(08-15-2012 05:04 AM)firmbizzle Wrote: That's revisionist history. We were losing 700,000 jobs a month when Obama took office. Here in Florida, we still had heavy job losses deep into 2010. It was the worst recession in your lifetime. Nobody had any idea how bad it was. It was especially destructive because it included housing which is how most people create wealth. With houses underwater it limited people from moving to other regions of the country (VA,ND,IA)to find new jobs. None of the past recessions included housing except the great depression.
Politicians promise a lot of things. Bush promised a modest foreign policy. Bottomline is it is going to take a while to recover. Unpaid for tax cuts, unpaid for wars, unpaid for prescription drug benefited, unpaid for bailouts, and stimulus packages got us all here. It's going to take time to clear them off the books. We are gaining jobs, out of Iraq, and have better national security. Those 3 things are resolve deficiencies of the W.
I'm sorry, but you're the one with the revisionist spin here. Obama's policies are not producing the recovery we want? No problem, we'll just make the problem bigger than it was, and that will make him look better. Make it the worst recession ever, and when people don't buy that, then use the old "nobody knows how bad it is" line.
Yes we were losing jobs. That's what happens in a recession. Were we going to keep losing 700,000 jobs a month forever? Of course not. Eventually you hit bottom, and we did about the time Obama took office. Which was pretty close to the timeline when most recessions hit bottom. And before anything Obama did had time to take effect. What Obama's policies have done is to keep us on the bottom rather than produce the kind of recovery that follows most recessions. And the longer we stay on the bottom, the worse you have to portray the problem in order to make Obama look good.
Housing is a factor in every recession. Recessions are about correcting malinvestment. This time housing was a bigger factor because the malinvestment was in housing, in response to policies designed to create a housing bubble to mask the fact that our economy has been basically dead flat since 9/11. We've been trying to hold off the needed corrections and until they take place we aren't going to recover.
We're a consumer economy, a retail/service economy, instead of the producer economy we used to be. You can't create significant amounts of wealth in a consumer economy. Until we fix that, we aren't going to recover. The dot.com bubble was about trying to create wealth by being a service economy. The housing bubble was about trying to create wealth by stimulating consumption. The only way to create wealth is to produce something of value, and until we start producing things again, we're not going to create any value.
Neither the tax cuts nor the wars nor the drug benefits nor the bailouts nor the stimulus packages got us here--although it is useful to note that you apparently recognize that the bailout and stimulus policies started with Shrub and were continued by Obama. We're gaining jobs too slowly to keep up with population growth. We're getting out of Iraq and eventually Afghanistan by giving up, essentially surrendering without ever making a valid effort actually to win, which means every young American man and woman who gave his/her life in those disasters did so in vain. I don't know how you conclude that we have better national security, but I don't think so.
Nice effort to spin but sorry, I'm not buying.
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