Today the White House admitted that that there will be 9% measured unemployment through the election. Barack Obama should step aside and allow the Democrats to go through a nomination process to pick a better candidate.
Because Obama has no experience in creating products people want to use, he really has no energy for creating wealth or good jobs, although I think in some academic way he understands where wealth comes from, but he doesn’t feel it. So there is really nothing for him to run on except to run a vicious negative campaign against the Republican nominee and the Tea Party which is a popular movement of Americans.
In doing so Obama will betray himself personally, and will lead Democratic footsoldiers to betray their ideals and morals by becoming relentlessly negative and cynical. People still like Obama as a man and he will be throwing that away. No new ideas or positions can come out of such a campaign, so very little will be accomplished or mandated at the end of it. How is that going to help the country?
nt
I guess I’m most annoyed about what this campaign is doing to venues like this website. A lot of elected officials come here to connect, or maybe just to blast-fax us, but even so, it’s not doing a service to set up an echo chamber.
If the leadup to the Iraq war taught us something, it’s that on some levels elected officials really aren’t that far in their beliefs and ideas from whatever is banging around the internet.
It’s surprising how often a Republican suggests that Obama step aside to make way for a primary challenger, and how infrequently a Democrat does.
…I want to say in Salon, but I’m not sure, a column in which the author suggested Obama step aside in favor of Hillary Clinton. The author basically compared Obama to Neville Chamberlain. The President’s failure to bring down unemployment is related to his apparent preference for policies that might have a chance, at least in sane world, of getting bipartisan support over those which have a better chance of working.
will skyrocket if she runs. You couldn’t spell “SPOIL SPORT” in big enough letters.
Let’s not stir this pot.
She can handle them and her opponents better than he can, but I’m not pushing for her to primary him.
Progressives want a primary challenger because they want Obama to move left, so bringing in Hillary would hardly serve.
How far do you think the progressive candidate would get in a primary field of new candidates?
May depend on the issue. I’m not necessarily endorsing the idea of a switch, but I do get the sense that she would fight harder for what she wants, so there’s a chance the policy results would end up being more progressive.
Is it supposed to make us proud to watch our values carried in on their shields?
I’d fully support Clinton on the ticket. Sorry Joe. :v/
However, I also expect that if we fight we’ll get something closer to what we want than if we start by proposing what the other side claims to want.
No way. I’d play ball because I always play ball, but that would really annoy me if he dumped Biden for HRC.
Quite frankly, too many from both parties are neither liberal nor conservative, but in the pockets of the corporations. Each then serve the corporate interests and attempt to sell their policies to constituents in their terms. Which is why the activists on both sides appear equally unhappy.
so that everyone is able to get a good laugh.
Even with Republicans, including our esteemed junior Senator Scott Brown, doing their best to stifle the economy, the stimulus and Obama’s policies have been working. The answer is to elect those who want to create jobs, and sorry, filibustering job bills like Brown has done is enough to warrant another senator to represent us. You know a senator that wants to create jobs and help the economy. A vote for Brown seascraper is a vote against the economy.
the job market took off in the right direction at the same time Scott Brown was sworn in as US Senator. Ergo, Scott Brown gets all the credit.
The President is in a much better position to take credit/blame than an individual Senator. Looks to me like recovery began about when Obama took office and happened to cross into positive territory about the time Brown became Senator.
The various stimulus measures passed over Republican objections were responsible not the election of the then most junior Senator.
charts like the one above really tell us nothing. Trends develop over years and many charts (annual US budget deficits of one President vs. another) may look good/bad on the surface but the underlying variables are so dynamic that it’s hard to conclude anything from the chart.
So I agree that my comment about Scott Brown is akin to a broken clock being right twice a day.
is that purposely trying to mislead unemployment rate numbers is not going to help Republicans. Policies like the stimulus turned around the economy, not sure what specifically that Brown did, could you give me legislation he specifically passed or stopped? Health care reform? Nope.
Unemployment rate is a lagging indicator, job growth is a true measure, going from 300,000 losses a month, to decreasing losses, to gains is the right direction. You don’t get the real picture focusing on the unemployment rate, probably why Republicans focus on it so much. Determining who is helping and who is hurting is where the votes will go, Brown’s filibusters on job bills do not help him. Do you think it does?
I find it difficult to give credit to anyone, the President, the Senate or the House (including the MA contingency) for anything regarding jobs. They have all failed and continue to fail.
I do believe many partisans will look at the current and recent results and try to designate blame to their opponents while they spin goodness for the people they support but my lens sees failure on all sides.
Starting with a staggering unemployment rate in 2008 and now the current 9.1% unemployment rate is not what the people voted for in 2008… or 2010. When someone promises they’ll fix your house for $20,000 and then it costs $40,000, the sting doesn’t go away when they remark that it could have cost $60,000. At least when Mayor White would lie to Boston residents ABOUT REAL ESTATE TAXES, he would say it’s going to raise from $20,000 to $60,000 and then happily proclaim it will “only” be $40,000.
Who sucks less is not a rallying cry! We need a plan that will work and someone to lead us with that plan. Unfortunately, I have very little confidence in either need! Too many optimistic theoreticians and too few experienced pragmatists.
And we need to know when they ask for something big like more stimulus spending, it’s actually going to work as predicted and none of this “it could’ve been a lot worse stuff”…(from Krugman 1/2009)…
great. We agree.
When voting, get rid of the electrician and plumber who purposely acted in a way that made what normally would have been a $20000 fix into a $40000 project. You know, instead of putting them in charge.
Unfortunately many times “You only get one chance to make a first impression!” Most people’s impression of the ARRA was a bad one.
You can see the name of the party in the lower left-hand corner. I don’t have a problem with providing factually correct propaganda to counter GOP lies, but the reality of the situation is that we’re not producing enough jobs. The chart is supposed to imply that things improved under Obama–that may be, but not due to his policies.
The fact is that unemployment is measured as a rate, not in the number of jobs added. You’ve got the numerator, but no denominator. If you follow the logic of this chart, then Rick Perry did a great job because Texas added jobs, but did not lower the unemployment rate.
JohnD pointed this out and received thumbs down?!
job growth had nothing to due with Obama’s policies?
The unemployment rate is used by Republicans because it falsely implies that we were not in a recovery and were not going in the right direction. When the fact of the matter is that we’ve had 17 straight months of growth.
Jeeez, you’d figure that your memory doesn’t go back 2 months. If you don’t recall we were in a historic economic collapse, hundreds of thousands of jobs were lost each and every month. Your argument is that we should have gone from a 300000 loss to a 100000 gain in a month? Come’on really? You normally see a flow in a direction, not a straight line going up. But if you go from minus 300000, to 200000, then to 100000, then 50000, then 10000, then job gains. Do you think you are going in the right direction?
If you look at the unemployment rate it would continue to go up because you are still losing jobs while you are digging out of a very very deep hole, again to falsely imply that what you are doing is not working.
I like arrow going up myself.
It’s flat, and when you take into account population growth, it’s effectively heading down. Since Obama took office, the employment population ratio for 16 to 19 year olds dropped from 31% to 28.6%, for 20-24 from 66.1% to 61.9%, for 25-54 from 79.4% to 75%, for 55-64 from 62.2% to 59.7%, for 65-69 it pretty much stayed the same at 29%, but for those aged 70-74, it increased almost 1% – and somehow I doubt that’s folks deciding to hold off retirement because they love their job so much.
What Obama and the Democratic party are doing (mainly losing the the Republicans) is not working. This whole thread is pretty stupid, but the idea that we’re in some sort of recovery is laughable. Working people didn’t recover from the 2001 recession, and we haven’t recovered from the one we’re currently in.
you are using pre-Obama policies against him. You note that the thread is stupid, but the problem is that you don’t understand what you are writing. In any breakdown there is a net loss during Obama’s term, you don’t need to be a genius to figure that out. What we have been talking about is falsely affixing blame or purposely using unemployment rate in manner that falsely implies blame. You are doing the same thing, I did a quick search on Bachmann, she’s good at doing the unemployment game. Just read why it’s a farce, I’m done with you.
link
I’m NOT talking about the unemployment rate, I’m talking about the employment population ratio. This measures the percentage of the population that is working, it presents a far more accurate picture of where the economy is going than either the unemployment rate (which only includes people looking for work) or total employment (which doesn’t take into account growth).
Your argument, which relies solely on the number of jobs created, is like talking about wages or prices in nominal dollars, which makes it seem like a gallon of gas is more expensive than it was in the 50’s, or a $0.05 coke in 1930 is so much less than a $0.90 coke today. To talk about what’s really happening, we need to normalize – that’s what talking about the EP ratio does, and it’s why my line of reasoning is objectively superior to yours.
So what’s happened since Obama took office? The percent of people in this country who are working dropped from around 63% to 58%. We have to go back to 1983, to get to that level. I’m not suggesting that the stimulus didn’t create any jobs, it did, but to say that the arrow is going up, is a stretch. And, to suggest that Obama’s policies haven’t had a chance to kick in, is laughable. This past summer, we’ve had three months of stagnation, likely heading into recession. What’s the Obama teams response? Keep Geithner in place, put a corporate shill in charge of staff (who thought he could chosen worse than Rahm?), fold on putting Elizabeth Warren in charge of consumer protection. And those are all things he’s done since it was clear that the stimulus wasn’t effective. Going back in time, I’ll put the following actions on Obama: Keeping the architects of this disaster in charge of economic policy, Summers, Geithner, Bernanke – all terrible choices. Keeping Gates on in Defense, rather than someone who would work to get that destructive noose of the defense department off our neck.
Of course the blame shouldn’t begin with Obama, it should begin with Reid, but the fact that Obama didn’t work to get him removed, and in fact supported folks like the Senator from Wal-Mart is another strike against him. I’ll work to get the guy elected again, but it’s going to be tough to do it with enthusiasm.
I think your analysis is spot-on.
The problem is that NOBODY is willing to face the reality of economic, technological, and political forces driving the EP from 63% to 58%. Nobody is willing to confront the reality that this isn’t going to improve in the foreseeable future.
Michele Bachmann is going to change it. Barack Obama isn’t going to change it. The Republicans aren’t going to change it. The Democrats aren’t going to change it.
This is not a “problem” that is going to be “solved”. This is, instead, a fundamental change in how the world’s products are created. We have changed the very nature of our economy, and we therefore need to change the way we think about our economy. This has actually been going on since the turn of the century, but the prior administration hid it for a while by creating counterfeit and fraudulent “growth” based on a Ponzi scheme “secured” by home ownership. Standard & Poor downgraded the AAA rating of the Federal government in part to distract attention from the AAA ratings the same company gave those fraudulent “securitized” mortgages.
Pretending that electing Democrats will “fix” the problem is no better than the GOP pretending that more tax cuts will help.
Instead, we need to increase (rather than decrease) government services (and therefore spending). We need change our economy so that most households can live a sustainable and desirable lifestyle on one income.
Most of all, we need to redistribute the obscene concentration of wealth that our top one half of one percent has accumulated so that the rest of us have something to spend — it is only way to restart the engine of our consumer economy that is currently completely seized up.
government action, but most of the time, it is largely independent of goverment policies. The chart follows the trajectory of the financial crisis. As the crisis resolved, jobs started coming back. The crisis’s “resolution” largely coincided with Obama’s tenure, but correlation is not causation.
Second, the issue is the rate of employment, not the direction or number of jobs.
We are not adding enough jobs fast enough. It’s like driving. If I drive from Boston to NYC at 5 mph on Route 9, I’ll get to the Big Apple eventually. But I’ll waste a lot of time. Slow job growth means unemployment and people suffering; we’ll get there eventually but after how much suffering?
There are 14 million people looking for work in the United States. Add 300,000 jobs and you’ll have reduced the number of unemployed by 2%. But how many people are entering the job market for the first time? If we don’t create enough jobs, the number of employed can stay the same.
The other thing to look at is what intelligent people are saying about employment. Mark Thoma, a respected, liberal economist is not sanguine. Dean Baker, another liberal economist, is also concerned. He says we need to add 90,000 jobs a month to keep pace with the growing number of workers. That’s just to keep unemployment at 9.whatever percent. Last month, we added zero jobs.
I’m not being critical of Obama in this post, but that chart argues improvement by looking at a variable that goes into the numerator of a fraction.
I’m mostly fighting back against to false blame game. But yes, the focus needs to be on job growth, I don’t know how Obama or Congress can do anything with the Republican party watering down good stimulus plans and filibustering job bills. It’s tough, but somehow we need to have voters get rid of the 2 year Tea Party mistake they voted in and keep Republicans in check by losing seats if they continue this path.
Our high unemployment is structural. It results from twenty years of right-ward movement in economic policy and fifty years of creating wealth by making labor obsolete.
The right wing is dismantling our social service support networks, and stigmatizing those who rely on them, at the very time when their policies are forcing unprecedented numbers of Americans to depend on them. We see the same pattern in dismantling and stigmatizing social security and medicare at the same time that the arriving baby-boom most requires it.
My disappointment with President Obama is that he is aiding and promoting, rather than fighting, this horrifying trend towards draconian selfishness.
It wasn’t anything Brown did, except run a great campaign and get himself elected of course. I remember it happened at the same time as a tea party resistance to government run healthcare and bank bailouts and liberalism, and when a Republican won in Massachusetts it inspired people to live again and get back to work.
Yes, government run health care that’s not run by the government, that would be universal care. Just trying to help here.
I’m continuing baffled that people think wise economic management of an economy of 312 million people can be learned by entrepreneurial success. It’s as if one could learn how to conduct an orchestra by excelling at violin making.
Academic? Entrepreneur? Pure politician? Carrer Politician? Charismatic leader?
PS I don’t know the answer myself!
I was not talking about Presidential qualifications. I was only commenting on the mistaken idea that entrepreneurial success bestows economic wisdom.
do you have any thoughts/suggestions to the broader question of what qualifications/experiences do make someone a better President?
PS Great short article by David Frum. More people should follow his advice on resisting the knee jerk reaction when someone starts to speak about an issue “against deficits” or “against higher taxes”… and really listen to the entire point. Although is doesn’t coincide with our sound bite news media frenzy. Thanks for the pointer.
downgrades another remarkably innocuous comment.
repost… it went to the wrong place.
Thank you.
And who made appointments, not based on campaign involvement but, again, pragmatically. Like FDR’s appointment of Knudsen and Stettinius…and oh yeah, a President more attunded to learning from history than from lobbyists.
And he is who the current Republicans model themselves on, although they are afraid to admit it.
Obama’s experience comes entirely from institutions and organizations that exist in a parallel universe to business: community organizing, non-profit, university, government. These organizations have a culture that exists in large part on government coercion, not saying they are not needed, but that their culture is a step removed from the experience of the people who have to support this whole enterprise by making, doing and selling.
I don’t believe a president has to be a businessman or -woman but he has to have a connection with those people to understand them. It would really help if he spent some time in organizations that attempted to make products or sell services to people without government or social coercion.
An economy is not just macro-moves by the government although stabilizing that is vital.
Nathan Lewis: “The Service Economy”
From Obama’s speeches I believe he is looking for answers only in the institutions he is used to. If he looked outside the people who are his friends, he would understand that recovery has to come from letting go, not yanking on the reins all the time. Unfortunately the evidence points to the conclusion that Obama’s constituency is entirely tied up in those institutions, and even the businesses that he knows depend on government assistance, either in enterprize zones in Chicago, or in huge medical contracts, or too-big-to-fail situations like banks.
I think what you’re saying is that if Obama had connections to the business or to businesspeople, he’d do something different.
“But what?”
“Oh, just something different.”
David Frum, former George W. Bush speechwriter, is a heterodox conservative and I found it very hard to find much to disagree with in his Reply to the President’s Defenders
nt