Barack Obama has unveiled a crisp, fresh and new campaign theme.
President Obama has devised a new strategy for dealing with troubling economic developments: Showcase optimism about turning around the economy while reassuring voters that although he understands their fears he isn’t directly responsible for their pain.
It’s been 2 1/2 years since Obama became President and he has amply demonstrated what happens when a socialist tinkers with a free market economy. Until he’s gone, we’re dead economically.
There are several Obaminary obstructions to recovery: housing, health care, pointless spending, finance, business strangulation, the green fantasy and energy.
Housing
In their socialist zeal to make America pay for homes for everyone, Democrats opened the doors to the abuse of the mortgage system. Bill Clinton had Robert Rubin rewrite CRA in 1995
Though well-intended, the problem was that Congress was about to change hands, from the Democrats to the Republicans. Rather than submit legislation that the GOP-led Congress was almost sure to reject, Clinton ordered Robert Rubin’s Treasury Department to rewrite the rules in 1995.
The rewrite, as City Journal noted back in 2000, “made getting a satisfactory CRA rating harder.” Banks were given strict new numerical quotas and measures for the level of “diversity” in their loan portfolios. Getting a good CRA rating was key for a bank that wanted to expand or merge with another.
Loans started being made on the basis of race, and often little else.
Then Clinton and then-Housing Secretary Andrew Cuomo came down on banks, forcing them to make bad loans.
Clinton got the Department of Housing and Urban Development to double-team the issue. That would later prove disastrous.
Clinton’s HUD secretary, Andrew Cuomo, “made a series of decisions between 1997 and 2001 that gave birth to the country’s current crisis,” the liberal Village Voice noted. Among those decisions were changes that let Fannie and Freddie get into subprime loan markets in a big way.
Other rule changes gave Fannie and Freddie extraordinary leverage, allowing them to hold just 2.5% of capital to back their investments, vs. 10% for banks.
Since they could borrow at lower rates than banks due to implicit government guarantees for their debt, the government-sponsored enterprises boomed.
With incentives in place, banks poured billions of dollars of loans into poor communities, often “no doc” and “no income” loans that required no money down and no verification of income.
By 2007, Fannie and Freddie owned or guaranteed nearly half of the $12 trillion U.S. mortgage market — a staggering exposure.
If that was not enough, Rubin then changed banking rules again and it was described this way:
Former Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin gets cozy with the banking industry while helping push through a bill freeing financial institutions to merge into ever larger megacorporations while largely absolving them of much of their legal obligation to invest in the communities in which they do business.
The predictions (from 1999!) were (and one in particular stands out):
And the weakening of the CRA is only one element of the finance industry’s deregulatory wish list which is included in the compromise legislation. The bill will:
■pave the way for a new round of record-shattering financial industry mergers, dangerously concentrating political and economic power;
■create too-big-to-fail institutions that are someday likely to drain the public treasury as taxpayers bail out imperiled financial giants to protect the stability of the nation’s banking system;
■leave financial regulatory authority spread among a half dozen federal and 50 state agencies, all uncoordinated, that will be overmatched by the soon-to-be financial goliaths;
■facilitate the rip-off of mutual fund insurance policy holders by permitting mutual insurance funds to switch domicile states — thereby enabling them to locate in states where they can convert to for-profit, stockholder companies without properly reimbursing policyholders (a conversion of tens of billions of dollars);
■permit the new financial giants to share finance, health, consumer, and other personal information among affiliates, compromising consumer privacy; and
■allow banks to continue to deny services to the poor (Congress rejected an amendment requiring banks to provide “lifeline accounts” to the poor, so they would have refuge from check-cashing operations and the underground economy).
Has Barack Obama changed any of this?
Why, no. So what has he done? He has thrown a life preserver to a man dying of thirst in the desert.
One of the biggest problems in the market is the number of people who were given homes and mortgages they could not afford. Naturally, Barack Obama’s first reaction was to just vaporize that debt with cram down mortgages, as if no one would notice the instant loss of capital, but we’re all friends, right? Now let’s remember that mortgages were being written with abandon primarily on the basis of race because those were the new rules and ample incentives were provided to make it all happen.
Yet how did Obama phrase it?
Families, he said, who “are being preyed upon by predatory lenders. If you’re protecting America, America should be protecting you from unfair bankruptcy laws.”
So let’s recap right here. Clinton, Rubin and Cuomo forced banks to make bad loans primarily on the basis of race, freed banks from responsibility, incentivized loan originators to provide these loans, pushed Fannie and Freddie to invest in these bad loans and now democrats and Obama blame the “predatory lenders” who did exactly as democrats wanted done.
Barack Obama’s plan was to force banks to forfeit the loans they were incentivized to make, resulting in loss of capital. If the banks were uncooperative, then Obama wanted to allow judges to force banks to forfeit capital.
That capital represented someone’s money.
The program was called HAMP. And how did it pan out?
The Obama administration’s flagship effort to help people in danger of losing their homes is falling flat.
More than a third of the 1.24 million borrowers who have enrolled in the $75 billion mortgage modification program have dropped out. That exceeds the number of people who have managed to have their loan payments reduced to help them keep their homes.
Last month alone,155,000 borrowers left the program — bringing the total to 436,000 who have dropped out since it began in March 2009.
And why is it failing? Stupidity.
A major reason so many have fallen out of the program is the Obama administration initially pressured banks to sign up borrowers without insisting first on proof of their income. When banks later moved to collect the information, many troubled homeowners were disqualified or dropped out.
Mother Jones attributed the failure to a number of reasons:
the program’s paltry results, Treasury’s efforts to move the goal posts for HAMP success, the disproportionate number of carrots and too few sticks in the program, and much more.
It never stops. The damage wreaked by one set of democrats is compounded by another set of democrats. Democrats made laws putting responsible, productive Americans on the hook for democrats’ fanciful visions of sugar plum fairies bestowing home ownership on those who could not afford them and would not pay for them and when that collapsed democrats once more demand that responsible, productive Americans pick up the tab for democrats’ largesse.
And that’s especially grating. Those of us who have conducted ourselves in a responsible manner and eligble for receive none of the benefits offered those who were something less than responsible. Incompetence is rewarded. Failure is subsidized. And Obama played the racial/poverty fiddle during his campaign, blaming everyone except for those truly responsible.
Obama has openly voiced his feelings in regards to foreclosure prevention and he has openly supported the bankruptcy bill throughout his campaign. He had also openly criticized lenders and Wall Street for predatory lending throughout his campaign, saying that many CEOs were paid for snookering the American people and paid to fail.
“Predatory lending” is the term democrats have invented to describe loaning institutions carrying out the wishes of democrats in a manner that makes it appear democrats had nothing to do with it.
Housing is either in or nearly in a double dip and there is no chance of recovery until the system is cleaned out. An alcoholic’s evolution offers a similar analogy. As long as the alcoholic is propped up and kept from finding the bottom, he or she will not recover.
Mark Steyn notes one of the geniuses behind these programs:
I’d ask one of Obama’s egghead economists to explain it to you simpletons, but unfortunately they’ve all resigned and returned to cozy sinecures in academia. The latest is chief economic advisor Austan Goolsbee, the genius who in 2007, just before the subprime hit the fan, wrote in The New York Times that this exciting new form of home “ownership” was an “innovation” that had “opened doors to the excluded” and was part of an “incredible flowering of new types of home loans.”
If you want a chuckle, read this from Obama’s website. Much of the story is there, but it omits Robert Rubin rewriting CRA, it omits Clinton pushing Fannie to buy subprime mortgages, it omits the tens of millions made by democrats acting as head of Fannie Mae while Fannie was circling the toilet and it omits Andrew Cuomo suing Accubanc for $2 billion because Accubanc was not making enough bad loans.
And here’s Obama’s explanation for why it all failed.
So why did so many people begin defaulting on their loans?
Because banks were reckless with their lending standards, they gave loans to people for houses these borrowers really couldn’t afford. Suddenly, feeling rich, those people pulled money out of their houses as if they were ATM machines and spent it, often on depreciating items like TVs or cars.
Good God! Banks were only doing what the damned democrats forced them to do! Barack Obama is and was always a stinking liar.
Andrew Cuomo is directly responsible for the housing crisis and as I once remarked, should be in jail instead of of the New York Governor’s mansion.
In 2000, Cuomo required a quantum leap in the number of affordable, low-to-moderate-income loans that the two mortgage banks—known collectively as Government Sponsored Enterprises—would have to buy. The GSEs don’t actually sell mortgages to borrowers. They buy them from banks and mortgage companies, allowing lenders to replenish their capital and make more loans. They also purchase mortgage-backed securities, which are pools of mortgages regularly acquired by the GSEs from investment firms. The government chartered these banks to pump money into the mortgage market and, while they did it, to make a strong enough profit to attract shareholders. That created a tug-of-war between their efforts to maximize shareholder value, which drove them toward high-end mortgages, and their congressionally mandated obligation to finance loans for those who needed help. The 1992 law required HUD’s secretary to make sure housing goals were being met and, every four years, set new goals for Fannie and Freddie.
Please read this carefully:
But raising the affordable-housing goals was only half the Cuomo story.
The HUD secretary is also required to produce voluminous rules that govern how the GSEs meet those goals, and the 187-page rules Cuomo issued opened the door to abuse.
The rules explicitly rejected the idea of imposing any new reporting requirements on the GSEs. In other words, HUD wanted Fannie and Freddie to buy risky loans, but the department didn’t want to hear just how risky they were.
HUD conceded in the rules that many consumer groups had urged it to insist that the GSEs provide “loan-level data” revealing how many of their loans contained high interest rates, prepayment penalties, or other requirements that presaged bad loans.
And as for those “predatory lending” YSP fees?
…it was Cuomo who issued a rule in 1999 that dozens of federal courts have since found legalized the yield-spread premiums. He was the first HUD secretary to say they were “not illegal per se,” nullifying most of the 150 class-action lawsuits against them filed across the country.
Because of Obama’s policies no one can afford to go where the jobs are:
But a Los Angeles Times story from yesterday suggests that even moving to Charlotte or Cleveland may be too expensive. The problem is not the prices of the homes where the jobs are, it’s the prices of the homes where the jobs aren’t:
Charles Mills can barely afford to stay here. But he also can’t afford to move.
That’s why the 44-year-old heavy-equipment operator was preparing to leave his wife and young daughter here and go where he could find work — the Oklahoma oil fields. Mills has a mortgage to pay, even if its size pains him.
He purchased his house in 2006 for $308,500. Current value: $105,797.
“We talked about it: What can we do with the house?” Mills said. “Nobody’s going to buy it. Nobody’s going to rent it. If we walk away, my credit’s shot. We’re stuck.”
I am likely to punch in the mouth the next person who blames “Bush policies” for this mess. Nothing will get better until Obama is gone and the market is allowed to cleanse itself and again become a reasonable investment opportunity.
Pointless Spending
Obama’s stimulus is a failure.
As usual for democrats, failure of a policy means it is worth repeating.
Krugman calls for second stimulus
Business strangulation
Barack Obama has made it known that he will not allow any business that is not unionized. His NLRB filed a complaint against Boeing to try to stop Boeing from opening a non-union plant in South Carolina. Tim Pawlenty likened this action to the Soviet Union circa the 1970’s.
Health Care
The cost of Obamacare is likely to exceed $2 trillion and as yet no one knows what’s in it. Its full effects have yet to be felt. Universal health care has failed pretty much everywhere it’s been instituted and once again, if something fails, democrats are determined to repeat it.
A recent study found that one in three employers are likely to drop health care coverage once Obamacare kicks in. The White House took issue with the report, citing Romneycare in Massachusetts. Romneycare is not working out the way it was intended. You might call it “unexpected.”
The 2006 reform jeopardized the solvency of private health plans in the Bay State. Unfortunately, insurers’ solvency is not something patients, physicians, and voters have reason to observe closely, so the political class suffers from perverse incentives once it starts micromanaging health insurance. As a result, higher costs have been passed on through higher per capita spending and premium growth.
According to the state’s 2010 annual report, today “per capita spending on health care in Massachusetts is 15 percent higher than the rest of the nation, even when accounting for wages and spending on medical research and education in Massachusetts.” Indeed, Professor John F. Cogan of Stanford University has concluded the 2006 reform led to premium growth 6 percent higher in Massachusetts than in the rest of the United States between 2006 and 2008.
And there’s more bad news:
Mr. Romney’s promise that getting everyone covered would force costs down also is far from being realized. One third of state residents polled by Harvard researchers in a study published in “Health Affairs” in 2008 said that their health costs had gone up as a result of the 2006 reforms. A typical family of four today faces total annual health costs of nearly $13,788, the highest in the country. Per capita spending is 27% higher than the national average.
~~~~~
Fifty-six percent of Massachusetts internal medicine physicians no longer are accepting new patients, according to a 2009 physician work-force study conducted by the Massachusetts Medical Society. For new patients who do get an appointment with a primary-care doctor, the average waiting time is 44 days, the Medical Society found.
~~~~~The difficulties in getting primary care have led to an increasing number of patients who rely on emergency rooms for basic medical services. Emergency room visits jumped 7% between 2005 and 2007. Officials have determined that half of those added ER visits didn’t actually require immediate treatment and could have been dealt with at a doctor’s office—if patients could have found one.
Now democrats are determined to take this failure nationwide.
Finance
Dodd Frank is a failure. A summary of Dodd-Frank trumpets this:
ENDING TOO BIG TO FAIL BAILOUTS
No Taxpayer Funded Bailouts: Clearly states taxpayers will not be on the hook to save a failing financial company or to cover the cost of its liquidation.
No it doesn’t. Two of the most incompetent institutions, Fannie and Freddie, are exempt from Dodd Frank. Obama said that the cost of bailing out Fannie and Freddie was $130 billion. The CBO says the real cost of the bailout is $317 billion and F&F are expected to need another $42 billion over the next ten years.
Energy
During his campaign Obama promised to make our electric rates skyrocket.
When I was asked earlier about the issue of coal…under my plan of a cap and trade system, electricity rates would necessarily skyrocket…even regardless of what I say about whether coal is good or bad, because I’m capping greenhouse gasses, coal power plants, natural gas…you name it…whatever the plants were, whatever the industry was, they would have to retro-fit their operations.
That will cost money…they will pass that money on to the consumers.
And he is making good on that promise. His EPA-gone-nuts is shutting down coal power.
Utility giant American Electric Power said Thursday that it will shut down five coal-fired power plants and spend billions of dollars to comply with a series of pending Environmental Protection Agency regulations.
The company’s dramatic plan to comply with the regulations could give Republicans and moderate Democrats ammunition in their ongoing fight against EPA’s efforts to impose new regulations aimed at limiting greenhouse gas emissions and air pollutants including mercury and arsenic.
And with them go potentially hundreds of thousands of jobs.
It is argued that reduced pollution will be worth the cost, but that conclusion is based on legerdemain:
The agency estimates that the utility rule will cost $10.9 billion annually but will yield as much as $140 billion in total health and environmental benefits. Sounds like a deal. But most of those alleged benefits are indirect—i.e., not from the mercury reductions that the rule is supposed to be for. Rather, they come from pollutants (“airborne particles”) that the EPA already regulates under other parts of the Clean Air Act. A good analogy is a corporation double-counting revenue.
And it is going to be expensive.
Consumers could see their electricity bills jump an estimated 40 to 60 percent in the next few years.
The reason: Pending environmental regulations will make coal-fired generating plants, which produce about half the nation’s electricity, more expensive to operate. Many are expected to be shuttered.
If Obama remains in office, half of our energy sources for electricity will be gone.
The green jobs fantasy
Politico ran a story describing the underwhelming number of “green jobs.”
Green jobs success eludes President Obama
President Barack Obama heads to an energy plant in North Carolina on Monday to talk once again about the job-creating power of a green economy.
The catch? Nearly three years into Obama’s presidency, the White House can’t point to much solid evidence that significant numbers of Americans are scoring the green jobs the president has been touting.
Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers suggests 225,000 clean energy jobs were either created or preserved through the third quarter of 2010 thanks to more than $80 billion in the economic stimulus package. But those are estimates at best.
That’s $355,000 per job.
There’s something wrong with the title of the Politico story. Ah, I’ve got it.
“Green jobs success unexpectedly eludes President Obama”
There, I fixed it.
The White House figures 825,000 Americans should be building electric car batteries, retrofitting homes or doing other green collar work by the end of 2012. But that too is an extrapolation.
Car batteries, you say?
Electric cars could produce higher emissions over their lifetimes than petrol equivalents because of the energy consumed in making their batteries, a study has found.
An electric car owner would have to drive at least 129,000km before producing a net saving in CO2. Many electric cars will not travel that far in their lifetime because they typically have a range of less than 145km on a single charge and are unsuitable for long trips. Even those driven 160,000km would save only about a tonne of CO2 over their lifetimes.
The British study, which is the first analysis of the full lifetime emissions of electric cars covering manufacturing, driving and disposal, undermines the case for tackling climate change by the rapid introduction of electric cars.
And that company Obama is visiting? It’s Cree Inc. Cree got $39 million from the stimulus package. And what did it do with that money? It opened a plant in 2010.
In China.
Spain has learned a painful lesson about over-subsidization of green industry:
Zapatero introduced the subsidies three years ago as part of an effort to cut his country’s dependence on fossil fuels. At the time, he promised that the investment in renewable energy would create manufacturing jobs and that Spain could sell its panels to nations seeking to reduce carbon emissions.
Yet by failing to control the program’s cost, Zapatero saddled Spain with at least 126 billion euros of obligations to renewable-energy investors. The spending didn’t achieve the government’s aim of creating green jobs, because Spanish investors imported most of their panels from overseas when domestic manufacturers couldn’t meet short-term demand.
A new headline:
Obama pledges focus on job creation
As long as they are union jobs.
Barack Obama talks jobs, but everything he does kills jobs. Barack Obama talks business, but everything he does is bad for business, especially with business always waiting for the next shoe to drop. Every regulation, every new law- it’s all bad for the economy.
Barack Obama is destroying this country and there is absolutely no chance of recovery as long as he is in office.
DrJohn has been a health care professional for more than 30 years. In addition to clinical practice he has done extensive research and has published widely with over 70 original articles and abstracts in the peer-reviewed literature. DrJohn is well known in his field and has lectured on every continent except for Antarctica. He has been married to the same wonderful lady for over 30 years and has three kids- two sons, both of whom are attorneys and one daughter on her way into the field of education.
DrJohn was brought up with the concept that one can do well if one is prepared to work hard but nothing in life is guaranteed.
Except for liberals being foolish.
There’s no need for more lengthy examples. Obama is TRYING to destroy the country, so from his perspective he’s a success. STOP WITH THE EXAMPLES!!!! We all know he’s a horror show. Why spend time listing examples? Would you read this responses if it belabored the same idea endlessly with dozens of unnecessary examples?
@SpySmasher:
I disagree, SpySmasher.
I think the very best way to prepare to destroy Obama at the polls this election is the culling together of all of his most egregious sound bites and most clearly proven failures.
Then the best ones can be distilled into 30 second or 1 minute ads for both internet and mass media.
If someone distills it down even more it will make great bumper stickers or political poster art.
But none of that happens unless artists and other imaginative folks are exposed to enough of Obama’s failings to do that creative, distilling work.
Remember, Obama actually tried to (ILLEGALLY) set up an art propaganda department within the government.
He was outed on that and the artists emails ruined his plan.
But propaganda art (from either side) does not come out of thin air.
There must be a strong basis in fact or it won’t ring true.
Good post, DrJohn. NOTHING is ever Obama’s fault! Nor his administration. Nor his (bailing) advisors.
The study neglects to consider that the battery components most carbon-intensive to initially produce–copper and lithium–are fully recyclable, and that recycling requires only a fraction of the carbon-emitting energy use that was required during the initial mining, extraction, and refining. Subsequent generations of electric vehicle batteries will be associated with much less CO2 emission than those produced for the first wave of electric vehicles to hit the streets and highways.
I talked to a guy a couple of weeks back who was driving a Prius hybrid. The car was a month old and he’d been keeping careful track of his mileage. An actual 51 MPG on the highway, he said. He’d measured it on a long trip. 45 MPG around town.
Those who resist the future will be left in the past.
All posters, please remember:
Conservatives consider facts, data, details, and extant records.
Liberals consider their feelings.
You cannot dispute facts with a conservative; they have done their research and know the details. Unless, that is, you systematically distort the facts (as when Obazero claimed that all of the Chrysler money had been paid back.
You cannot dispute feelings with a liberal. They know how they feel, and they feel that Obazero is the best President ever in the history of the United States. The case is closed. The issue cannot be debated.
Dr. John will gain no traction with this posting. It does not address feelings.
The only trouble with the liberal viewpoint is that it does not produce economic growth, jobs, productivity, or peace. Instead the liberal viewpoint produces stagnation, idleness, and an increase of threats from all over the world. The liberal does not want jobs, peace, or any of those things. The liberal wants his/her feelings to be validated.
And that is the problem.
SpySmasher #1 Forgive Dr.J. He sometimes gets a little wordy. He’s had some company here of late.
@rich wheeler: It’s a target-rich environment, so to speak.
Dr.J. Short and sweet. On request I gave you my employment info.I AGAIN ASK FOR YOURS. Thanks
BTW As a mortgage banker I’d again confirm #10. Noone “forced” lenders to make bad loans. Greed motivated the lenders to make these loans.
@mathman:
Terrible truth there, mathman.
Last night during the Republicans debate a false dilemma was asked as a question of one of the candidates.
Should we stay the expensive and bloody course in Afghanistan/Iraq/Libya/Yemen OR should we pull out ASAP?
Of course the question is a fallacy.
There are multiple other things that can be done.
But it boils down to this:
Do we want the bombings and the suicide bombers, the car bombers, the acid throwers, etc., doing their nastiness THERE or HERE?
Obama seems to favor the front of the war against terrorism to move here.
WHY?
He answered that.
He said, we could ABSORB a nuclear attack…..it would make us better people for it!
Oh, goody.
Any Republican (except the isolationist Libertarian mascarading as a Republican) would be better than Obama.
Bad loans were made for a different reason entirely: to make money.
In the wake of sweeping deregulation of the nation’s financial industries and at the beginning of the rise in housing prices, a situation evolved where a tremendous amount of money could be made simply by increasing the volume of loans. No one worried about borrower qualifications or unacceptable levels of risk because no one was watching anything but the profits. Bad loans could be easily hidden among the good, and were. The bundled lots were resold at an additional profit each step of the way up the chain to the largest financial industry players. The largest players completed the deception by giving the top level packages false risk ratings, and finally passing them on to unsuspecting investment funds–in effect, stealing from the little guy both coming and going.
This isn’t theory. This is history.
The crooks weren’t the regular people who lost their homes to foreclosure, or the regular people who found that their pension plans’ highly-rated investment instruments were actually barrels full of rotten apples. The crooks were the people who got away with the money.
All indications are that it was an inside job. On top of committing legal theft, the crooks kicked a leg out from under the national economy.
Just got an e-mail from Gibbs complaining about how 7 candidates were putting Obama down and saying there were 7 against 1 and a donation….I thought we seen the last of him but he’s back….Obama never takes responsibility for anything everything is someone elses fault never his such a winer………
@Greg:
God Almighty, Greg. They were told to do what they did. Freakin’ Cuomo said the YSP was legal. All anyone did then was play by the rules Clinton, Rubin and Cuomo set up.
That damned Cuomo sued Accubanc for $2 BILLION because they weren’t making enough bad loans.
Pulllleeez
DRJ. Sure the Yield Spread Premium (YSP) was legal but so is alcohol.The lenders used it (often hid it) without properly explaining it to borrowers.
Another reason why there can be no recovery as long as Obama is president:
He finally appears to ”get it.”….businesses are not hiring.
So, instead of LOWERING the cost of doing business, what does Obama do?
(Well, he has been thinking about doing it.)
He is considering a temporary tax holiday for employers.
Now, who is the genius who thought of that?
Obama.
Didn’t think it through though.
Non-Keynesians have long ago thought it through…..
Milton Friedman even had a name for it: the “Permanent Income Hypothesis.”
See, temporary measures have little meaningful effect on consumption behavior.
If you make an extra $100 this week, you don’t act as if you’re going to make an extra $100 a week from here on out if you know for a fact that it’s a one-time thing.
If you get a short-term tax cut, or one that is supposed to be short-term, you don’t go hiring a bunch of people at your business based on that.
Hiring is a long-term commitment.
No permanent income = no long-term planning or hiring.
DUH!
Obama’s friends (in business) seem to be Wall Streeter’s who can deal in timelines lasting mere milliseconds.
Real business persons are always looking long term, whether it is starting up, expanding, building, buying equipment or hiring.
Stability and predictability are important, nay, vital to them.
What have businesses done with all the money Obama thinks is ”sitting on the sidelines?”
They have been paying off long term debt, merging – so as to cut costs, innovating and improving.
When Obama is gone, they will be ready.
There will NEVER be any recovery unless we act. And I do not mean that we all need to merely write about this. Write about it we must but action speaks much louder, does it not?
@rich wheeler:
They did not have to do so. It was “not illegal, per se” said Cuomo.
http://www.investors.com/NewsAndAnalysis/Article.aspx?id=551114&p=2
http://www.villagevoice.com/2008-08-05/news/how-andrew-cuomo-gave-birth-to-the-crisis-at-fannie-mae-and-freddie-mac/2/
Ibid.
Ibid.
Andrew Cuomo is at the heart of the biggest clusterf**k this country has ever seen. Clinton and Rubin should also be strung up.
History will eventually catch up.
DrJ. I explained it because I thought it was the right thing to do. MANY DID NOT. I believed a certain responsibility came with the license.The same is true of the securities industry or the law.
With no apologies to Gordon Gecko Greed is NOT good.
What is your profession?
You payin’ attention here, Greg?
@rich wheeler: Greg, they were doing what they were incentivized to do. Cuomo gave them a license to steal.
Obama’s dishonesty has no bounds.
Even ABC News is covering his latest lie.
Obama Campaign Sends Around Misleading DNC Video on GOP Debate
At last night’s Republican debate, the seven candidates talked about
unemployment,
taxes,
regulations,
former Gov. Tim Pawlenty’s talk of a goal of 5% GDP growth,
the individual mandate in the health care bill,
the Independent Medicare Advisory Board,
welfare reform,
the Tea Party,
currency policy,
the National Labor Relations Board,
Boeing,
TARP,
the auto bailout,
Rep. Paul Ryan’s Medicare proposal,
former Gov. Mitt Romney’s health care program in Massachusetts,
raising the debt ceiling,
raising the retirement age for Social Security,
the role of religion in public life,
the 10th amendment,
Libya,
Afghanistan,
and so on.
But President Obama’s 2012 campaign is sending out a DNC video suggesting the candidates spoke only about sharia law, an anti-gay-marriage amendment, repealing health care, Sarah Palin, and the space program.
Read the rest at link.
Recovery comes in more forms than just financial or economical.
America needs a recovery from the constant lies of Obama!
spysmasher #1 Did I mention John (not sure he’s a Dr.) sometimes gets a little wordy?
@rich wheeler: Grandpa said sometimes you have to use a 2 by 4 to get the mule’s attention.
“Brevity is next to Godliness” I’d say more but it would defeat the post.
Obama is so mired in old economic ideas that he actually said this today:
Oh My!
In 1946 an economics book came out called Economics in One Lesson.
In Chapter Seven, ”THE CURSE OF MACHINERY,” Henry Hazlitt wrote of a coat manufacturer.
He explains in detail the impact of technological improvements and labor-saving machinery.
He writes of all eyes being focused on “Joe Smith,” who loses his job to the new machine.
Forgotten are ” Tom Jones, who has just got a new job in making [or servicing] the new machine.
Ted Brown, who has just got a job operating one, and Daisy Miller, who can now buy a coat for half what it used to cost her.”
Overlooked too are the manufacturer’s higher profits, which are spent on new machines, invested in new businesses or lines of business, and/or consumed, each of which increases employment.
The focus on Joe leads to “reactionary and nonsensical policies” that are ultimately detrimental to everyone else. (How best to deal with Joe’s personal situation, which is “incident to nearly all industrial and economic progress,” is dealt with elsewhere in the book.)
In short, the “real result of the machine is to increase production, to raise the standard of living, and to increase economic welfare” by lowering prices or raising wages or both.
But Obama does not get it.
Our local Longshoremen Union in the Ports of Los Angeles/Long Beach struck to PREVENT computerization of shipping inventories!
Too many uneducated people might lose jobs.
So, for a few years (after 9-11-01!) we limped along with handwritten manifests for every cargo container entering the country!
In communist China people were given the ”job” of sweeping the street in front of their own homes every day.
The ultimate end of policies like that in China?
Worse pollution than anywhere else on the planet with plumes of filthy air reaching all the way across the Pacific.
AND 12-hour days in factories with no bathrooms.
Workers simply ”go” at their work station and a series of groves in the floor lead sewage to the center of the room where it falls into a hole.
But, hey! Everybody has a job!
If CRA, Freddie, and Fannie were the root causes, how do we explain the fact that there was a simultaneous commercial real estate bubble and collapse?
Had somebody mandated that subprime loans be made to unqualified borrowers in the commercial market? Or was it only because quick money could be made, and the risk could then be hidden and shifted to somebody else?
It was NOT simultaneous.
It followed the residential loan collapse.
That means it was less than 1/2% before.
This article was written in Oct 2009.
@Greg:
An overlooked reason why we will not have any substantial recovery while Obama is in office is that he is making the world much more (expensively) dangerous for America and Americans.
Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad called Wednesday for a security alliance of several former Soviet nations and China to form a united front against the West.
This took place at the summit of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization in Kazakhstan.
Member nations include:
China,
Kazakhstan,
Kyrgyzstan,
Russia,
Tajikistan,
Uzbekistan.
Iran is trying to join.
So are India,
Pakistan
and
Afghanistan.
@SpySmasher:
What damage has Obama caused?
The economy was in a tailspin when he took office and had been months prior to that.
If he hadn’t done TARP or bailouts, there still would have been economic harm.
Had he not had the government help GM and Chrysler, there would have been economic harm.
Had Democrats along with Obama not done things the Republicans objected to like extending unemployment benefits, there would have been economic harm.
McCain or any other Republican, had they been elected president in 2008, would not have been able to pull the country out of the 2007 recession and get things roaring again without it being a process where there would still be a large number of unemployed and continued housing market slump and foreclosures.
So, what exactly has Obama done that’s damaged or is destroying the country?
And just look at what “jobs jobs jobs” Republicans did when they got the House – go after abortion, Planned Parenthood, and NPR. It’s in their political ethos. You think they’re serious about fixing real problems that impact Americans’ lives? They’ll do the same as they always do.
Dr.John great article very well researched and splendid lay out. Don’t pay no attention to the Liberals (Socialistic Communist) It seems a lot of them have been on some Steroidic hormones the last couple of days. If they gave them a shot of reality it would probably kill them.
They talk about integrity and respect but it is obvious this is only a concept to them. It is amazing how they come on the blog and shoot those stupid ignorant one liners after clearly not reading your material, and try to make out as if they are actually saying something worth addressing! They are making me believe in male menopause the way they can not understand the most simple and clear concepts of reality!
Recovery is not O’s plan, and anyone who thinks he is simply inept is missing the point completely. The destruction of America, knocking it down to just another bit player on the world stage is his goal. Ushering in a socialist, one-world government is his objective. Arguing about this or that is simply a stalling tactic, misdirection, while the progressives work feverishly on their dirty scheme to take over before anyone knows what happened.
The comments are……. Here this author writes a piece blasting the both Obama collusion between big business and big government. But this is a conservative forum who hold corporate America as sacred. So … ok there is one bad corporation now, GE. And this only started with Obama’s administration. Before this there was only propriety and no corporation ever got the idea to appeal to government for favors. Everything was perfect with corporate America before Obama.
Corporations are sacrosanct. Don’t say anything bad about corporations. It’s government, Democrat governments, that are evil!
Pardon my sarcasm. This is so obvious.
In Obama’s opinion, he has not got to get Congressional approval to fight a war in Libya.
OK, fine, that’s his opinion.
But instead of telling Congress, he tells the NYTimes!
Here is what the Times had before Congress had anything.
(I refuse to click on NYTimes links, but you all do what you will.)
Obama has done many go-arounds to avoid Congressional approval or check & balance before now.
It is how his regime operates.
@Nan G:
Pathetic! Can you imagine the Republicans want a report on what the Libya involvement costs? The audacity, W supported by many of these jokers halls into two wars one a complete waste of money and lives and they want to know what Libya cost after 60 days How about they pull their your head out and get real. 1.5 trillion of BS that Obama has to try and clean up and these idiots are trying to make hey on Libya. What a joke they are. With their record on war I wouldn’t give them squat!
@J V Hoffman: Thank you, JV!
@Questionman:
Are you familiar with the concept of a straw man argument?
@Questionman:
This would be a good time to read the post. Just sayin’.
There can be no recovery so long as republicans are actively resisting it.
yeah right, Greg… another “stimulus” is the cure…..
Yup, ya can’t fix stupid.
@Greg:
The only thing Republicans are resisting is the final destruction of the country. Stopping Obama is JOB ONE.
@Greg:
Umm…Greg…what, precisely, are Republicans doing to “actively resist” recovery?
I can hardly wait to hear this one.
Obviously a lot republicans feel the same way. Given the serious problems that currently beset the nation, I would suggest that that be submitted as Exhibit A in the case for Seriously Misplaced Republican Priorities.
@Greg:
Given the serious problems that currently beset the nation, and given that Barack Obama has been a completely abysmal failure at addressing those problems, and given that in many cases he has actually exacerbated those problems…I would suggest that anyone with more than half the brains of a goose would want to stop him.
@Aye, #47:
Democrats Explicitly Call Out GOP For Sabotaging The Economic Recovery
How else can we explain republican resistance to economic stimulus proposals that conform to their own long-stated ideological principles?
Chuck Schumer:
I’m not sure whether that comment should be characterized as a warning shot or a ranging shot. I suspect it will turn out to be the latter.
Back in Feb Obama told the US Chamber of Commerce to start hiring.
But did Obama undo any of his job-destroying policies, which are eroding confidence, fostering uncertainty, and crowding out private investment?
Nope, if anything Obama has doubled down on them since Feb.
Without a shred of proof that his policies have helped employment Obama wants more of the same.
But our nation’s deficit is at Civil War levels right now.
This latest ploy of putting Joe biden in charge of deficit talks (now Obama HAD to go in) was proof that Obama wasn’t the least serious about getting a budget, making cuts, or anything of the sort.
Before Eric Cantor quit he pointed out that, “Each each side came into these talks with certain orders, and as it stands the Democrats continue to insist that any deal must include tax increases. There is not support in the House for a tax increase, and I don’t believe now is the time to raise taxes in light of our current economic situation. Regardless of the progress that has been made, the tax issue must be resolved before discussions can continue.”
Obama wants the gov’t to spend 23.6% of GDP by 2012.
Tax revenues will be 16%.
That cannot work.
Ryan’s roadmap limits spending to around 19%.
Ryan’s tax revenues are pegged at 19% also.
Why not get spending down to 18.5%?
So, to be fair, not even the Ryan ”roadmap,” plan avoids eventually hitting our debt limit.
So, we all need to get back to work.
Too bad they take so much time off, huh?
At least here in CA the legislature is working for free until they pass a budget.