-Submitted by David Drumm (Nal), Guest Blogger
To get the ball rolling, here’s Paul Krugman: “For the deal itself, given the available information, is a disaster, and not just for President Obama and his party.”
House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-California): “maybe none of us will be able to support it.”
Comment moderation is off, so have at it.
kderosa,
Name a president other than Clinton that left the country with a surplus or a deficit lower than when he entered office?
Now name a single economic benefit that GW Bush’s terms produced.
http://deeperwants.com/ratboys_anvil_2/2011/07/deficit-truth.html
Thank you rcampbell…
@rcampbell
“The lowered GDP was the result of the failed conservative policies which brought us to the lowest point since the Great Depression.”
Wrong, the recession was primarily caused by bipartisan. mostly Democrat by the way, tinkering with the financial markets to increase home ownership among the poor, a worthy though severely misguided foray into social policy tinkering.
“Obama’s spending wasn’t high, the GOP so damaged the US economy that any spending looks like a lot.”
The fact is that both as a percentage of GDP and in constant dollars, Obama’s spending was some of the highest ever, even greater than the high spending ways of the Bush Admin.
“Did you forget that the top end tax rates were lowered because of a projected surplus.”
Source? All rates were lowered.
“Did you forget the costs of Bush’s wars were hidden from the budget and funded by Continuing Resolutions instead of through the budget process and that this practice continued from 2002-2008?”
You mean like SS and Medicare? And the current wars?
“Did you forget the unfunded Medicare Part D? Then, of course, there was TARP.”
Both passed with strong Democrat support. And at least in the ase of TARP with a majority of Republican’s votes in the House. (I’m too lazy to look up the Part D bill.)
“Don’t you DARE lecture Preogressive about taxes, funding, budgets and debt. Progressive have nothing to learn from
conservativesREPUBLICANon fiscal matters because they have nothing to teach.”There I fixed it for you.
“The only adults in the room have been (are) Democrats and as much as Progressives don’t like this deal, I believe it helps insure Obama a second term and that matters.”
That sounds very adult-like.
A “spin storm” is approaching where each side claims victory in the pathetic matter.
But in either case, the public lost.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/from-the-debt-debate-to-the-coming-hostage-revolt/2011/07/30/gIQAZrDclI_story.html
kderosa
At least get your facts straight. The $800+ billion stimulus package was supposed to be to for job creation through public works, but the GOP wouldn’t allow a vote on a package that brought jobs. They demanded more tax breaks businesses perperating the lie that tax breaks create jobs. They didn’t. The package also included money for states to prevent police, fire and education cuts that would have raised the unemployment rate even hire–the GOP goal.
Your use of spending as a percentage of GDP is quite telling as it reflects you are simply ignoring reality. The lowered GDP was the result of the failed conservative policies which brought us to the lowest point since the Great Depression. Obama’s spending wasn’t high, the GOP so damaged the US economy that any spending looks like a lot.
Do you think we’ve forgotten how we got into this mess? Did you forget that the top end tax rates were lowered because of a projected surplus. See any surplus out there? Did you forget the costs of Bush’s wars were hidden from the budget and funded by Continuing Resolutions instead of through the budget process and that this practice continued from 2002-2008? Did you forget the unfunded Medicare Part D? Then, of course, there was TARP.
Don’t you DARE lecture Preogressive about taxes, funding, budgets and debt. Progressive have nothing to learn from conservatives on fiscal matters because they have nothing to teach. The only adults in the room have been (are) Democrats and as much as Progressives don’t like this deal, I believe it helps insure Obama a second term and that matters.
SM, how so? There are no real spending cuts, just cuts to the baseline spending which will only cut the growth in spending. How else could Boehner’s bill promise “spending cuts” to discretionary spending and still permit the budget to grow S200 billion over the next ten years? This is Washington style accounting at its finest.
It is an austerity deal for everyone other than those in the top 1%.
Obama stepped into the stalled talks in recent weeks. He never offered his own new debt reduction plan, but used several public statements and closed White House meetings to show executive leadership and criticize other plans.
He used his poll-tested “balanced approach” demand numerous times (meaning more taxes as well as spending cuts) and sent aides like David Plouffe out to repeat how Republicans were demanding “my way or the highway.”
As one result, not only did Obama’s overall job approval sink to 40%, lowest of his 923 days in office.
But a new Rasmussen Reports national survey of likely voters out Sunday night revealed a sharp jump in the number of Americans who find this Democratic chief executive to be “too confrontational” in his national leadership approach.
Nearly one in three (30%) now say that about the man who was going to change Washington’s harsh partisan atmosphere. That’s the highest percentage in 16 months and up nine points in just four weeks.
On his first day in office more than a trillion dollars ago in 2009, 64% called Obama a good or excellent leader. That number has since slid to 42%. Those who consider him a poor leader have increased to 41%.
(Source)
Debt crisis: Boehner, Reid & McConnell make ‘Jersey Shore’ cast seem smart by comparison
MIKE LUPICA – NEWS
Monday, August 1st 2011, 4:00 AM
“So it seems this is how the whole thing will end in Washington, where the politicians make the cast of “Jersey Shore” look enlightened in comparison:
There will be new rules about borrowing for our government, spending will be cut, President Obama won’t be able to raise taxes, and another debt ceiling crisis won’t be something the Republicans can send crashing down on him in an election year.
And maybe the rest of the world won’t be able to foreclose on us Tuesday.
Fingers crossed.
There’s your tax dollars – what’s left of them, anyway – at work right there.
“Is this the deal I would have preferred?” Obama said Sunday night. “No.”
This is a big deal made by amazing small-timers and second-raters like Mitch McConnell and Harry Reid and John Boehner, the ones who say they are speaking for average Americans and are completely out of touch with them.”
Read more: http://www.nydailynews.com/news/politics/2011/08/01/2011-08-01_smalltime_players_flail_to_the_finish_before_disaster.html#ixzz1TmWEJXkz
http://www.tnr.com/blog/jonathan-chait/92991/did-obama-get-rolled “There’s a limit to how much faith one can place in a man who has so badly misjudged his political opponents time and time again.”
BTW,refused to watch any network talking heads on this subject this morning and decided to watch Washington Journal to hear the Peoples opinion.They took calls had a good back and forth and then had two reporters on.As the time started winding down they said their next guest was going to be Lawrence Kudlow.That did it for me, CLICK!!!
Stank, no one has “won” anything yet. Moody’s is still threatening to lower our credit rating within 4 months unless we make 4 trillion in real cuts, unlike the imaginary cuts in this bill.
To appreciate the scope of the Tea Party’s victory, consider: When Barack Obama came into office, he went on a bender of government spending. He signed an unprecedented $821 billion stimulus spending bill. His first budget increased federal spending to 27 percent of gross domestic product — the highest level as a share of the economy since World War II. He then proceeded to ram through Congress Obamacare, a massive government intervention that adds $1.4 trillion in new spending over the next decade alone. Democrats openly talked about passing a “second stimulus.” And five months ago Obama submitted a budget to Congress that tripled the national debt, raising it by $10 trillion over the next 10 years.
Today, no one is talking about tripling the national debt or passing a “second stimulus.” Congress is about to cut spending by about $2 trillion and put us on a trajectory to balance the budget within a decade. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid complained Saturday evening that Congress has raised the debt limit 74 times since 1962 without conditions. He is right. This is happening for the first time in history, thanks to the Tea Party.
(Source)
Look klownderosa, you and the rest of your minions from Hell can quit now. You won. There is no longer a Democratic party worthy of the name and the Republican party is no longer conservative but batshit insane radicals. Fine, you win, welcome to America as a third world shit hole. Huge disparity in wealth, lousy healthcare, shorter life expectancy, slow to non-existent economic growth.
Go and be happy, there will always be jobs as house boy for clowns like you.
Nal;
I posted Krugman and this opinion piece on your Voter Disenfranchisement thread.I’ll just repost this one.
“eniobob
1, August 1, 2011 at 6:47 am
OP-ED COLUMNIST
The Diminished President
By ROSS DOUTHAT
Published: July 31, 2011
By rights, Barack Obama should be emerging as the big political winner in the debt ceiling debate. For months, he’s positioned himself near the center of public opinion, leaving Republicans to occupy the rightward flank. Poll after poll suggests that Americans prefer the president’s call for a mix of spending cuts and tax increases to the Republican Party’s anti-tax approach. Poll after poll shows that House Republicans, not Obama, would take most of the blame if the debt ceiling weren’t raised.
Yet the president’s approval ratings have been sinking steadily for weeks, hitting a George W. Bush-esque low of 40 percent in a recent Gallup survey. The voters incline toward Obama on the issues, still like him personally and consider the Republican opposition too extreme. But they are increasingly judging his presidency a failure anyway.
The administration would no doubt blame this judgment on the steady stream of miserable economic news. But it should save some of the blame for its own political approach. Ever since the midterms, the White House’s tactics have consistently maximized President Obama’s short-term advantage while diminishing his overall authority. Call it the “too clever by half” presidency: the administration’s maneuvering keeps working out as planned, but Obama’s position keeps eroding.
Start with the first round of deficit debates this winter. After the Republican sweep, the White House seemed to have two options: double down on Keynesian stimulus or pivot to the center and champion deficit reduction. Instead, Obama chose to hover above the fray, passing on his own fiscal commission’s recommendations and letting the Republicans make the first move.
The strategy worked, in a sense. Goaded by the president’s evasiveness, Paul Ryan and the House Republicans put forward a detailed long-term budget proposal of their own, whose Medicare cuts proved predictably unpopular. But while the subsequent policy debate favored Obama, the optics of the confrontation diminished him. The chairman of the House Budget Committee looked more like a leader than the president of the United States.
Then came the spring’s great foreign policy dilemma, the civil war in Muammar el-Qaddafi’s Libya. The president (wisely) didn’t want to put America’s blood and treasure on the line for the rebels, but he also didn’t want to take responsibility for letting Qaddafi crush the revolt. So the White House opted for a kind of quasi war, throwing just enough military power at the problem to ensure a stalemate and then punting responsibility to our NATO allies. An Obama adviser told The New Yorker’s Ryan Lizza that the president was pioneering a new American way of statecraft: “Leading from behind.”
Again, the strategy worked, sort of. An immediate humanitarian crisis was averted, and Libya quickly fell out of the headlines. But it left Americans to contemplate a peculiar and unpresidential spectacle: The leader of the free world taking the country to war while pretending that he wasn’t, and then effectively washing his hands of the ultimate outcome — which, 135 days and counting later, is still very much in doubt.
The same pattern has played out in the debt ceiling debate. Instead of drawing clear lines and putting forward detailed proposals, the president has played Mr. Compromise — ceding ground to Republicans here, sermonizing about Tea Party intransigence and Washington gridlock there, and fleshing out his preferred approach reluctantly, if at all.
The White House no doubt figured that this negotiating strategy would either lead to a bipartisan grand bargain or else expose Republican extremism — or better still, do both. And again, the strategy is arguably working. Americans were given a glimpse of right-wing populism’s reckless side last week, and the final deal will probably let the president burnish his centrist credentials just in time for 2012.
But winning a debate on points isn’t a substitute for looking like a leader. It’s one thing to bemoan politics-as-usual when you’re running for the White House. It’s quite another to publicly throw up your hands over our “dysfunctional government” when you’re the man the voters put in charge of it.
In fairness, the president’s passive-aggressive approach is a bipartisan affliction. The ostensible front-runner for the Republican nomination, Mitt Romney, took a deliberately hazy position on last week’s crucial House debate, preferring to flunk a test of leadership rather than risk alienating either side. (The Washington Examiner’s Tim Carney quipped that “if you took Obama’s plan and Romney’s plan, and just met in the middle, you’d be in the middle of nowhere.”)
This leaves Americans to contemplate two possibilities more alarming than debt-ceiling brinkmanship. First, that we’re living through yet another failed presidency. And second, that there’s nobody waiting in the wings who’s up to the task either.
“For the vigilant apocalypse watchers, Robert Greenstein, a budget analyst at the liberal Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, is warning that John Boehner’s proposed debt plan “could well produce the greatest increase in poverty and hardship produced by any law in modern U.S. history,” which he apparently believes is the terrifying likely consequence of cutting government so much that federal discretionary spending only rises from $1.034 trillion to $1.234 trillion over the next decade. “
From last December’s transcript of Obama’s presser on the tax cut deal:
How’d those expectations work out?
Onward to oblivion USofA! It was nice knowing you, lately, not so much.
Plutocracy will kill you everytime.
Hmmm…Krugman and Pelosi both hate it. It must be a lot better than I thought it was if those two domestic enemies of America are against it.