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What the White House Really Knew About the Stimulus
IBD Editorials ^ | January 24, 2012

Posted on 01/24/2012 5:50:47 PM PST by Kaslin

Blame Game: News reports about a December 2008 White House stimulus memo claim it proves the stimulus was too small. What it really does is expose how Obama has misled the country about his economic policies.

The memo, written by Larry Summers — President Obama's top economic adviser at the time — shortly after the election, outlined the thinking of his economic team about the best size and make-up of a stimulus package.

News reports about the memo, which came to light this week, have focused on Summers' warnings that the government could spend only so much money in any given year, suggesting that this is why the stimulus was too small to be truly effective.

The Financial Times, for example, claimed "Obama advisers rejected giant stimulus," and the Atlantic said that "history might remember this memo as the document that killed any hope of a trillion dollars stimulus."

This is simply wrong.

First, the stimulus package that Obama signed was almost identical to Summers' "more ambitious option." That proposed $300 billion in new spending (the actual amount was $343 billion); $390 billion in tax cuts (actual amount was $264 billion, not including the subsequent payroll tax cut); and $200 billion in grants to states (actual amount, $180 billion).

Nor was the stimulus smaller than economists wanted at the time. Remember that in addition to the $787 billion stimulus (the CBO later upped it to $830 billion), there were other bills passed by the Democratic Congress that, as liberal Washington Post blogger Ezra Klein notes, added $500 billion to the stimulus pile.

That's awfully close to what even hard-core liberals advocated. Robert Reich, for example, wanted a $1.2 trillion two-year stimulus; Paul Krugman said it should be $600 billion in one year; Jamie Galbraith, $900 billion.

(Excerpt) Read more at news.investors.com ...


TOPICS: Editorial
KEYWORDS: paytoplay; stimulus

1 posted on 01/24/2012 5:50:53 PM PST by Kaslin
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To: Kaslin

BTTT


2 posted on 01/24/2012 5:52:13 PM PST by Jet Jaguar (Romney=Gun Grabber.)
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To: Kaslin

BTTT. JANUARY SOTU SURPRISE!!!!!!!!


3 posted on 01/24/2012 6:01:19 PM PST by Eagle of Liberty (Shaking My Head on a daily basis)
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To: Kaslin

“history might remember this memo as the document that killed any hope of a trillion dollars stimulus.”


They got $787,000,000,000. Is the claim here that another $213,000,000,000 would have turned this steaming pile of crap into the perfect piece of legislation to save the country? Is that what they’re saying?


4 posted on 01/24/2012 6:09:58 PM PST by Personal Responsibility (Obama 2012: Dozens of MSNBC viewers can't be wrong!)
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To: All
Candidate Barack Obama told us on the campaign trail: " The problem is, that the way Bush has done it over the last eight years is to take out a credit card from the Bank of China in the name of our children, driving up our national debt from $5 trillion for the first 42 presidents, # 43 added $4 trillion by his lonesome so that now we have over $9 trillion of debt that we are going to have to pay back, $30,000 for every man woman and child. That’s irresponsible. It’s unpatriotic."

REALITY CHECK Obama presided over the biggest political heist in US history. The Obamanations (insiders and politicians) sucked up trillions under the guise of inheriting the "Bush financial crisis."

THIS MADE ME LAUGH OUT LOUD Obama COS Rahm Emanuel "suddenly" discovered he wanted to be Chicago's mayor---the little turn went before the mics and announced his campaign "raised $10 million in just a few weeks." Rahm also controlled the US Treasury as COS.

================================================

What the so-called "collapse" of the banking system wrought under Obama:

FOURTEEN TRILLION DOLLARS Behind The Real Size of the Bailout; A guide to the abbreviations, acronyms, and obscure programs that make up the $14 trillion federal bailout of Wall Street
SOURCE motherjones.com
Mon Dec. 21, 2009 12:23 PM PST

The price tag for the Wall Street bailout is often put at $700 billion—the size of the Troubled Assets Relief Program. But TARP is just the best known program in an array of more than 30 overseen by Treasury Department and Federal Reserve that have paid out or put aside money to bail out financial firms and inject money into the markets.

To get a sense of the size of the real $14 trillion bailout, see our chart at web site. Below, a guide to the pieces of the puzzle:

Treasury Department bailout programs
(Remember that Obama's Treasury Dept was controlled by his then-COS Rahm Emanuel---a G/S lobbyist in the WH)

Money Market Mutual Fund: In September 2008, the Treasury announced that it would insure the holdings of publicly offered money market mutual funds. According to the Special Inspector General for the Troubled Asset Relief Program (SIGTARP), these guarantees could have potentially cost the federal government more than $3 trillion [PDF].

Public-Private Investment Fund: This joint Treasury-Federal Reserve program bought toxic assets from banks and brokerages—as much as $5 billion of assets per firm. According to SIGTARP, the government's potential exposure from the PPIF is between $500 million and $1 trillion [PDF].

TARP: As part of the Troubled Asset Relief Program, the Treasury has made loans to or investments more than 750 banks and financial institutions. $650 billion has been paid out (not including HAMP; see below). As of December 21, 2009, $117.5 billion of that has been repaid.

Government-sponsored enterprise (GSE) stock purchase: The Treasury has bought $200 million in preferred stock from Fannie Mae and another $200 million from Freddie Mac [PDF] to show that they "will remain viable entities critical to the functioning of the housing and mortgage markets."

GSE mortgage-backed securities purchase: Under the Housing and Economic Recovery Act of 2008, the Treasury may buy mortgage-backed securities from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. According to SIGTARP, these purchases could cost as much as $314 billion ---SNIP---.

LONG READ---go to web site to read more and checkout the shocking financial charts.

SOURCE http://motherjones.com/politics/2009/12/behind-real-size-bailout

5 posted on 01/24/2012 6:18:12 PM PST by Liz
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To: All

"Hi there, Americans. Obama put me in charge of the trillion dollar stimulus. My son and brother are gonna help me disperse the money. "

================================

Offshore Fraudster had links to offshore fund run by VP Biden's relatives
Reuters on Yahoo | 2/23/09 | BY Ajay Kamalakaran

(Reuters) – A fund of offshore hedge funds run by two members of VP Joe Biden's family was marketed exclusively by offshore firms controlled by Texas financier Allen Stanford, charged by regulators with an $8 billion fraud, the Wall Street Journal said.

The Bidens $50 million fund was jointly branded between the Bidens' Paradigm Global Advisors LLC and the offshore Stanford Financial Group entity headquartered in Antigua, and was known as the Paradigm Stanford Capital Management Core Alternative Fund, the paper said. Stanford-related offshore companies marketed the Biden fund to investors and also invested about $2.7 million of their own money in the fund, the paper said, citing a lawyer for Paradigm.

Paradigm Global Advisors is owned through a holding company by the vice president Biden's son, Hunter, and Joe Biden's brother, James, according to the WSJ. Paradigm's attorney, Marc LoPresti, who represents Hunter Biden and James Biden, as well as Paradigm, told the paper he did not know which Stanford entity invested the roughly $2.7 million.

Marc LoPresti, who represents Hunter Biden and James Biden told the paper the Bidens NEVER met or communicated with Stanford. (/snicker)

(Excerpt) Read more at news.yahoo.com ...

6 posted on 01/24/2012 6:19:37 PM PST by Liz
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Comment #7 Removed by Moderator

Comment #8 Removed by Moderator

To: Kaslin

Before the "stimulus" was passed, the incoming regime's Council of Economic Advisers predicted that with a stimulus of $0, unemployment would hit 9% for nearly a year and would still be close to 6.5% today. With Obama's stimulus . . . we saw exactly what anyone sensible who rejects Keynesian "economics" predicted, and it cost a total of $4T in massively wasteful deficit spending to accomplish that destructive goal.

9 posted on 01/24/2012 6:29:15 PM PST by Pollster1 (Natural born citizen of the USA, with the birth certificate to prove it)
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To: All

10 posted on 01/24/2012 6:30:12 PM PST by Liz
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To: Liz

bttt


11 posted on 01/24/2012 7:06:04 PM PST by Matchett-PI ("One party will generally represent the envied, the other the envious. Guess which ones." ~GagdadBob)
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