Capitol Hill Blue Forums Political Issues The Obama Administration 6,825.42 Nice job Mr. President

And those workers spent that money on goods and services, which in turn created more jobs. And it was working until he changed course and started worrying about deficits.


No, you brought up "markets" and how we should just let them "fix" everything.


"Field mice?" Is there any baseless, debunked republican talking point that you haven't bought into? The Obama tax cuts will go right into the economy and create demand for goods and services.

But it was tax money! It wasn't money from private business, it was money taken from people who were getting paid with tax money. It was unsustainable and inflative. He might as welll just sent checks out to people. That isn't a market, that is federal welfare.

If you want to institute an FDR New Deal type of program it will not work in today's climate. If Obama had been elected in good times he might have been able to institue it and have some success, but in these times all it will accompluish id inflation and higher taxes. Higher taxes lead directly to higher unemployment, which leads to the need to raise taxes even higher to care for the newly unemployed.

I would think that our experience under the Clinton administration when taxes were increased and the country enjoyed record job creation and under the Bush II administration when taxes were cut and there was minimal job creation would be evidence that your premise concerning the relationship between taxes and employment is false.

Assuming that it is true, but only for the sake of argument. then I guess Obama is doing the right thing because he is cutting taxes on 95-98% of the work force.

Using this chart, please explain the "direct" relationship between high taxes and high unemployment which you contend exists.

That's ridiculous Ma. If he had been elected in good times there would be no reason for a New New Deal. Sadly he inherited a godawful mess from his predecessor, whom you have admitted having no love for. His predecessor instituted exactly the policies you espouse and they failed miserably. Your logic is flawed and you stubbornly cling to a false reality.
First, that government is too big. We are the government the government must be as big as we are.
Second, that the government is the problem, we are the government and we are not the problem.
Third, it was not tax money it was borrowed money, just like businesses and private citizens borrow money for what they need the government must borrow money. If the Bush regime hadn't grown government so much and borrowed so much money and put it into all the wrong hands we wouldn't now be forced to go back to the depression era programs to keep peoples heads above water until the free market recovers from the Bush era hangover that has driven its dick in the dirt.

The Clinton experience does not work, it is a statistical blip. The internet boom started under Clinton, jobs were created for hundreds of startup companies that do not exist 8 years later. I lived in that industry. That was a dynamic time, but nobody could quite figure out how to make the inetrnet work as a business. By the time Clinton left office, the boom had gone bust. Today you cannot find more than a handfull of those companies still in business, and most of them are ISP type businesses who sell server time.

Actually, looking at the whole internet bust thing, the Bush years were a tremendous success employment wise. Jobs were created to take the place of the internet bust layoffs.

We disagree with the unterior motive of Obama. Had he been elected in good times he would have tried to institute the same spending programs he is now. He campaigned on thuis latform and he really hasn't modified it all that much. We got lucky, with the economy the way it is he will be unable to implement the change he wants to implement. The federal coffers will not be able to support socialized healthcare, and the economy will not be able to support the tax increases necessary to implement it. He tells up he is giving us a tax cut, but he is allowing tax cuts to expire that will dwarf the cuts he is implementing. Once that happens it will be even harder for him to pass new spending.

We are not the government, we are the pawns who elect the thieves to office. If we were the government America would be much different today than it is.

1) Government is not only too big, but incompetent as well. The sub-prime crisis could have been avoided had anybody had a set, instead some denied there was a problem, some cringed away from political pressure and some made a profit from it, but nobody was willing to do anytghing about it.

2) Government and business do not have the same agenda. Government has pressure applied from all segments of the populous. Most times that pressure is counter productive from a business standpoint, for example the Reno DOJ and the banking industry blackmail.

3) It was money printed by the treasury at the request of congress to pay for people to work on busy work jobs. Those monies were not outside money that could be used to support the federal budget, it was money paid by the federal government to people who were unemployed. It was worse than tax dollars, it was money printed with nothing to back it up. It was federal money that the federal government then taxed. It doesn't matter where the government gets the money, if the check comes from the federal government in any way, it is by definition tax money being used to pay for it. Whether it is long term bonds or taxes collected, tax money will be used to pay for it.

We got lucky, huh? Fortunately for us the economy is in shambles so he wont be able to make any progress? I find very little consolation in that logic.


We are the government and we elect men just like ourselves to implement the laws and policies we endorse.
If you and I were Senators how would we be different from our current elected officials? I daresay the difference would be slight and others would call us thieves.

The crisis is not a "sub prime" crisis. The economy is not crashing because homeowners are defaulting on loans, homeowners are defaulting on loans because the economy is crashing. Who was it that denied there was a Problem? Who was it that didn't "have a set"? Was it the guy who last year said: while banks were busy slicing and dicing those loans, whether to prime borrowers or to fools who bought what they couldn't afford, into untraceable and ultimately unprofitable paper. The banks dug their own graves, Ma. You can't blame Janet Reno for all of this. You can blame reckless investments and outrageous "Bonuses" paid to CEOs of companies who lost money that was never theirs to lose.

Government does not have to be incompetent. I know it seems like it after eight years of George Bush's lackadaisical forays into whatever his gut and god told him was the right thing to do but your opinion that explains a lot about why republican leadership so often fails. and why, after the fact it is so difficult to rise above that failure.

Tom Petruno - Los Angels Times Columnist

Why bother, Phil?. Ma's already admitted that his purpose here is to "piss liberals off." See Ma's comments on the latest D Thompson rant-thread. That's probably the best explanation for his advancement of theories which are only based in the fantasy world of right-wing talking points. You know, like, higher taxes lead directly to higher unemployment, or poor people are poor because they are lazy or don't play by the rules, and, my favorite: rich people are rich because they work hard and play by the rules.

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