As most of our readers know, I’m squarely in the Obama camp for the Presidential election. This isn’t because I agree with everything he has done or pledges to do in office – far from it – Obama has disappointed me on many, many issues to the point where my defense of him has been difficult to justify. I’m supporting Obama because generally speaking I believe he is tilting the country in the right direction, particularly from an economic perspective, whereas the Republicans would do irreparable damage to the economy and gut vital social programs that are a lifeline to many Americans.

I believe it is important that Obama is reelected next week so that the country can continue it’s (painfully) slow path to economic recovery, pursue a more nuanced and thoughtful foreign policy, and preserve the function of government.

However, Obama has shown a history of extreme willingness to compromise with Republicans on sacred progressive issues that should be defended tooth and nail, and he needs to be watched carefully in his next term for backdoor deals with Republicans that do damage to programs like social security and welfare. Obama has long talked about a ‘Grand Bargain’ with Republicans – a tax increase on the rich in return for cuts across the board for social programs. In his own words the deal would be “$2.50 worth of cuts for every dollar in spending”. In an interesting discussion on The Real News, Professor William K. Black the former Executive Director of the Institute for Fraud Prevention warns the Left that it must hold Obama to account should he be reelected. Here’s Black discussing what the ‘Grand Bargain’ would actually mean:

This grand bargain is: we will weight this much more heavily towards killing social programs, or at least cutting them back significantly and raising taxes on the rich.Now, that’s got most of the attention from progressives, but note two other things that he was saying. One, he’s talking about austerity. He’s talking about following exactly the kind of model that Europe has followed that put them gratuitously back into recession, and indeed into a Great Depression……

You tell me what kind of grand bargain would put the economy back in recession, cost us jobs, increase the deficit, and begin the process of gutting Social Security. That’s not a grand bargain. That is a complete surrender. That is the great betrayal. And that is what Obama is telling us he intends to seek.

Obama is obviously betting that ensuring government has a more tax revenue coming in is better for him politically than funding social programs – and he is probably right. Raising revenues and cutting social programs could cut the deficit significantly, leading to a far safer political position for the Democrats. But cutting social programs in weak economic times and throwing the most vulnerable people into severe poverty is not only immoral, but economically counterproductive in the long run. The truth is that while the debt is an important issue, it takes second place to job creation and robust welfare system in times of economic uncertainty. Europe is deeply in debt and in the midst of a great depression, and it is cutting government spending as a solution. The results have been spectacularly bad with continued mass unemployment no end in sight.

Obama, in infuriating fashion, has already laid out the terms of the deal before negotiations have begun – and as always, he has started from a conservative position leaving him little room to maneuver. The Republicans won’t take the deal and they’ll force more an more concessions until it looks like a standard piece of Right wing social engineering; continued tax cuts for the rich and massive cuts to welfare programs for everyone else.

There’s no doubt a big bargain is needed over the next four years if the country is to pull itself out of the mess it’s in, but slashing the already underfunded welfare system shouldn’t even be on the table. You don’t negotiate from your opponents own perspective in the beginning if you want to achieve tangible results. It seems Obama hasn’t learned from the past, so it’s up to the Left to force him to.

Subscribe

Ben Cohen's feed

Enter email below:

By Bob Cesca: In a speech filled with misleading statements and nostalgic lines about how wonderful life used to be before President Obama was inaugurated, the single-most ridiculous line from Mitt Romney’s acceptance speech Thursday night was this:

“…Every president since the Great Depression who came before the American people asking for a second term could look back at the last four years and say with satisfaction, ‘You are better off than you were four years ago.’ Except Jimmy Carter. And except this president… This president cannot tell us that you’re better off today than when he took office.”

He absolutely can, and he should!

Yes, I agree that there are still people who are hurting. Unemployment remains unacceptably high, and, ultimately, the depth of the Great Recession is still playing itself out in the difficult task of mitigating it and returning the economy to a place of steady prosperity.

But when it comes to the question of whether we’re better off, there’s no doubt that everyone is better off now than we were when, for example, the economy was collapsing with no end in sight; when we were engaged in two wars with no end in sight; when healthcare was less affordable; when mutual funds, IRAs and 401(k) retirement plans were losing value as the stock market crashed; and so forth. More of this presently.

By the way, this is a risky question for Romney since a Republican president with a strikingly similar economic agenda was in office four years ago, and he was navigating his way around a worsening economic freefall. Why would Romney even dare to bring this up? I’m sure the question the president and the Democrats will be asking this coming week in Charlotte is whether we should continue the policies that ended the disaster and sparked an economic recovery, or whether we should revert back to the policies that were in place prior to the recession — policies that John McCain and Sarah Palin were proposing in 2008 and which Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan are proposing today. On one hand we have an administration that’s responsible for policies that have proven to be effective given the dire circumstances, and on the other hand we’re hearing about Republican boilerplate policies that absolutely failed.

So how effective were the policies of the Obama administration?

Insofar as the Republicans have blamed the president for everything that’s bad, it’s only fair then to credit him for the things that have significantly improved, and many of the following things are, in fact, a direct result of the president’s actions.

1. Several weeks after the president was inaugurated and before any of his policies had taken effect, the Dow Jones Industrial Average reached its bottom: 6,626. This was the low point in a slide that began as far back as October 2007 when the Dow surpassed 14,000. From that day onward, it dropped. Since its low point and under the watch of the Obama administration, however, the Dow has climbed back to 13,090 as of Friday. That’s a massive recovery in just three-and-a-half years, and this resurgence began in earnest just after the president signed the dreaded stimulus, which pumped over $700 billion back into the economy when no one else, from consumers to corporations, were prepared to do the same.

2. When the president took office, the gross domestic product — the pulse of the American economy — was contracting by 8%. In other words, the last time the economy was shrinking to this degree was 1947. In early 2009, no one knew how deep the contraction was, and we’re still discovering the true depth of the crisis. Regardless, by the third quarter of 2009, the economy was growing again. To this day, it continues to grow by around 1-2% per quarter.

3. The economy hemorrhaged 800,000 jobs during the month the president took office. 700,000 the month after. 750,000 in March of 2009. The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (the stimulus) was signed in that same month, March, and following the measure, fewer and fewer Americans were fired until November 2009 when the private sector began to add new jobs for the first time since December 2007. In terms of new job creation, we’re actually better off now than we were nearly five years ago. Obviously, more jobs need to be added, but we also have to examine why job creation isn’t more robust. Primarily, corporations are inexplicably sitting on record cash assets. $2 trillion, in fact, according to the Wall Street Journal — the highest level of cash assets since 1959. Furthermore, public/government sector jobs at the federal, state and local level have dropped off for the first time in recent history. Experts assert that this has hurt job growth and the unemployment rate.

These are three of the biggest indicators of economic health in America. But what about the deficit and the debt — the crazy scary numbers the Republicans were screeching about last week?

4. According to the CBO, the president inherited a 2009 deficit of $1.2 trillion from President Bush’s final spending request back in 2008. I’m not talking about 2009 spending authorized by President Obama but fiscal year 2009 spending requested by Bush, which somehow President Obama has become responsible for in the eyes of many Republicans. Actually, the Obama administration only added an additional $400 billion to the deficit for the remainder of 2009. That’s still a big chunk of money, but bear in mind the stimulus and other measures that were necessary as a means of breathing life into the economy when no one else would. Add to that a seriously constricted level of tax revenue due to layoffs and reduced incomes. By the end of the president’s first year, the deficit was $1.4 trillion. Huge by ordinary standards, but that economic era and the colossal recession was hardly ordinary. Since then, the deficit has been reduced nearly every year (the deficit increased by $6 billion in 2011 from $1.293 trillion to $1.299 trillion, then dropped to $1.1 trillion for 2012). Fact: the president has reduced the deficit from $1.4 trillion to a projected $977 billion in the last fiscal year of his first term, 2013. $500 billion in total deficit reduction in four years. While I personally would have preferred more spending given the depth of the recession, from the perspective of deficit reduction, this can be considered a considerable achievement and far from the big spending, big government myth the Republicans have created. Meanwhile, the national debt continues to grow, but the year-over-year growth of the debt has slowed from 15% in the president’s first year to 4% in his third year. Likewise, the year-over-year growth in the size of government is the lowest since the 1950s.

What’s next?

One million unemployed Americans found jobs in the first six months of 2012 alone. Inflation is 1.4% — a full point below its all-time average and four points below its 5.6% rate in July, 2008. Home sales are up. Home prices are up. Consumer debt is down. Income tax rates remain at an all-time low. The Medicare prescription donut-hole is closing, with 5.2 million seniors and people with disabilities having saved $4 billion on prescription drug costs because of the evil, evil Affordable Care Act. Preventative medicine is now fully covered by both Medicare and private insurance without deductibles or coinsurance. Millions of Americans in their 20s are now insured under their parents’ health insurance. Medicaid and SCHIP have been expanded, making it easier for struggling families to get healthcare. Women are closer than ever to paycheck equality. The war in Iraq is over. Bin Laden was hunted down and killed.

Are you better off than you were four years ago? From a national perspective — from the perspective of life becoming a little bit easier and the future a lot brighter, the answer again is a resounding yes.

Adding… By way of a post script, I’d like to add that several Obama campaign surrogates turned up on the Sunday shows and actually avoided the obvious answer to this question. Clearly they were worried that answering “yes” would appear insensitive to the Americans who are still struggling. The governor of Maryland, Martin O’Malley — a Democratic supporter of the president — actually answered, “No.” What the hell? Astonishingly self-defeating and weak. Perhaps a response to the effect of, “Without a doubt the nation is significantly better off than it was four years ago, and it will continue to get better and stronger when the president is re-elected,” would completely thread the politically sensitive needle without giving Romney a major win on this too-important question. But to run away from the answer undermines the entire basis for the campaign. I suspect Governor O’Malley will end up in numerous Romney ads. Unfortunately and stupidly.

Subscribe

Bob Cesca's feed

Enter email below:

Don't you make fun of my brother!

By Bob Cesca: Yes, I get it. Among the children of Barbara and George H.W. Bush, Jeb Bush is considered the “smart and reasonable” one. But that’s sort of like saying, Lotsa’ hammers in that tool box, but this hammer doesn’t hurt as much when you bash it into my skull.

Make no mistake. When challenged, Jeb Bush is capable of being as petty and nearsighted as just about any Republican you can name. He might do it with a smile on his face, but as the famous Shakespeare quote goes (say it with me), “That one may smile, and smile, and be a villain.”

On Meet the Press yesterday, Jeb insisted that President Obama should stop blaming his brother, George W., for the condition of things, “I think it is time for him to move on. I mean — look, the guy was dealt a difficult hand, no question about it. But he’s had three years. His policies have failed, and rather than blame others — which I know we were taught that that was kind of unbecoming over time — you just can’t keep doing that. Maybe offer some fresh new solutions to the problems that we face.”

Totally smart and reasonable, yes?

No way.

This is typical Republican behavior with overtones of the “starve the beast” strategy. Typically, the Republicans set a nasty table filled with disasters, and then, when the new guy comes along, they blame the new guy for their own disasters. When the new guy defends himself by saying the previous guy set a nasty table filled with disasters, people like Jeb Bush and the others bark at the new guy, telling him to stop playing the blame game. It’s a no-win for the new guy.

Specifically, the Bush team rocketed through eight years of unchecked spending on trillion dollar wars, trillion dollar tax cuts, corporate bailouts and continued deregulation — it was responsible for the final measures that precipitated a massive recession that further bloated the deficit and debt. They did all of this knowing full well that when the bill came due, they’d be long gone. And, bonus, if the new guy was a Democrat, Barack Obama, they could just blame the him for the deficit, the debt and the nightmarish economic collapse. Furthermore, the Obama team would become handcuffed and unable to totally resolve the problem due to all of the spending/deficits/debt that occured under the Bush administration, thus sabotaging the Obama policies and agenda. The “starve the beast” strategy.

When the Obama team rightfully points out that, for example, it inherited a $1.2 trillion deficit for fiscal year 2009 based on spending requests from the Bush White House, Republicans either deny the reality of how the budget process works, like hack liar Dinesh D’Sousa did with Cenk Uygur the other day, or they wave their open hands in our faces and say, “Baaaah! Blame game! Bush derangement syndrome! Not listening!”

But it’s an empirical fact that the current deficits and debt are a direct result of Bush era policies. It’s an empirical fact that in spite of what ought to be done about the recession and recovery — massive government spending over and above the March 2009 stimulus — the Obama White House has actually presided over the lowest year-over-year increase in government spending of any modern president going all the way back to Eisenhower. The Obama White House has also presided over an (inexplicable) reduction in government employees, while Bush 43 and other presidents were responsible for considerable increases in public sector jobs. The deficit under President Obama has slowly been reduced following the massive deficit he inherited in 2009, and every spending bill he signs is required to be fully paid-for due to “paygo” rules he authorized.

Meanwhile, contrary to the myths floating around in both conservative and liberal circles, this president made history by, yes, rescuing the world economy from a second Great Depression. I’ve written this many times before, but it can’t be stated often enough or with enough emphasis. He rescued the economy from a second Great Depression that could have crushed U.S. and other western nations. Since his policies took effect, the GDP is growing again. The Dow has nearly doubled. The economy is creating jobs. And, ultimately, we’re all still kicking around in a relatively stable nation (compared to what could have happened under, say, John McCain and Sarah Palin).

So when the Republicans shout and screech and their eyes bug out of their tiny heads about the deficit, the debt and “failed policies,” it’s perfectly reasonable and understandable that the president would want to correct the record. Jeb Bush, in particular, seems to think the unmitigated shithole that President Obama inherited can and should’ve been resolved in three years. It’s just that easy to — POOF! — obliterate record deficits, debt and economic disasters, especially when those three things can’t necessarily happen at the same time. You can’t cut the deficit to zero in a slow growth recovery following the deepest recession since Depression. As for the debt, the only president who cut the debt in the last 30 years was Bill Clinton, and it was during an incredible economic boom. Nevertheless, how else is President Obama supposed to respond to these charges? Should he accept the blame for something that’s not his fault? Not a chance. And should he accept the blame for not entirely rolling back the deficits and debt, not to mention the status of the economy, to 1999 in three years even though it took 10 years to get here? That’s a totally unrealistic and unfair expectation.

But the Republicans aren’t fair players. They’re liars and superficial marketing gurus who can come up with zingers that fit conveniently onto bumper stickers, but they’re nowhere near capable of debating empirical reality and accepting rational explanations for our current state of affairs.

Subscribe

Bob Cesca's feed

Enter email below:

Paul Krugman: Lone voice of sanity (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

By Ben Cohen: Nobel prize winning economist Paul Krugman has been getting a huge amount of media attention over the past few weeks, in part due to a book he has written ‘End This Depression Now!’, but mostly because his message of economic sanity is resonating with the American public.

Krugman is an unassuming figure – he’s not exactly telegenic, he’s not the best public speaker, and he tends to perform awkwardly when debating. But Krugman’s common sense solutions to America’s deep economic problems are finding a massive audience of people sick to death of the status quo. More than ever, his voice represents sanity amidst a cacophony of nonsense – a clarion call to restore decency in public policy and prevent the further corruption of the country’s monetary system.

For years, the Left in America has been afraid of its own shadow. The Democrats have been systematically emasculated by the Republicans and have given up on virtually all their core beliefs – Bill Clinton passed more Right wing economic legislation than any Republican could have dreamed of, and Barack Obama’s boldest redistributive economic proposal was to return the top rate of tax to that just under Ronald Reagan’s. This was a direct result of the influence of big money in politics, but also a sad reflection of the intellectual bankruptcy pervading the Left in America. The Democrats stopped believing in their own principles, and gave up on having their own ideas. As Bill Maher said on his show last Friday, the Democrat’s pledge to the electorate is this, “Vote for us, we’re lame, but the other guys are nuts”.

The Republicans are now so far out of the mainstream that it would be criminal not to vote for the Democrats. They are the only entity standing in the way of the complete disintegration of government and the economy. We saw what happened under George Bush, and there’s absolutely no need for a repeat.

But for Krugman, this is not good enough, and he is pushing an agenda to reverse 30 years of Republican economics that has created gigantic wealth disparity, huge amounts of poverty, and massive financial instability. In his critically acclaimed book ‘The Conscience of a Liberal’ Krugman wrote:

I believe in a relatively equal society, supported by institutions that limit extremes of wealth and poverty. I believe in democracy, civil liberties, and the rule of law. That makes me a liberal, and I’m proud of it.

Krugman sees no need to be ashamed of his liberalness – instead, he flaunts it and goes to great lengths to disprove Republican economics in his daily writing and media appearances. While the media treats both side’s policy proposals with equal respect in an attempt to be ‘balanced’, Krugman looks at actual facts says it how it is. In a recent appearance on ABC news, Krugman stated the following about Republican Paul Ryan’s budget plan:

The plan’s a fraud. The plan is a big bunch of tax cuts, some specified spending cuts, basically for poor people, and then a huge magic asterisk which is supposed to turn into a deficit reduction plan, but, in fact, if you look what’s actually in it, it’s a deficit-increasing plan…..There is really no plan there, neither from Ryan, nor from Governor Romney, is just the truth … if that’s being harsh and partisan, gosh, then I guess the truth is anti-bipartisanship.

This type of straight talk is refreshing to hear, particularly to liberals who are not ashamed of being liberal. Krugman is pointing out that the emperor has no clothes, and it seems people are finally waking up to it. Krugman’s solutions to the current economic crisis are equally straightforward. He wants to stop self imposed austerity, pump lots of money into infrastructure spending to create jobs, then pay the deficit down once the economy has stabilized. As he told the Guardian:

These are not hard concepts, actually. It’s not hard to get it across to an audience. But it doesn’t seem to play in the political sphere. What’s fascinating is his historical analysis of why policy-makers, who once understood these principles, collectively decided to forget them.
In the years following the Great Depression, governments imposed regulatory rules upon the banking system to ensure that we could never again become indebted enough to make us vulnerable to a crisis. But if it’s been a long time since the last major economic crisis, people get careless about debt; they forget the risks. Bankers go to politicians and say: ‘We don’t need these pesky regulations,’ and the politicians say: ‘You’re right – nothing bad has happened for a while.

While Krugman’s concepts have been ignored in the political sphere, there are signs that people high up the food chain are starting to catch on. As President Obama told Rolling Stone:

I read all of the New York Times columnists. Krugman’s obviously one of the smartest economic reporters out there.

High praise indeed – and maybe an indication that the Democrats might actually start implementing his ideas. Obama’s Presidency is largely staked on the well being of the economy, and given Krugman has been right about virtually everything thus far, it would be smart to listen. And that is why Krugman is so important right now.

Subscribe

Bob Cesca's feed

Enter email below:

The recovery in the US jobs market hit a wall in May as the economy added a paltry 69,000 jobs and the unemployment rate rose to 8.2%, the first rise in nine months.

The news, combined with fresh fears about the future of the eurozone, sent US stock markets into a tailspin. By early afternoon the Dow Jones had lost over 270 points, all the gains it had made so far in 2012.

May’s figures are the third consecutive set of disappointing numbers but the latest report from the labour department contained more worrying news. The gain was the smallest in a year. At the same time, April’s gain of 115,000 jobs was revised down to an increase of just 77,000.

A broader measure of unemployment, the U6, rose to 14.8% in May from 14.5% in April. The U6 takes into account job seekers as well as those working part-time who want to work full-time jobs.

Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney attacked the president’s record on jobs. He said the report was “very bad news” and said the president had focussed on his landmark healthcare legislation at the expense of the economy.

“Jobs are jobs one for the presidency,” Romney said in an interview with the CNBC financial news channel. “And unfortunately this president put in place Obamacare.”

But Obama defended his record during a campaign stop at the Honeywell plant in Golden Valley, Minnesota, blaming political infighting for holding back growth in the job market.

“We’ve got responsibilities that are bigger than an election,” said Obama. He said Congress had stalled on his plans to create jobs in “This is a problem we can fix,” he said. “Let’s do it right away.”

Earlier, Alan Krueger, chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers, had moved to dampen the political fallout from the figures. “Problems in the job market were long in the making and will not be solved overnight,” he said in a statement released by the White House.

“The economy lost jobs for 25 straight months beginning in February 2008, and over 8m jobs were lost as a result of the Great Recession. We are still fighting back from the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression.”

He said the US economy faced “serious headwinds, including the crisis in Europe and a spike in gas prices” but it was important not to read too much into one month’s figures.

Read more at the Guardian…

Subscribe

Bob Cesca's feed

Enter email below:

By Ben Cohen: A note to our readers, I will be discussing the double dip recession in the UK on the RT network at 4pm ET with Abby Martin, so please tune in if you have time. I wrote a piece yesterday about the crisis, arguing that the austerity measures passed by the Conservative government are not working, proving that it is impossible to cut your way out of recession.

As the election looms, I think this argument is going to become more and more prominent, and will probably be the focus of the debate between Obama and Romney. Each candidate offers a different approach to the economy, and choosing the right one will be crucial to the economic future of the US. In short, Romney wants to cut, and Obama wants to spend. We’ve seen the results of cutting in Europe (double dip recessions, extreme unemployment, and bleak projections for future growth), while the US economy continues to grow after the injection of stimulus money into the economy.

I’m consistently amazed that politicians continue to argue that cutting spending is the way forward despite the very visible evidence that is not. I watched the debate last night between Ron Paul and Paul Krugman and found it fascinating to see Paul regurgitate his fanatical belief in free markets regardless of facts on the ground. Krugman did his best to point out the madness of Paul’s beliefs, but there was little point as Paul refused to acknowledge government could do anything positive in the economy.

Paul’s points are often difficult to argue with as much of his analysis is correct – the US monetary system is deeply corrupt and unsustainable in the long run, and much of this has to do with the reliance on debt as a motivator for growth. The Federal reserve has been complicit in funding bubbles, jacking up inflation, and encouraging unsustainable levels of debt – all acts Paul believes are fraudulent and illegal.

“Inflation is theft,” argued Paul. “You’re stealing value from people who save money. Why should people get 1 percent for their money for savings in the banks get it for practically free? Why did the Federal Reserve bail out the rich and not give the money to the mortgage holders?”

While Paul makes some salient points, his solutions are flat out crazy. Dismantling the entire monetary system when it was responsible for building much of the nation’s wealth would be utterly suicidal – a fact that Paul never wants to acknowledge.

“You can’t leave the government out of monetary policy,” Krugman told Paul. “If you think that you can avoid that, you’re living in a world that was 150 years ago….We have an economy in which money is not just green pieces of paper with faces of dead presidents on them. Money is a part of the financial system that includes a variety of assets — we’re not quite sure where the line between money and non-money is. It’s a continuum.”

Krugman also pointed out that even Milton Friedman argued that the Fed was responsible for the Great Depression in the 1920′s as it didn’t print enough money:

“It’s really telling that in America right now, Milton Friedman would count as being on the far left in monetary policy”

Milton Friedman: A Lefty? (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Paul stuck to his guns arguing that the only way to create a stable economy for the future would be to radically undermine the powers of the Federal Reserve and ensure government had as little to do with monetary policy as possible.

“The point is, the Fed does either too much or too little and they can’t do it,” said Paul. “They don’t have a good record – they’ve ruined 98 percent of the value of the currency since 1913.”

While Paul may be technically right, since 1913 the United States has also become the greatest economic power in human history.

Obviously, it’s doing something right.

Subscribe

Ben Cohen's feed

Enter email below:

By Bob Cesca: Paul Glastris from the Washington Monthly wrote a piece for the magazine’s forthcoming issue that praises the Obama presidency. I hope he’s prepared for the onslaught of screeching from various unhinged hipsters tarring him as an “Obamabot.” Meanwhile, Kevin Drum from Mother Jones tamped down some of Glastris’ enthusiasm but mostly concurred with the analysis.

At the risk of inviting the wrath of anti-Obama liberals, I wanted to add to the discussion as someone who firmly believes the first Obama term to be an historically successful one — but approach it from a different angle.

First, I’d like to preface with a clear illustration of what I mean by “anti-Obama liberals.” It’s okay to criticize the president. You don’t need my permission to do it, of course, because it’s part of being a responsible American. The president, irrespective of who it might be, is worthy of criticism and accountability. Where liberals go wrong is when we seek out (and in some cases exaggerate or fabricate) gripes for the sake of being one of the too-hip-for-room cool kids. Look at me! I’m criticizing a Democrat because I’m independently minded! By way of a recent example, on his show last week Jon Stewart criticized President Obama for not closing the prison at Guantanamo — even though the president issued the order, but Congress failed to pay for the closing. This was inexplicably crow-barred into a segment about the laughable new Breitbart video of the president during his years at Harvard Law. While I like Stewart, this incongruous attack came off as a self-conscious pander to anti-Obama liberals, and, ultimately, it was inaccurately presented. That was the sort of unfair liberal analysis I’m referencing.

But back to the Glastris piece and Drum’s reaction. While Glastris wrote an extended list of accomplishments, Drum tried to condense the list down to 10 really important items, but found the exercise to be impossible so the list ended up being 13 items.

1. Passed Health Care Reform
2. Passed the Stimulus
3. Passed Wall Street Reform
4. Ended the War in Iraq
6. Eliminated Osama bin Laden
7. Turned Around US Auto Industry
9. Repealed “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell”
12. Reversed Bush Torture Policies
14. Kicked Banks Out of Federal Student Loan Program
16. Boosted Fuel Efficiency Standards
18. Passed Mini Stimuli (July 22, 2010; December 17, 2010; December 23, 2011)
22. Created Conditions to Begin Closing Dirtiest Power Plants
27. Achieved New START Treaty

I’ll take it one step further in terms of simplicity. There’s a single major accomplishment that transcends list-making and it ought be the centerpiece of every discussion about the president’s first term. And here it is. Nine words.

President Obama rescued the economy from another Great Depression.

And he did so despite considerable opposition and with the calm, cool leadership required in such precarious times.

That’s huge. It’s impossible to highlight it enough. The president prevented what might have been a global financial collapse. At the very least, his actions on, 1) the stimulus, 2) Wall Street reform (aka. “Dodd-Frank”), 3) the rescue of the auto industry and 4) healthcare reform, along with the “Mini Stimuli” in July, 2010, have all contributed to a significantly stronger American economy in the long run while mitigating and reversing a deepening economic disaster in 2009. We can see it illustrated on every economic chart available from the CBO.

If the president did nothing else with his time in office and was only able to, you know, rescue the economy from another Great Depression, I believe his presidency would be counted as a successful one given this one very serious accomplishment.

Not to compare apples to supremely incompetent oranges, but the meme about how we’d be living in shanty towns using a Mad Max barter system if McCain-Palin had won in 2008 isn’t too far off the mark. Such an administration might have passed something similar to the Bush stimulus from early 2008, which only included tax rebates, tax incentives and, strangely, anti-immigrant language. Who knows what the hell brand of nonsense would have been produced from the McCain administration. Maybe another war? Maybe nothing at all.

In terms of the Obama agenda on the economic meltdown, it’s ultimately academic whether a larger stimulus would have been better or if there should’ve been fewer middle class tax cuts in the stimulus. The fact remains that the stimulus reversed a very destructive path into economic oblivion. Had McCain-Palin won the day, it’s quite likely that a world of destruction would have ensued. Likewise, who knows if Hillary Clinton or John Edwards would have been able to pass a larger stimulus given the McCarthyite screeching from the Republican Party and the stubborn votes of the conservadems. It’s safe to say the outcome would have been about the same (and it’s worth noting that Edwards would have also been dealing with a presidency-poisoning sex/cancer/baby scandal during his first several months in office — smack in the middle of that economic ground zero).

Regardless of the finer points, and to repeat, President Obama’s policies turned a steep economic decline into steady long-term growth which, by the way, isn’t based around quick-fix bubble economics.

All of his other accomplishments, while vitally important, are gravy in comparison to the magnitude of this one thing.

Subscribe

Bob Cesca's feed

Enter email below:

Paul Krugman dispels the myth that Ireland is recovering from its prolonged recession due to a rise in pharma exports and austerity measures:

So, some cold water. First of all, eventual recovery after years of Depression-level unemployment is a strange definition of success. But there’s also a specifically Irish twist. Pharma accounts for a large share of Irish exports — but it makes a much smaller contribution to the Irish economy. Partly that’s because pharma uses a lot of imported inputs, so that it has relatively low domestic content. Partly that’s because pharma is very capital-intensive, employing very few people — and the capital is foreign owned, so that the contribution to Gross National Product, which deducts income paid to foreigners, is smaller than the contribution to Gross Domestic Product, which doesn’t. Indeed, Ireland is one of those countries where you really want to track GNP rather than GDP to get a sense of how the country is doing.

And here’s how it’s doing:

Not exactly a roaring success by any stretch of the imagination. Some sort of economic recovery was bound to happen due to the cyclical nature of supply and demand – it just could have been much much faster had the government intervened to ensure demand during the tough times.

Subscribe

Ben Cohen's feed

Enter email below:

Not torture when America does it

Andrew Sullivan on the radical mindset of the Republican Party:

It can only think in doctrines, because the alternative is living in a complicated, global, modern world they both do not understand and also despise. Taxes are therefore always bad. Government is never good. Foreign enemies must be pre-emptively attacked. Islam is not a religion. Climate change is an elite conspiracy to impoverish America. Terror suspects are terrorists. When Americans torture, it is not torture. When Christians murder, they are not Christians. And if you change your mind on any of these issues, you are a liberal, an apostate, and will be attacked.

Subscribe

Ben Cohen's feed

Enter email below:

Bob Cesca asks for a reality check:

When has deficit reduction ever stimulated economic growth during a difficult recovery, and especially considering the disturbing economic indicators we're experiencing today (sluggish GDP, high unemployment, housing crisis, etc)? Never. In fact, the next nearest example — the conservative budget cuts of 1937 during the recovery from the Great Depression — damned us to another major recession, which spiked unemployment by nearly 10 percentage points and required another three years for the economy to return to its pre-austerity levels.

(image shows per capita real gdp during the great recession)

Subscribe

Ben Cohen's feed

Enter email below: