Obama was terrible for economic growth

Nowhere to be found were the hundreds of thousands of green jobs Obama promised. Nowhere to be found was any sign of economic competence from Obama and his administration. Instead, Obama created millions of government dependents who relied on the taxpayers for everything from food to healthcare.

Instead of opening up the throttle of America's business engine, Obama and his minions did everything they could to regulate it. Jobs were lost as businesses moved overseas and Obama himself pessimistically proclaimed those jobs weren't coming back. Business leaders who supported Obama told Clinton they wouldn't support her if she kept Obama's economic advisors.

In a nutshell, Obama hurt this country far more than he helped it and it could take decades to fix.

Now imagine how bad things would be if Sanders had beaten Trump.

 

People put too much emphasis on the economic impacts presidents have. Who's say that the growth rate wouldn't have been 0.6% instead of 1.6% with another president? Likewise, I personally think the stock market is overvalued (by a lot), but I'm not going to blame Trump if/when it crashes. I'm not saying presidents can't single handedly set the whole country down one economic path or another. But quantifying just how much and determining the timing of the lag between a specific presidential policy and it's eventual economic effects isn't as easy as most people seem to think.

 

I think you and I both know that you're ignoring the calamitous elephant in the room: the biggest market crash since the Great Depression. You think that had anything to do with a poor average growth rate? Nahhhh, couldn't be.

 

Obviously, if in 2009 we only had cut taxes a little more and had let GM and some large banks go bankrupt, and at the same time had balanced the budget by cutting 10,000s of government workers and kicked the unemployed and those on welfare to the curb, growth would have been peachy.

In the real world, though, the greatest private debt deleveraging since the great depression didn't allow for better growth.

 

Gotta love how much the con artists have forgotten that Obama inherited the Great RepubliCON Recession and prevented the economy from turning into the
Second Great RepubliCON Depression. Thanks Obama. It is amazing in the year 2017 how this country's version of the ignorant Taliban, RepubliCONS, want a
return to the same economic principles that tanked the US economy: Supply-side socialism.

 

I knew this was going to be the attempted get out of jail card.

He was president for 8 years, and the economy had already recovered significantly recovered (not due to Obama in my opinion). You can't blame his last year on something that happened a decade prior. Come on now.

 

That isn't what tanked the economy.

What tanked the economy was an agenda that favored a owner occupied housing market, and pressured lenders to make loans to people that had no business buying a home, coupled with reduced lending regulations.

That was ALL democrats.

Nice try though.

 

PIt's hard to defend Obama about anything, because he was simply the worst president in our history.

BUT, it's unfair to blame him about "economic growth", per se. Why? Because he never was an architect for anything having to do with "economic growth"! Obama was nothing but a yes-boy, socialist-lite stooge for the Federal Reserve Banking cartel. The Fed, and the Fed alone dictated all the major factors in economic growth, starting in August 2007, under Idiot Bush. When Idiot Obama was installed, he simply took the other idiot's place and kept right on doing the bidding of the Fed and the people that it had carefully installed in both the Republican and Democrat administrations. Hint: Paulson? Geithner?

People have wanted to shower praise, or, condemnation on both our presidential idiots, Bush and Obama, for things like lower unemployment, higher unemployment, lower gas prices, higher gas prices, lower stock market performance, improved stock market performance... BUT, it hasn't got anything to do with who the "president" is anymore. The whole damned thing is run by the Federal Reserve System and a gaggle of other central banks that now control the economies of all other countries in the world except for two -- Russia, and China....

 

That is a bald face lie. What really happen was lenders were issuing sub-prime loans to QUALIFIED borrowers and the courts put an end to this illegal practice.

 

So, what should the FED have done after the great recession? Raise interest rates?

Also, how would the aftermath of the great recession played out without the FED?

 

You could have left it at "Obama was terrible"

 

Glass-steagall was a huge contributor as these sub prime loans were combined and sold to investors.

That legislation was signed by Clinton.

At a minimum, both parties had responsibility, but your republiCONS nonsense is noted.

 

No mystery. Without Fed interference, the normal forces that are an essential part of our free-market economic system would have gotten rid of those who drove their companies into insolvency and were headed straight to bankruptcy. New owners and management would have taken over all the assets, and our economy would have completely recovered without interference from anyone or anything within about two years -- much as it did under Ronald Reagan after he took the reins from Jimmuh Cawduh.

Back then, though, the Fed was intelligently run and managed by Paul Volcker, who worked with Ronald Reagan. Result: we had a profound, exceptional recovery from the horrible days of "Stagflation" that lasted from Nixon until we got rid of Carter. Interest rates increased because the demand for money increased -- but instead of generating trillions of imaginary dollars and stuffing them into banks, like Bernanke did, Volcker raised interest rates in accordance with DEMAND, without debasing our currency. After about two years, everything levelled out, Reagan cut taxes tremendously, and yet tax revenue came pouring in. We had a GREAT, long-lasting recovery, and I remember it well....

By contrast, in June 2009, the big-wig Libocrat economists declared "The Great Recession" to be over. Wonderful. Except for bankers and stock market gamblers, who is better off today, in 2017 -- eight freaking years later?!

 

Economic growth or lack thereof cannot be solely attributed to whomever happened to be President at the time. It's a matter of party and which party has majority control of the government. If one party has total control then the President has more of a leadership role, less so if they only control one house. Budget policy is primarily congress.

 

I had to do with a business cycle that also got hit by the financial crisis. The latter was taken care of by TARP. The former was not taken care of by the Democrats who took the congress in 2007 and failed to institute policies to help mitigate the recession and then passed their trickle-up stimulus which failed to get us into a full recovery. And then of course their disastrous fiscal policy increasing spending 9% in 2008 and then 18% in 2009 taking the last Republican deficit of $161B in 2007 to their WHOPPING $1,400B in just two years and keeping the deficit about $1,000B for the next four years.

 

You are attempting to change the subject. The issue was whether loan institutions were being forced to issue loans to unqualified borrowers....the answer is no.
Loan institutions were improperly issuing sub prime loans to qualified borrowers and the courts corrected this injustice.

 

You forget the Democrats took majority control of the government in 2007 so why do you call it the Republican recession? And how exactly did supply side economics tank the economy when in fact they gave us 52 months of full employment WITH I might add average LFPR, rising incomes, soaring tax revenues, solid economic growth and falling deficits heading towards a surplus again after the previous Republican surplus.

What do you have against that compared to the failed Democrat Demand-Side socialism which kept us out of a full recovery for almost 8 years?

 

Yes, and normal market forces have the tendency to provide positive feedback on the way up and negative feedback on the way down, thus exacerbating the up and down swings, which would have probably resulted in a depression. The two year recovery you mention is just fantasy, not based on any fact but rather wishful thinking.

Yep, cutting taxes in a deep recession when revenues are already down would have worked great for the already strained budget.

In any case, I understand the disdain for the FED, I was once of that opinion too. However, the stable inflation rates in the last decades seem to indicate that the FED is doing its job rather well.

 

obama was terrible for America.

 

sanders was tricky, looking back it would have been hard to create high wage jobs for the poor by imposing climate change regulations on the energy industry.

he was against the outsourcing like President Trump, but high wage jobs are lost from both outsourcing and climate change regulations on the oil, gas, and coal polluting industries..obama ran on taxes on the rich to redistribute wealth, and while that creates generous welfare it is not in line with freedom.

hillary clinton losing probably saved America from socialism, because sanders had a good chance of being elected if he went up against the President. their plan was really a welfare state where only the i fone people like bill gates in silicon valley are rich.

 

So that forced Obama to make job predictions that failed miserably?

You do realize that happened before he was president right?

 

Democrats weren't the ones lending money using sketchy tactics and then passing that debt on down the road. They certainly played a role in it, but it is ultimately the real estate industry which overvalued homes and properties and the banking industry with their predatory lending habits that caused the crash. They don't get a free pass because they weren't prevented from doing it by the government. Personal responsibility, yeah? The endless pursuit of money is not a valid defense for unethical behavior. Greed is not a valid defense of unethical behavior.

 

First, guys like you manufactured excuses for the debacle that the Bush years brought and tried to blame others.

Then you insisted that the only way out was austerity and spending cuts. (it hasn't worked in the UK).

Then when things started to improve, they didn't improve fast enough to suit you.

All the while conservatives and the GOP did their level best to stand in the way.

There's no reason whatsoever to listen you you rant about an economy that is better than it has been in years. Donald Trump isn't responsible either. In fact, a lot of folks are holding their breath in case the Clown Prince screws it up.

 

Really?

I don't recall the the economy worked itself out in two and a half years under Reagan. Rather, I recall that the unemployment rate was higher in 1984 than it had been in 1980, Interest rates were only slightly lower.

But we did have record budget deficits, so any money that might have lowered interest rates or stimulated private investments was being soaked up by Reagan's yawning government spending.

The recovery finally appeared in teh summer of 1985, when Saudi Arabia stopped propping up OPEC oil prices and oil dropped.

That was also teh beginning of the end of the Soviet Union, as they could not meet their debt obligations with decreased oil income, and the US was still feeding their grain shortfalls.

 

I do remember it a bit differently, but I'm not trying to idolize Reagan so much as I'm trying to point out that neither Bush nor Obama should be blamed, or praised, for any big, hooptie-wonderful economic breakthroughs.

Again, if the Fed had stayed OUT of the "Great Recession", market forces would have prevailed and the whole thing would have been resolved in about two years. As it is, all the Fed has done is to dig a far deeper, darker hole than we've ever even imagined before, and although the recession may, technically, be over, nobody but bankers and Wall Street gamblers have prospered in the long run.