Good News You Haven’t (Really) Heard Yet
BushCo signs the paperwork for a transition.
The mess this man leaves means that the next President has a quite unenviable job on his hands. It is really clear that John McCain is not only not up to the job, he doesn’t even care about fixing the mess.
Our long national nightmare is almost over.
What are you doing to help get Obama elected in the next 23 days?
Tags: 2008 Presidential, Bush
“… he doesn’t even care about fixing the mess.”
How do you know what he cares about, Kreskin? Is this your amazing ability to know what others feel and think in action again? I’ll bet that skill comes in handy on dates.
heh, but only Honchette knows what Obama is “all about”.
And I guess this means that you don’t know if McCain cares about fixing the mess, since you don’t even offer any evidence that my assessment might be wrong.
Not that you especially care about why I come to this conclusion (or that you’ll even read it for that matter — I get that you’re still playing by high school rules), McCain hasn’t even demonstrated that he understands what the problems are, much less propose any coherent solutions. A presidential candidate who continues to claim that Fannie and Freddie are the cause of the financial meltdown isn’t playing on the right board. And if you don’t understand what the problem is, you can’t begin to come to grips with how to fix it. The debunking of the Fannie and Freddie crapola has been awfully thorough, and anyone who continues to repeat this really does not give a damn about the problem we face here.
Dom,
because he doesn’t even have a transition team set up yet. He has not set up anything, no transition team or anything. He plans on reviewong the play book in January as opposed to hitting the ground running in Novermber…in the event that he wins the election.
On the other hand , of course, Obama already has a large transition team organized in the event he wins the election. They are set and ready to go Nov 5th if they win it, so no one misses a beat.
Talk about leadership eh?
I actually agree with you. I don’t think he understands what the problem is. I don’t think either of them do. In fact, I don’t think anyone in Congress does (unless they have a PhD in Economics). I just think it’s a bit leap from accusing someone of not knowing about something to accusing someone of not caring about it.
You could probably get a bunch of the country’s best economists in the room and, while they may understand the problem, they wouldn’t likely agree on how to fix it.
In all seriousness (and without snark…which is not easy for me), I am concerned about Obama’s tax plan. I don’t want anyone’s taxes raised – even if they make > $250K/year. I am of the belief that the government has plenty of money and before it goes to its citizens with its hand out, it should show that it has done absolutely everything in its power to cut spending first. That said, my greatest concern is not whether personal income taxes are raised, it’s whether business taxes are raised. If Obama is planning to create jobs, raising taxes on businesses – especially small businesses – is not the way to do it. While I don’t necessarily agree that increasing taxes on small businesses will result in any kind of measurable job losses, it will definitely impact their budgets. Having worked for small businesses, I can tell you that one of the first things to get cut when money is tight is the market/advertising budget. If a business cannot afford to market/advertise, it will suffer in terms of growth which will impact hiring and salary increases.
You’re absolutely right, Cassandra, I never went to college. I’m not an idiot, though. You are clearly very well read. You can quote statistics with the best of them and you can explain complex economic issues at a very high level. I am impressed with that ability in spite of the fact that my short attention span sometimes makes my eyes glaze over a bit when I’m reading your posts. While I’m not as well-educated as you are, I am pretty smart about things like starting, growing and managing a small business budget.
Less than 100 days to go! Unfortunately, we still have Bush/Paulson/Bernanke in charge of our economy Bush/Cheney in charge of our foreign policy.
I’m not an idiot, though.
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Playing by high school rules was meant as a description of social interaction, not an indicator of your education, Dom.
McCain has spent the last few weeks going from a doctrinaire tax-cutting conservative to a big government interventionist and even doing the latter badly. He has been searching for something he can sell to folks that will make them comfortable with him steering the economy. Both of these teams have folks who do know exactly what is going on with this economy. McCain’s folks just keep reaching for the usual right-wing solutions to try to fix this. And it is those right-wing solutions that got us here in the first place. The Obama strategy — flawed as it is — at least tries to purge some of the worst of the ideology that hasn’t worked.
Frankly I would have been alot happier if Obama had asked everyone to stand back and get some real hearings on the issue and possible solutions. There are people who have had lots of great ideas and they all seemed to have gotten them up on the web shortly after Paulsen announced the crisis. I posted links to many of them.
Crucially, at least for me, Obama and his people understand that government needs to be paid for. They aren’t always good at details at how they’ll get there, but I think that they get that continued borrowing is unsustainable. Whether they’ll actually get there is the question, but I think they’ll try. Bush doubled the national debt while telling everyone that there was no need to pay for it. That was irresponsible and it will be really hard for whoever comes into office next to unwind that, especially if there is a long recession. In many ways, Bush made us all into the owner of a subprime mortgage that just reset and we still don’t get that we’ll have to tighten our belts.
Obama is not proposing increased taxes for most small businesses altho there are folks who will say that. The tax cuts that Obama is proposing are of the kind widely accepted as they type of stimulus that has real positive consequences in the economy.
I guess I just don’t understand the math. We are trillions of dollars in debt and he’s promising universal healthcare AND tax cuts, plus money to rebuild the infrastructure. I’m sorry, but I don’t see how ending the Iraq war and raising taxes on the rich will free up/generate enough money to even put a dent in what he’s promising. It’s very easy to promise everything to everyone. The tricky part is following through.
Dominique wrote:
And what makes you think that the PhD’s in Economics understand, either? 🙂
Remember the crash of 1987, when the market lost something like 31% of its value? Well, if you didn’t panic, and just stood pat, your were back up to your previous levels by September of 1989.
Will that happen this time? Perhaps not to the July levels, but yeah, there will be a recovery; there always is. And we’ll have a recovery regardless of which candidate is elected.
In August of 1982, the DJIA stood at 776. In July of this year, it topped out at over 14,000, a number wholly unsupportable by inflation.
The secret to our economy isn’t something you need a PhD to understand; it’s related to an ECON 101-level point, the velocity of money, or how many times a given dollar is spent over the course of a year. With the credit crunch, the velocity of money was slowed down. People got scared, consumer spending dropped, and the velocity of money slowed down again.
When people save, they reduce their own spending, and the velocity drops. In good times, bank lend money based upon what they have in deposits, so even someone who saves is contributing to the velocity of money, because as that money is borrowed by someone else, it gets spent again, contributing to the velocity.
But if people save (or just don’t spend; the money in their checking accounts is no different from money saved as far as banks’ demand deposits are concerned), and the banks don’t lend the money to others, velocity decreases.
As we have moved from an industrial economy to more of a service and financial-based one, we saw an increase on the dependence of velocity. Buying a coffee from Turkey Hill on your way to work, rather than drinking one at home, something that seems like a little thing, increases velocity; all of the little consumer spending that we do that wasn’t done in 1982 (bottled water? home computers? cell phones? internet service?) contribute to the same dollar being spent more times.
Once the sorting out of good money from bad is done, banks will start to lend money again, because they have to lend money to make money. The habits we formed toward ever increasing consumer spending will then bring the velocity of money back to what it was before the crash.
And, you know what? The government has nothing to do with any of that! 🙂
Dominique, maybe you don’t understand the math because the math never made any sense in the first place.
By the way, I saw an Obama commercial today, again promising that no one who earns less than a quarter-million dollars will see his taxes increased if he wins.
Pure bovine feces.
At least Obama has his presidential seal all ready to go.