Despite Failure of “Stimulus” to Work as Advertised,
President Focuses on Regulatory Schemes, not Economic Recovery
President Focuses on Regulatory Schemes, not Economic Recovery
Welcome Instapundit Readers! While you’re here, you might want to check out my tributes to Karl Malden, my co-blogger’s reflections on the President’s tanking poll numbers, a thought on how some gay marriage activists have made demonizing Mormons their modus operandi and my observation that the MSM see Obama and Palin as blank screens upon which to project their prejudices.
Today, the Labor Department released figures showing unemployment hitting new highs, continuing to exceed even the level the Obama Administration forecast it would have attained without the “stimulus”–and considerably higher (considerably, considerably) than Democrats promised if Congress passed the legislation which may well have ended Arlen Specter’s political career. (Hey, ya’ gotta find a silver lining somewhere.)
(Chart courtesy of Innocent Bystanders.)
No wonder the President’s support is taking a hit, particularly on the economy.
Apparently, Obama is more interested in exploiting the economic crisis to achieve his own political goals* than to first accomplish what he was elected to do. Recall, how the polls started shifting in the Democat’s direction as the scope of the financial meltdown became clear. He used the economic downturn to his political advantage. People trusted him to fix the economy.
But, now instead of focusing on the economy, he continues forward a myriad of initiatives, many of which would place burdens on private industry, you know, companies which tend to create new jobs. Instead of getting us out of the mess that Obama “inherited,” the “stimulus” has made it worse.
Small businesses aren’t hiring because they are “paralyzed by regulatory uncertainty.” If they had greater confidence in the Administration’s economic plans, were less skeptical about its attitude toward the private sector, these employers might be expanding their businesses, hiring new workers and spurring economic growth.
Given the regulatory schemes proposed by the Obama Administration and the legislation proposed by the Democratic Congress, no wonder the economy continues to stagnate. Unless the President develops economic plans which work, based on models of successful recoveries, rather than adhere to theories similar to past policies which failed to end economic crises, expect unemployment to continue its upward climb. But, then again, if the economy fails to recover, expect Obama’s failures should help end the political careers of Barbara Boxer, Russ Feingold, Patty Murray and Hary Reid.
Like I said, ya’ gotta find a silver lining.
*As i was finishing writing this post, I had this thought–do you the Administration insisted on moving with such haste on the “stimulus” so they could focus on those regulatory schemes close to their hearts?
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Was it Rahm Emanuel who said earlier this year, “Never waste a crisis”? (i.e., as an opportunity to enact the Democratic Party’s agenda of expanding its power, and the government’s power, over Americans)
Comment by ILoveCapitalism — July 2, 2009 @ 9:29 pm - July 2, 2009
So Obama was wrong about a maximum of 8% unemployment. He was wrong about the shovel ready jobs and the stimulus. He was wrong about verbally supporting the Iranian freedom fighters. He was wrong about the pork bill. He was wrong about not allowing the natural bankrupcy of the auto companies. When exactly are we going to ask him to quit being so Napoleaonic?
Comment by Gene in Pennsylvania — July 2, 2009 @ 9:50 pm - July 2, 2009
considering the recession has been going on sinze 2007, I think you might be shooting your wad a little early…
Of course you might be suffering from Premature celebration syndrom.
if so I apologize.
try the start and stop method.
Comment by gillie — July 2, 2009 @ 10:28 pm - July 2, 2009
yo gille did you see the recent approval poll ratings of your Democrat Congress?
18% pal. NICE. Leftist liberal Democrat boobs, and morons. Way to defend em! Helps to shore up your credibility! hehe
Obamas economic leader Christina Romer was on CNBC this morning and said the 7 million unemployed and the 467,000 more unemployed in JUNE was a surprise to them. She said the stock market was up. “Obamas economic advisors”….now that’s an oxymoronic statement huh? Man your people are out of touch or morons. Which is it?
Comment by Gene in Pennsylvania — July 2, 2009 @ 10:37 pm - July 2, 2009
gille is right, the recession began at the end of 2007. Unemployment then was 4.7%. And the liberal Democrats were wailing about the Bush economic results. Now the Obamateleprompter economy has DOUBLE THE UNEMPLOYMENT. With no end in sight.
LiberalzDemocrats get so frustrated with the blogosphere. No preplanned questions. No teleprompters. No pre selected questioners. No 60 minute time limit. No 13 question limit. So frustrating this freedom. WAAAAHHHH
Comment by Gene in Pennsylvania — July 2, 2009 @ 10:45 pm - July 2, 2009
#5 we’ll see
lots of time right now and if there is one thing Obama has shown its the ability to be patient, not panic and allow the crops to grow
Comment by gillie — July 2, 2009 @ 10:54 pm - July 2, 2009
Really? When, gillie? Obama has never stayed in one job long enough to do anything. He preens, gets his picture taken, votes present, and moves on to something else.
The Peter Principle kicks in at this point; Obama has truly reached the pinnacle of his incompetence. He’s gone as far as affirmative action and liberal brainwashing can take him. Now we get to see what happens when a truly-incompetent, narcissistic individual takes the reins of an entire country and proceeds to drive it into the ground trying to remake it in his own tin-pot image.
Comment by North Dallas Thirty — July 2, 2009 @ 11:22 pm - July 2, 2009
“do you [think] the Administration insisted on moving with such haste on the “stimulus” so they could focus on those regulatory schemes close to their hearts?”
Without a doubt, except that the haste is to not allow anyone sufficient time to organize any opposition.
Comment by pst314 — July 2, 2009 @ 11:52 pm - July 2, 2009
um, gillie, please note the title of the post. Please read its contents. Please check the graph. The rest is based on information provided by Obama’s team.
He’s the one who told us that if we enacted the “stimulus,” we’d see unemployment peak at about 1.5% less than it is today. He’s the one who told us we shouldn’t be patient.
Why aren’t your wiling to measure him against his own promises? Guess ’cause it’s easier for you to attack us instead?
Oh, and, if the recession had been going on since 2007, it would be ending by now, considering the length of most such downturns. So, please quit attacking us and dare to hold your guy to account.
Comment by GayPatriotWest — July 3, 2009 @ 12:20 am - July 3, 2009
Gillie, Gillie, Gillie. Your fellow democrats didnt even read the bill. Todd lied about the AIG bonus feature. Barney Frank didnt want regulation. Nancy Pelosi asked for a “truth commission” and her fellow democrats voted “hell no!!!” Humm…I see a pattern here. The stimulus package was soooooooooooo important it had to be passed or else there was going to be financial armageddon. Guess what, my democrat puppet, it couldnt be any worse. I take that back. Your Dream Team is working on the next chapter – it is gonna get worse.
Comment by Duffy - Native Intelligence — July 3, 2009 @ 1:26 am - July 3, 2009
Gillie is right.
The recession began in December 2007 according to the NBER — indeed, the economy kept growing for a year after Republicans left and wasnt until Democrats had been there for a year and their policies and budgets started taking effect that things tanked.
That makes it two and half years since Dems took control and they have done NOTHING but make the economy far worse.
Comment by American Elephant — July 3, 2009 @ 6:08 am - July 3, 2009
But keep in mind, while Democrats have spent a trillion dollars to “fix” the economy ( a proposition economists are basically laughing at), they have only spent a small portion of it, and despite the millions of people suffering and out of work, are holding the majority in reserve, unused, so they can throw money at their special interests and voters just before the 2010 election.
Comment by American Elephant — July 3, 2009 @ 6:13 am - July 3, 2009
even using ghillies definition of recession, it is still a dem problem as they were the ones writing the budgets, and as can be easily seen from the CBO and other charts, the deficit was again shrinking with the Bush tax cuts and the growth of the economy. . . . until the after the ‘06 elections and Reid/Pelosi pork monster bills.
On the other hand. . . looking at Obama’s forecasts with or without the Porkulous, I think we have finally found Al Gore’s Hockey Stick!
Comment by JP — July 3, 2009 @ 9:43 am - July 3, 2009
Under Cap and Tax, you’ll have to get permission from a Federal Bureaucrat before you can sell your house. Can we call it socialism yet?
Are people still responding to gillie? Why? He’s an idiot.
Comment by V the K — July 3, 2009 @ 9:48 am - July 3, 2009
The thing about Gillie and Buckeyenutlicker is, they don’t care about the enormous deficits, they don’t care about the recession, they don’t care about the job crushing regulations or the coming tax hikes or the loss of freedom. They don’t care about facts. They only care that their team is in charge. Nothing else matters.
Comment by V the K — July 3, 2009 @ 10:10 am - July 3, 2009
Hmm, the recession has been going since 2007… I seem to remember something important happening in 2006 on Capitol Hill. I can’t quite put my finger on it… It’ll come to me.
Comment by DoDoGuRu — July 3, 2009 @ 10:18 am - July 3, 2009
The problem is a misdiagnosis of the problem. This is not an inventory driven recession. It’s a credit driven recession. The real problem is too much debt, so adding more only compounds the problem. This is obvious even to a child.
Geithner is doing the same thing he did when he dealt with the Asian crisis. He misidentified what was a debt crisis as a liquidity crisis, thus the solutions he offered only made the situation worse. This is precisely why Asian economies no longer trust the IMF or modern Western capitalism. Because it’s no longer capitalism, it’s debt slavery.
Comment by Ga — July 3, 2009 @ 10:20 am - July 3, 2009
[...] Gay Patriot post: Despite Failure of “Stimulus” to Work as Advertised, President Focuses on Regulatory Schemes, no… Apparently, Obama is more interested in exploiting the economic crisis to achieve his own political [...]
Pingback by Obama: Carter on Steriods? : Urbin Report — July 3, 2009 @ 10:51 am - July 3, 2009
The projections return shortly to 5% unemployment in fairly short order, with or without “stimulus”. If instead the graph flattens out at near 10% can even Obama fast-talk that? Or, let’s hypothesize that this Keynesian optimum of 5% is no longer realizable given the destruction of our Reaganite (this incudes Clinton) economy for a ham-handed aping of 1960’s France. Give ghillie his due, he seems at the least willing to embrace that ultimate and wisest end to all political discussions… “We shall see….”
Comment by megapotamus — July 3, 2009 @ 10:57 am - July 3, 2009
Christina Romer and her husband are main economic advisors to Obama. They are part of a UC, Berkeley group of economists for hire. In an interview at Berkeley she made the following observation on tax cuts as a way to stimulate the economy:
I read this as skip the tax cut part and reshape the economy instead. Big government must have big revenue so stop fooling around with stimulating a free market system when we are replacing it with a controlled economy.
Comment by heliotrope — July 3, 2009 @ 11:19 am - July 3, 2009
Obama wants the economy to totally tank, that way people will be more receptive to a government takeover of everything.
The more people are out of work with no healthcare coverage, the easier it is to say to them, no matter what you can have government coverage.
The real solution would be to disengage healthcare from employers and make it true free market, so it is easier for people at all levels of society to choose what is best for them.
Sorry, that was some common sense creeping in, not something this administration cares about, all they want is more control over our lives.
Comment by Leah — July 3, 2009 @ 11:52 am - July 3, 2009
Fellow Patriots. You are doing a good job – driving less, saving more, consuming less. Keep it up until we dump the Dems in 2010, and send Obama packing in 2012.
Vote AGAINST any and all who voted for the liberal progressive lies and economy destroying plans in both the Senate and the House. NEVER give apolitician seniority privileges in committees. You see what the Democrats have done.
POLITICAL CLASS MY A _ _.
Let’s vote people in who willTAKE away retirement packages of all who voted for the liberal progressive lies instead of letting them destroy your retirement.
ATTEND TEA PARTIES & HOLD YOUR LOCAL AND STATE GOVERNMENT ACCOUNTABLE.
FIGHT, VOTE, PROTEST, CANCEL MSM CABLE AND PRINT MEDIA. SAVE AMERICA.
Comment by mad-as-H — July 3, 2009 @ 12:13 pm - July 3, 2009
Nancy Pelosi’s, Harry Reid’s, and Obama’s motto:
“If we could just tell everyone what to do, we would all be fine”
Comment by Andrew_M_Garland — July 3, 2009 @ 8:37 pm - July 3, 2009
[...] ‘President Focuses on Regulatory Schemes, not Economic Recovery’ – Gay Patriot [...]
Pingback by Dirty Democrats » “Where are the jobs?”: Updated — July 6, 2009 @ 2:06 am - July 6, 2009
Of course the partisans are interested in cheap shots. Yes unemployment did rise dramatically during the first few months of Obama’s term. Unemployment is a lagging indicator and the economy took a huge body blow during the Bush years. If you down two six packs last night and throw up when your mom makes you eggs in the morning, it isn’t your mom’s cooking that made you sick.
The other cheap shot is to assume the stimulus failed. But to make this argument you guys have to take a rather odd position. You have to argue that the economic team was dead on in projecting future unemployment without the stimulus but horrible in projecting unemployment with the stimulus. But why is it not more likely that the forecast for how bad the recession would be is the element that is off? If the recession forecast understates how bad it is, then the rate without the stimulus might easily be 11 or 12 percent. Given that this type of depression-like recession is relatively rare while stimulus packages are not there is more reason to believe the forecast of the ‘without stimulus’ curve had more error.
Comment by Boonton — July 6, 2009 @ 9:42 am - July 6, 2009
Krugman makes a more relevant observation on the graph in http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/07/05/bruce-bartlett-misstates-the-problem/
The purpose of the graph is not to forecast unemployment rates but to estimate the impact of the stimulus plan. The key piece then is the difference between the ‘with’ and ‘without’ curves. For Q2 to beginning of Q3, the projected impact of the stimulus on the unemployment rate is barely noticeable maybe half a %. The project asserts that most of the impact comes out in 2010 where the spread expands to maybe a point and a half.
To say then that the stimulus failed makes no sense unless you have an argument that the stimulus somehow caused unemployment to be higher than it otherwise would be. This, though, has no orthodox economic backing. Gay Patriot’s link and claim that ‘regulatory uncertainty’ is the problem is absurd for multiple reasons.
1. The rate of unemployment growth is decreasing, if uncertainity was the cause and is getting worse, then you’d see the opposite.
2. Regulation has actually been quite mild under Obama. Yes there’s uncertainity if you’re a giant bankrupt car company or a giant bankrupt Wall Street firm but that’s not small business and that is not the leading job creator in the economy.
3. The macro concerns of the cnbc commentator are quite frankly irrelevant to small business. A small business’s primary driver is the local economy. If small businessmen sat around pondering things like ‘whose going to pay for the stimulus’ nothing would ever get done. Go ask your local repair shop, fast food joint, or consulting firm how much time they spent thinking about whose going to pay for the Iraq War, The Gulf War, ‘Star Wars’, the S&L bailout or $600 toilet seats for the defense dept. before they started their companies. Don’t assume talking head financial pundits actually produce any insight on the productive aspects of the economy.
4. The unemployment curve is smooth and appears to be following a parabolic path (steeper than we’d like of course). The curve does not appear to have been dramatically deflected which is what one would expect if the election brought in radically bad policies. What we are seeing is a business cycle downturn. Granted it’s a category 5 one that’s very dangerous, but nothing indicates that it is any other type of animal.
Comment by Boonton — July 6, 2009 @ 10:57 am - July 6, 2009
Wise Boonton, you are clearly not. Use a lot of words you do to say very little.
Yes, the rate of unemployment increase is decreasing, but we’re just comparing the actual record to the President’s projections. And we’re seeing that the “stimulus” hasn’t created new jobs.
And how can you call Krugman’s observation relevant since he uses the chart the Administration offered before implementing the “stimulus” without contrasting it with the actual record after it has passed.
Seems the the only ones making the cheap shots are you and Mr. Krugman–where posing a theory is enough to make it so.
Comment by GayPatriotWest — July 6, 2009 @ 2:02 pm - July 6, 2009
GPWest
The chart actually containes 3 projections:
1. A projection of the recession (the ‘without’ line)
2. A projection of the recession with stimulus (the ‘with’ line)
3. A projection of the impact of the stimulus (the difference between the lines).
Krugman’s point is that at this point the 3rd projection is probably the most important. Whatever the recession will do the question you want to know is whether or not the stimulus package will cut down on the recession’s pain or not. If, for example, it shaves 2% off the rate then that’s great. I’ll take 2% off of 8%, 9% or 14% anyday.
Here, though, the projection indicates very little decrease at this point. Eyeballing it it appears like the projection is 8.5% without at Q3 2009 and 8.0% with. That’s a difference of only 0.5 points in Q3 but Q3 just began a few days ago!
To see this point, imagine you have cancer and the doctor projects you have 5 years to live. A new drug offers you 3 years. Well if the doctor screwed up and you only have 2 years to live…that sucks…but if the projection of the drug is still good it makes all the sense in the world to take it.
Now my point was that what is your beef really besides the cheap point of ‘unemployment went up on Obama’s watch’ or ‘the projection was wrong’ (duh, all projections are wrong)? Are you saying #1 was perfect so the stimulus made life worse? All the error was in #2 (and #3)? My point is that #1 was probably the most off. The recession is/was a lot worse than people expected….its a borderline depression level event. The ‘without’ projection should have been a lot higher.
Comment by Boonton — July 6, 2009 @ 2:48 pm - July 6, 2009
Boonton, you use a lot of words to evade the point, save for your one line about the projection being wrong.
Let me repeat the point, the President said we needed to ask quickly to pass his “stimulus” to prevent things from getting worse. He used charts to show how the “stimulus” would make things better.
Innocent Bystanders (who gave us the chart) used red dots to show us just how wrong the President was.
So, while the projection of the impact of the “stimulus” is indeed the different between the three lines, the red dots are the reality.
Comment by GayPatriotWest — July 15, 2009 @ 2:21 am - July 15, 2009
[...] to come up with a clever analogy to build on my post earlier this month faulting the President for focusing on enacting regulatory schemes rather than promoting econmic recovery, when I (via Glenn) chanced on Ben Stein’s recent op-ed in the New York [...]
Pingback by GayPatriot » Will Obama’s Ambitious Agenda “Kill” the Economy? — July 15, 2009 @ 2:37 am - July 15, 2009