Thanks for the birthday present, Arty. Enjoy your time 'away.'
As Barack Obama’s economic advisers confront choices that vary from bad to worse in their mission to revive the financial sector and the broader economy, it is worth remembering that those choices were in essence inherited by the president, who is still new to his office.
First, let me say that time-honored tradition ascribes the 'blame' for all economic woes to the previous President when they occur around the time of or shortly after a change in party affiliation of the Presidency, Rush notwithstanding. Congress actually deserves the blame, mind you, but it has the advantage of being too diffuse a target with too many names, so our lazy media (and many of us) lay it off on the Executive. It's just easier that way, with only one target to aim for.
So let's get that part out of the way and concede that it's all Bush's fault. I disagree with that only in degree, as I believe Bush was wrong to hit the panic button and enable Congress to push through TARP I. He shouldn't have asked for it, shouldn't have signed it. It was like serving up a hanging curve ball to Hank Aaron. More like being the pitcher at the Home Run Derby, actually, and it set a precedent that he had to know would be exploited to the max if the Democrats took complete control, which at that point looked nearly inevitable.
Now to BO and Conason's straw man argument that BO's choices vary only from 'bad to worse' because of what he inherited. BO and his apologists can keep bashing Bush for the problem, for all the good it will do, but they sure as hell can't blame him for the choices BO's making now and can't claim the inherited problems constrain his options entirely to choices from 'bad to worse.' It is interesting to note that even his apologist's (Conason in this case) admit that he's choosing from the 'bad to worse' side of the menu.
Furthermore, BO signed up for the job. By so thoroughly and relentlessly assigning blame for anything & everything to the sitting President during his campaign, he set himself up for the same treatment once he secured the job he signed up for. He bought in to the fantasy (or 'truth,' if you choose to call it that) & ruthlessly exploited it. May he now enjoy the fruits of his labor. He has no cause to complain.
Ever since Election Day 2008, the usual suspects have been hard at work, deflecting responsibility from the Bush administration (and the Republicans in Congress) for the catastrophic effects of conservative policy enacted during the past eight years.
Call it the Bush recession. I don't care. But I'd be interested in a bit more detail about the 'conservative policy enacted during the past eight years' and how, exactly, it had 'catastrophic effects.' This is intellectually lazy, simplistic propaganda. At no time did Republicans have filibuster-proof control of Congress, let alone a 'conservative' majority, and many of the policies were hardly 'conservative.' There were plenty of conservatives who were rather vocal critics of aspects of Bush's economic policies. Furthermore, the seeds of the recent economic meltdown, caused almost entirely by the real estate bubble bursting & pulling the rug out from under the mortgage-backed securities market, were sewn before Bush entered office. Based on Conason's contentions, we shouldn't blame Bush - he 'inherited' them.
To his credit, he tried valiantly, if too quietly, to remedy the problems at Fannie & Freddie, but was rebuffed by a Congress that failed in its fiduciary duty. The problem was made clear to Congress and it had the opportunity to nip the problem in the bud, but opposition from Democrats & 'compassionate conservative' Republicans killed meaningful reform. I fault Bush for not getting up on his Bully Pulpit about this and many other issues in which he should have been much more publicly and forcefully engaged (another topic in itself).
Within days after Obama’s victory, as stock prices fell, radio host and ideological commissar Rush Limbaugh exclaimed that we were already in the “Obama recession.”
Now that Bush is gone (and being respectfully quiet), we need a new bogeyman - BO's administration is just continuing in campaign mode, doing whatever it can to deflect attention from what really matters. That business about not letting a good crisis go to waste wasn't just an off-hand comment from Rahm - they believe deeply that they can achieve their agenda if they keep the media busy with bullshit. If only the media realized how they are being played for suckers. The ones who aren't actively & willingly participating in promoting the BS, that is.
In January 1981, Reagan took the oath, and within his first three months had rammed through a budget that contained his historic “supply-side” tax cuts. Reagan budget director David Stockman had created computer simulations supposedly showing that those tax cuts would result in 5 percent growth in gross domestic product during the following year. Years later, when simulation failed to materialize as reality, Stockman referred cynically to that prediction as the “rosy scenario”—and admitted that it was essentially a fraud. Contrary to the rosy scenario, 1982 was the worst year since the Great Depression, with negative growth of 2.2 percent.
Just goes to show you that rosy scenarios are just that. However, whether you believe those policies were beneficial or not depends entirely on your assumptions about economic cycles and their timelines. It can be argued that the only thing 'rosy' was the expectation about the timing, as opposed to the effect. That they were wrong about the timing doesn't mean they were wrong about the ultimate effect. It can also be argued that those policies worked in spite of Reagan's subsequent decision to raise taxes - he picked a good time to ride the wave which led ultimately to the surpluses Clinton is so pleased to claim as his own. Also gave Bush41 the 'Read my lips" opening. Even Conason admits they 'took back' only a third of the tax cuts - so they weren't wrong on principle, just on how much to cut taxes at that particular point in the economic cycle. Even then, it is hard to argue that raising taxes 'helped' the economy at the time - helped the government, for sure, but probably not the economy, which was already gaining steam, possibly in part (maybe substantially) from those previous 'supply-side' tax cuts. Furthermore, had Reagan been successful in seriously trimming the fat from the federal government, there might not have been a need to 'take back' that third.
Ironically, Conason (unintentionally I'd imagine) points out the danger in any predicted 'scenario.' That danger should serve to raise grave doubts when considering BO's economic projections. Those qualify, hands down, as the 'rosiest' of all time.
But facts are inconvenient for propaganda—especially when politicians and pundits are seeking to escape blame for policies that have failed.
I quite agree with this. But it cuts both ways, and assumes it was nothing more than 'policies' that failed, and only those of the President in question. Furthermore, his highly selective use of 'facts' doesn't help his argument much.
The rest of Conason's article is mostly smokescreen, part of the effort to keep us focused elsewhere, to keep meaningless fluff front & center, while the real objectives in health care, education & energy (none of which will do diddly squat for the recession and which may well undo any efforts to fix it) are pushed through. BO really doesn't know or care that much about the economic situation - the 'economics' of community organizing are pretty much limited to 'How can we get more government money for this?' He's leaving the economy to Pelosi, Reid & Geithner. On Leno, he said again that Brownie's Geithner's doing a 'great job.' So far, Olberman hasn't made much of the irony.
So even as critics roast President Obama and his treasury secretary, honesty requires that they acknowledge that the problems faced by Obama and Timothy Geithner are not of their making.
Honesty also requires acknowledging that they (I repeat) signed on for the job. Time to dispense with the 'we inherited it' brush-off.
What's going to have the greatest and most long-lasting impact on us is his legislative agenda to massively expand the reach of the federal government, to infiltrate it into as many aspects of our daily lives as possible. It's all about establishing centralized control of everything. Let us pray that somebody actually reads that legislation.
Remember, it is a fact that, despite massive federal spending on education over the past 4 decades and the massive make-work project that is the Department of Education, our educational system has failed. Failed the very people it was intended to help - our children. BO's solution? More of the same, even bigger government, with an ever bigger bureaucratic army to police it. The Achilles heel of federal solutions is that there is never 'enough' - and never will be. If we don't return real control of schools to local communities, no amount of federal money is going to cure that failure. We're all crazy if we think it will.
