New Hampshire Primary Thread

The highest unemployment under Bush was 7.7%.

People are celebrating 8.5%? Really?

If if you used the same size employment pool as under Bush - Obama would still be over 10%

 

... because he left office a couple of months after the economy collapsed (an event exacerbated by his foolishness) and before unemployment topped out. So what? Interesting that each Bush presidency had its recession, right?

 

Just a reminder that in January 2007 when Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid took over Congress - the unemployment rate was 4.6% and the national debt was $8.6 trillion - but let's blame everything on Bush? is that the deal?

 

This would be very similar to what happened with Reagan. When Carter left office, unemployment was just over 6 percent. By mid-1982, it was over 10 percent.

Now, Carter eventually took the blame for the 10 percent unemployment, not Reagan, because it was a carry over from the energy crisis and inflation - Volcker had already imposed tight monetary policy to bring down inflation, but that caused unemployment. So in time, as the recovery continued, Reagan got credit for the recovery and the blame for the rise in unemployment went to Carter, because the perception was that the energy crisis led to the spike and the energy crisis happened in Carter's watch.

Similarly, if the recovery continues - and many are now saying that it will continue (with Europe being the possible stumbling block) - then Obama will enjoy the credit, much like Reagan. And since the cause of the spike in unemployment was the housing crisis and that happened in Bush's watch, Bush would be the Jimmy Carter in this story.

 

Cran - show me your work. Give me 3 specific actions by Bush that you term "foolishness", that caused the economy to collapse.

1.

2.

3.

 

If Obama had not signed TARP into law we would be in a much bigger mess than we are now. I'll give him that.

 

And I'm not here to talk about who DESERVES credit and blame. It's an election thread, so it's about what PERCEPTIONS are as the candidates campaign. Much of the campaign so far has been under the premise that the economy is continuing to struggle. But if a more robust recovery continues, then what?

When Reagan was re-elected, unemployment was still considerably higher than what it was when Carter left office. Why was this not a problem? Because it was coming down from its 10.8 percent high of 1982. Similarly, I don't think Obama will need unemployment to be back to 7 percent for perceptions to be more optimistic. But if it's still 8.5 in September, then that's some low-hanging fruit for whoever the GOP nominee (Romney, I'm sure) to feast on.

 

The global financial crisis caused the recession. The global financial crisis was directly caused by WORLD submission of governments to banks and financial interests in general. Bush was in charge of a large country's government, and his policies encouraged the housing bubble and speculative finance that caused the crisis. So, yes, he's responsible.
Is Obama responsible for not doing enough to put people back to work. IMO, yes, because he didn't realize that many legislators in his own party didn't give a damn about the crisis, didn't think things were as bad as they were (worst error) and failed to account for total Republican opposition. But that's different from making things worse. That charge is not sustainable from the data.

 

You could make similar arguments about the energy crisis.

 

Before you start blaming Bush for the economy tanking, don't forget that Clinton had a large hand in creating the housing bubble and setting up the eventual bust:

http://www.businessweek.com/the_thread/hotproperty/archives/2008/02/clintons_drive.html

http://voices.washingtonpost.com/ezra-klein/2009/05/bill_clinton_and_the_housing_b.html

Here's a key point from the Washington Post item:

For readers who want a fuller picture of this, I'd recommend Alyssa Katz's forthcoming book, Our Lot: How Real Estate Came to Own Us. In fact, her book is so good on this point that I e-mailed to ask her thoughts. She wrote:

Clinton's mea culpa on derivatives deregulation is welcome, and I don't think he's wrong that the left has placed undue blame on Glass-Steagal repeal. The Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act was not a primary cause of our current economic miseries.

But on [the Community Reinvestment Act], Clinton conveniently brings onstage and then demolishes the straw man conjured by the right: that CRA required banks to lend to non-credit worthy customers (it doesn't) without copping to what his administration actually did do, which was to set ludicrously high quotas on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac's obligations to buy mortgages made to low-income people or securities based on such mortgages. From that point on, the explosive growth of subprime lending and the Wall Street mortgage-backed securities market became inevitable.

 

Duh, he spent too much, which Obama and the Demcratics have fixed by increasing spending.

 

Clinton's role in financial deregulation was also a blot on his record -- bigger by far than that blot on the blue dress. What's odd about the bipartisan encouragement of financial excess was that it continued, no, accelerated AFTER the dot.com stock crash. You'd have thought one of the two parties would've reacted to that if only from sheer opportunism.