuse for justifying the greed of the haves against the have nots. Poor people worry about paying the rent to avoid being evicted onto the streets while the wealthier worry about the prestige of their neighborhood. Radically different outlooks on the world. Radically diferent political needs. Anyone who thinks that ideology drives politics in America is a fool.
It took me several years of study to put together my ideas about Freud and Spinoza. I am so glad that you could dismiss it with just a few key strokes. Your mind must be as quick as the speed of light. Thank you so much for your thoughtful response!
And yes, making a distinction between the Republicans and the Obama Democrats on the role of government is of such a magnitude that one might mistakenly attribute it to Voltaire or John Quincy Adams.Bravo!
Says the person who has dismissed everything I’ve ever written with a few key strokes. What’s good for the goose is good for the gander.
Not true at all for me. But in your world its a good way for you to justify your closed mindedness.
And so all will be deaf, dumb and blind in your world.
The problem is that Obama is effectively overseeing the weakest recovery since FDR — who got 4 terms.
While you may disagree, FDR and Obama weren’t (aren’t) going to be held responsible for the crash that preceded their arrival.
I’m not saying either one of them deserves(d) multiple terms. Although I would agree that both of their predecessors should get a great deal of responsibility for why we got saddled with them.
I think it’s very difficult to compare the election of 1936 to today. I don’t think we can discount FDR being the first President to take advantage of speaking on the radio. Prior to FDR it was rare indeed for Americans to hear the voice of their President. Couple that with his political WPA and he easily won re-election. Obama doesn’t have any of this working for him plus he’s got a country that’s not only politically divided but very much capable of getting information online.
Mitt Romney would handle the situation much better. Actually, that’s one of the reasons why I think that the Romney/Ryan ticket seems to be a better choice not only for the U.S. but for my country as well. Most Canadians were disappointed when President Obama didn’t approve the Keystone pipeline project and thus destroyed a promising prospect on the way to the economic recovery in both countries. More importantly, the interconnection between Canada and the U.S. is benefical not only for our national economy as a whole but also for the economic development in Canada’s regions which could best be seen when the recovery in the U.S. motor vehicle market positively influenced Toronto’s leading automotive industry. However, I’m afraid that Obama’s decisions could threaten such positive economic development and worsen the relationship between Canada and the U.S.
Canada is our biggest trading partner and there’s no doubt Canada would be better off with Romney in the White House. Obama has distanced himself from all of our traditional allies, Canada included. Not only will Romney approve the Keystone XL Pipeline, he’ll have closer relations with Ottawa which can’t be anything but good for both the US and Canada.