Posted on 10/19/2009 8:44:25 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
FIRST, “Saturday Night Live” parodies President Obama’s “achievements.” Then Mr. Obama wins the Nobel Peace Prize, bringing yet more head-scratching. Clearly, the nation’s attention is focused squarely on a question few presidents want to answer just nine months into their term: What has your administration accomplished?
I’ll leave foreign and military affairs to the Oslo Five and concentrate on domestic economics.
The president’s critics complain that his only real accomplishment is the $787 billion stimulus bill — which they deride, somewhat contradictorily, as either budget-busting, ineffective or both. But is that all there is? I think not.
STOPPING THE SLIDE Let’s remember that the new president was dealt a dreadful hand on Inauguration Day — including a shattered financial system and a national economy teetering on the brink of disaster. The administration’s chief accomplishment to date surely is devising and executing — with huge assists from the Federal Reserve — a comprehensive program to pull us back from the abyss. The stimulus was just one component.
With the unemployment rate near 10 percent, it is difficult, inappropriate and premature to stand up and cheer about the state of the economy. But the improvement should not be belittled. Growth of the gross domestic product in the second half of 2009 is likely to exceed 3 percent, a vastly better outlook than just six months ago, when the consensus forecast was 1 percent. Thus Job No. 1 — stopping the train wreck — appears to have been done rather well.
ENACTING THE STIMULUS PACKAGE The much-maligned fiscal stimulus has been criticized from both the left (as too small) and from the right (as too big, especially the spending parts). My own judgment is that both its magnitude and composition were reasonable, though not perfect.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
"On balance, then, this assessment leads to a Nobel-like verdict in the areas of financial regulation, health care and energy: the ideas have great merit, but any real achievements are hopes for the future. They don’t award prizes for that in Washington, even if they do so in Oslo.
Yet on the crucial macroeconomic and banking issues, we must conclude that “Saturday Night Live” got it quite wrong: Mr. Obama’s accomplishments in just nine months are palpable and were very much needed. If he seems to have achieved little, it’s partly because he set out to do too much. Too bad he didn’t just “focus like a laser beam on the economy.”
EDIT TO ADD : The author ( like Nobel Prize winner Paul Krugman, is an Economics professor at Princeton U. He was ealso economic adviser to the Slick one and a VP at the Federal Reserve ).
Barry O. is taking on water faster than a sieve
The author’s wife is a big Dem $ gal.
Appropriate.
The NY Times has become a satirical caricature of a paradoy.
Let's revisit in 6 months.
The stimulus package wasn’t too big - it was too stupid.
Proving once again that the only thing the NYT is good at is bad comedy...
“which they deride, somewhat contradictorily, as either budget-busting, ineffective or both.”
If this guy can’t see how a stimulus bill can be both budget-busting and ineffective, I don’t have any reason to continue listening to him.
Just for fun, allow me to explain it to him. The whole point of stimulus bills is to get money out as soon as possible. You know, in the interest of stimulating things. What usually happens, and what is happening in this case, is the money comes too late. Most likely, by the time the bulk of the money is spent, the economy will already be recovering. Sorta defeats the whole purpose, doesn’t it?
“The stimulus package wasn’t too big - it was too stupid”
But it was too big, too. That is, if you care about historically huge budget deficits, and apparently nobody does.
The Dem playbook:
Taxation
Regulation
Litigation
the media, asserting itself as The Authority in the public square, has decided it’s time for us to quit kidding around.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.