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Admit Mistakes and Ideology
I will start out saying I was not for Obama from the beginning! I cannot believe however that his sticking by his ideology although none of his ideas to this point have made any improvement and can be argued have made things worse; that no one here has expressed regrets. The shovel ready jobs situation and further stimulus for this is scary at best and disastrous at worst. I hope for a landslide if for nothing else to stop Obama from doing any more damage!
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The stock market is up about 30% since anti-Wall St. Obama came in, along with my and several million other seniors' retirement account.
The American auto industry was going over a cliff in 2009. It is not stable by any means but it is functioning -- bail out indeed.
Draw down in Iraq.
Obama's messaging sucks and he and Dodd should have passed bank/finance bail out legislation that either would have generated business and community loans quickly or imposed hard and fast penalties to corporate/bank heads that took money and sat on it. (By penalty, I mean jail time. That Enron business with the perp walk and the CEO dying in jail while awaiting trial had a rather compelling narrative to it.)
Obama hasn't got it on jobs, a big point to be sure, but he has passively let himself and his party get defined by that issue alone. They deserve to lose by being so lame in the fight.
But none of that changes the fact that Obama in a bad year is better than George W-MD, multi trillion dollar Iraq war, est. 4000 American war casualties, Bush at his best.
Hello All,
I would just like to say hello to everyone since I haven't posted on this site in awhile, but that doesn't mean I haven't been keeping up with the discussions going on.
To "me"
I would like for you to elaborate an your comment. Just what do you believe President Obama's "ideology" to be? And how do you think those policies have been a reflection of his ideology? (personally, I believe that President Obama is personally a pretty staunch liberal but has so far governed from center or a bit left of center, if you look at his policies they aren't as "radical" or "extreme" as the media would have you believe.) In addition, how exactly has he made "things" worse? what exactly is worse now than it was before?
We now have had positive GDP growth (the recession is shown to have ended in July of last year, 2009). Job numbers aren't great, but at least the economy is growing, and everyone who knows basic Keynesian economics knows that government spending and tax cuts are the only way to jump start the economy and get things going. Yet Obama gets criticized for everything, he's in between a rock and a hard place. If he decides to spend money to on the stimulus, he's labeled as a big-spending liberal, and is criticized for increasing our debt. If he wants to let the Bush tax cuts expire on the rich in order to cover a bit of the difference, he's called a radical socialist. Even though the stimulus is shown to have worked (though perhaps not to the degree most people would have liked), he's still getting criticism from the right (who say they believe in small government yet expect government intervention when the economy isn't doing well).
On the foreign policy front, I am disappointed that Obama has continued many Bush-era terror policies which he spoke out against while he was Candidate Obama. However, Iraq is (relatively) stable, we're pulling our troops out of there, and we're focusing the fight on in Afghanistan which is what he promised to do.
So let me ask you, what would you do that's so different from what Obama has done? What exactly are the "mistakes" and "ideology" that you point to that are so disastrous? It's been shown that our economy is on an upward if slow trend, and Obama's foreign policy results and process have been much more realistic and reasonable than under Bush. Can you cite some solid evidence for your claims?
Ooh-Rah, Marine4Life51! Well-said.
Heck I wish I had written that myself, it's so close to my own views on the situation.
Feels pretty lonely, sometimes.
Good points have been made so far (welcome back, Marine... glad to know there are still lurkers who read and eventually come in to post).
I won't repeat what's already been said, but I'll try to add something else -- some good old fashioned data, but I'm not sure that "me" wants facts -- I think (s)he is guilty of what he is accusing us of: hanging onto ideology.
In case, though, me would like to check some facts, here is a link to a blogger column that's worth reading: measuring spending by Presidents (since Reagan) five quarters into each first term, indexed for inflation and all indexed to 100.
In case you don't want to go through all that trouble to click and link and read for yourself, here is the scorecard:
Yep, both Bush administrations beat out Reagan, Clinton and the supposed uber-Liberal Obama in spending within the first years of their terms.
I'd like to ask me: why did you just rediscover fiscal prudence on January 20, 1009?
"People complain about the Health Care bill but it is paid for and reduces the deficit."
In the real world, that is simply not true.
Gary Shapiro in a piece for the Huffington Post explains this better than I can.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/gary-shapiro/five-hidden-costs-of-heal_b_523013.html
Shortly before the penultimate vote, Democrats trumpeted the bill as reducing the deficit. They relied on last minute scoring from the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) reporting that the bill will reduce the federal deficit by $138 billion over 10 years. As a result, proponents declared the bill as good for the deficit and the economy.
History will prove whether this claim is true. But anyone who has even peeled back one layer of this onion knows the CBO was boxed in to giving a distorted picture. This law will be proven quickly to expand our bloated deficit -- and sadly, the media was asleep at the switch and did not report on it.
The big distortion occurred by the CBO assumption that the 21 percent cut in doctors' Medicare reimbursements would stay in place. The 21 percent drop in doctors' pay began April 1 (no April Fools) and was included by CBO scorekeepers as permanent. This allowed them to claim $450 billion in Medicare savings. Yet, the same politicians who voted for the bill have also promised doctors a "fix" and that they will restore the drastic cuts in Medicare reimbursement.
Even before the 21 percent cuts, increasing numbers of doctors refused to take Medicare patients, as the Medicare reimbursements are tiny compared to private insurance reimbursements, not even factoring in the cost and time of the additional paperwork, audits and hassle of collecting from the government bureaucracy. With a 21 percent cut in Medicare reimbursement, tens of thousands more doctors will refuse Medicare patients and the goal of getting more Americans health coverage will be countered by fewer available doctors. Medicare patients, our oldest Americans, will suffer, and a marketplace form of rationing will be imposed.
This real problem begins this month, and the promise to "fix" Medicare reimbursements puts both Democrats and Republicans in a pickle. If they don't reverse the Medicare cuts, thousands of doctors will close their doors to Medicare patients, depriving millions of needed health care and belying the promise of the health care bill. But if they vote to restore the doctors' cuts, then the myth of deficit neutrality will be exposed for Democrats, and the promise of fiscal prudence will not be met for Republicans.
In any case, either Americans will suffer or the myth of the new medical law's deficit neutrality will be exposed. Members of Congress from both sides expect a vote within weeks. That vote will transform the entire financial assumption underpinning the health care law.
And if you are not convinced yet that the new health care law is not a deficit expander, here are two other tricks the CBO used to hide the true costs. First, the CBO used 10 years of revenue-raising and only six years of expenditures. Had the 10 years been based on both revenue and expenditures, it would cost $114 billion annually. More, the CBO was told to assume many plans would pay the 40 percent excise tax on plans and offset the costs of this new government benefit. This 40 percent tax will impact very few plans - if any. If realistic assumptions were used for those two items, then the law clearly does not reduce the deficit.
If that's not enough, other revenue assumptions have been labeled by fantasy. For example, The Hill notes that the $2.7 billion assumed to be raised by a tax on tanning salons would require tanning customers to make 3.9 billion visits to tanning salons over the next 10 years.
The government takeover of student loan processing is assumed to save $70 billion and presents the questionable assumption that government can do something cheaper than private industry. Government scorekeepers rarely consider the true cost of government employee pensions, overhead, real estate, support by other government employees or supplies when calculating theoretical savings of "insourcing."
The calculations by Congress of every new entitlement program have been multiples off the mark. The 1965 Medicare program was supposed to cost only $9 billion by 1990. Instead it cost $67 billion in 1990 and it now costs $521 billion.
This expansion of the deficit is an enormous cost that we are imposing on our children.
The Iraq War was supposed to pay for itself, too, with savings from oil when a "democratically elected" government friendly to us would take over their reserves a mere months after we invaded. (That from Cheney).
When that math didn't pan out, people who criticized the war became unpatriotic and were accused by the Right of working against America and demoralizing the troops. (That from Cheney, too).
I'm good with that.
You are a disloyal American, Brandon. This is America. Why do you hate America so much? You want the insurance companies to win, don't you?
Any real American, unlike you, would want to guarantee that all children have terrific health insurance, that way they will be healthy enough to pay off the health care reform debt we have passed on to them.
Actually, the only difference between debt incurred from health care reform and debt incurred from the Iraq war is that the latter carries with it a total destabilization of the middle east and the death of 4,000 Americans. I prefer the former, you prefer the latter -- probably because you hate America and I am loyal to my country.
Thank you, former VP Cheney.
Tom,
I think Obama's Healthcare Plan is the wrong way to solve that issue. I also thought the Iraq War was not the right way to combat Islamic terrorism. I thought that from day one, so you can't pin that one on me.
But your post is an example of why Democrats are losing this election cycle. The whole "look at what Dick Cheney/George Bush did" just doesn't work in 2010.
I see you didn't refute one point of the article I linked/posted. Instead you used the Bill Maher approach of trying to use humor to deflect the real issue. At least I hope this was supposed to be tongue in cheek ("You are a disloyal American, Brandon").
Brandon-The CBO is a neutral scoring office. Sure, you can look at worst case scenario and assume certain "what if's" until you are blue in the face, but you can also look at best case scenario and find even more savings, greater reduction of the deficit. The point is that the Democrats actually took the time and effort to pay for this. I know you don't like when we bring up Bush because the truth hurts, but you can't hide from the fact that Bush did not even include the wars in his budget. This was dishonest, sneaky and now we see the huge deficit as a result. He also passed Medicare Part D and tax cuts with no way to pay for it. Do you see any reason to think the GOP would change this pattern? At least the Democrats put it all out there and the CBO scored without bias. Do you have any idea how difficult that process was-making sure each part was paid for? No wonder the GOP is not a fan of paying for things they want to pass. It's unpopular, tricky, and involves much compromise. Where were the Republicans during the health care negotiations if they think this is such a bad bill? They refused to compromise and wanted to keep the insurance companies happy by keeping the status quo. If millions of people are uninsured, it's their own tough luck. If an insurance company wants to deny a woman health care or increase premiums because she is a victim of domestic abuse, it's the free market working as it should. Who cares about parents of children with chronic conditions being billed thousands of dollars for each visit to the hospital to the point where they must file for bankruptsy?
Come on, Brandon, the GOP wants zero change to a system in which insurance companies are soaring with profits and paying out huge bonuses to reward knocking "at risk" people off of insurance. I know Tom was being somewhat sarcastic and mocking Cheney's "you are a traitor if you are against what we deem important" but he actually has a point. This country used to be about helping those in need, reaching out. Many industries, corporations, and CEO's were all about philantropy and their businesses were rewarded for taking care of workers (good benefits) and giving to charity. Now it's all me, me, me. How can we make the biggest buck? Look at the huge profits of companies reporting right now. Do you really think they could not hire a good chunk of people? No, they will make their current workers work twice as hard with less benefits to ensure their bottom line. We no longer want to help our neighbor. We're ok to use billions of dollars on wars that kill and maim-even women and children-but heaven forbid we spend money to protect our most vulnerable citizens. So, yes, people who are against access to health care for all, are borderline unpatriotic in my opinion. It's not a stretch.
And if you want to twist the math in such a way that you show ensuring millions more people adds to the deficit, then fine, let's cover the cost by ending the wars, ending spending on military aircraft we no longer use, ending tax loopholes for the rich. Let's start with letting the tax cuts expire for the rich. Hmm-$3 billion in savings sounds like alot of health care we can provide. But the people you want to vote in would rather continue tax breaks for the wealthy and dismantle the health care reform which will help so many in need. Is that really who you want leading this country? People that care more about the rich and insurance industry than the sick and at-risk here in this great country? Is that what this country is all about? Fine, just understand that the GOP does not want any real, positive changes in health care reform. In fact, the CBO (whom you say always underestimates cost) says the Republican plan discussed these days will really skyrocket the deficit. Does it bother you that the status quo/GOP plan will cost tons more than the plan that was passed? And I'm just talking money, let's not even get into the increased illness and death.
GOP plan to repeal health care reform would add $455 billion to the deficit
Finally, you asked what the net deficit impact would be if certain provisions of PPACA and the Reconciliation Act that were estimated to generate net savings were eliminated—specifically, those which were originally estimated to generate a net reduction in mandatory outlays of $455 billion over the 2010–2019 period. The estimate of $455 billion mentioned in your letter represents the net effects of many provisions. Some of those provisions generated savings for Medicare, Medicaid, or the Children’s Health Insurance Program, and some generated costs. If those provisions were repealed, CBO estimates that there would be an increase in deficits similar to its original estimate of $455 billion in net savings over that period.
Are you seeing why a more "socialized" plan like "Medicare for All" or at least a public option would make much more sense than leaving the insurance companies in control with little competition?
Brandon-you are drinking alot of kool-aid and not realizing that the GOP is really not the fiscally conservative party you think it is and maybe it never has been. But they invest in great "spinners"-and Democrats are woefully inept at pointing out the hypocrisy and being proud of their record-so polls show most people didn't even know they got a tax reduction from Obama and 1/3 think he increased their taxes-when the fact is that 95% have lower taxes thanks to Obama and the Democrats. Keep hiding your head in the sand, but facts are facts.
The Democrats won't show a backbone, but at least people like Maddow do their homework and can point out the truth (which the media ignores, too) and we can only hope some Democratic leaders pay attention or some in the media realize they are accepting what Republicans say without fact-checking. Maddow is so great at what she does, but would be much more useful as a Democratic consultant or ad advisor. If she was working for the Democrats on a national level, they be increasing their majority, not in danger of losing it. She is one smart lady.
Media adopt Republican narratives for midterms
Rachel Maddow explodes the prevailing media explanations for the success of extreme right Republican candidates, proving that the election is not about such issues as the deficit or TARP.
P.S. For the record, although I am so glad this historic legislation passed, I'm not a huge fan of the health care reform bill because it should have contained a public option, so when the question is asked "Do you approve of HC reform?" and the numbers are dismal, I'm sure there are many people like me who are pleased it passed as a step in the right direction, but wanted something more Progressive. Forget repeal, please get some legislation going that will put the public option back on the table!
Actually I am blaming Obama for NOT doing on healthcare reform what Bush and Cheney did on Iraq.
> Sell it as a financial winner but also as a moral commitment. When the financial argument tanks, go with moral imperatives, America is the greatest country in the world for doing health care and, of course, opponents are unpatriotic, child hating vermin.
> Even when he had congressional approval and suport for the war Bush and his minions kept campaigning for the war almsot daily-- building the case for the long hard push. Obama checked it off his to-do list and basically shut up about it.
Obama is not losing because America is outraged at the questionable CBO report. Obama has misread his opposition every step of the way.(I am not second guessing here. After healthcare passed I wrote on this site that Obama and Dems would have to keep selling this every day, just like Bush and sold the Iraq war every day for YEARS, to keep a backlash from building.)
Obama is losing because Dems will not stick with a message... any message... long enough to even remotely influence the campaign agenda.Republicans have attacked the media for years. Obama tried attacking Foxnews for two days, got criticized and backed off. Right wing operatives spent months and millions making war hero John Kerry look like a coward. They succeeded eventually but it took a while. Obama and Dems spent two days trying to make Boehner look like a corporate tool -- and he is one. Conservatives told him it wouldn't work and, for two days, of course it didn't. They stopped. Cheeses.
Obama is losing because Palin and teapartiers make him look dull. Obama beat Hillary not on accomplishments. It wasn't even close. He made her look dull, uninspiring.Now he does compared to them.
Obama is losing because two weeks from the election he and Democrats are still "crafting" (make that fumbling over themselves, still...again) a message that works. Republicans have pretty much been on message for 6-12 months.
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OMG Misty! LOL!!
Do You have a link???
"Peace Cannot be kept by force. It can only be achieved by understanding."
Albert Einstein
"People here actually do their homework"
If Christine O'Donnell wins, homework will no longer be a requirement. Think of all the time we will save.