Fox News reports that a boat has struck an oil rig, sparking another spill in the Gulf. T-minus how long until Obama blames Bush?
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Before all those extremist teabaggers started their hatefest:
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Still Bush’s fault:
VPOTUS blamed the George W. Bush administration for any unpopularity the
current administration has suffered.“We inherited a cynical republic, and I can’t blame them,” he said.
“Eight years of collapse, eight years of being misled about wars.”
He cast the Republican political strategy since last January as
irresponsible cynicism, and boasted that the recent passage of health
care reform might dispel it.“They [Republicans] still believe cynicism will prevail, that the
government can’t do anything, that we’re a bunch of socialists – all
these things you hear. I think the healthcare debate put a big stake in
the heart of that argument.”
Oh yes, the health care bill sure showed us that you’re not really a bunch of socialists.
Hat tip: Hot Air
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The jobless rate is currently at 10% (or higher if you count the discouraged), so clearly we need a little government job promotion, right? Barack Obama thinks so, and is set to unveil his latest “plan.” But not so fast! Haven’t we done this before?
This will be the third time government has acted to “create jobs” since the beginning of 2008. Why should we believe it will be any more successful now than it has been in the past?
In early 2008, President Bush teamed up with Nancy Pelosi to pass a $150 billion (then considered a lot of money) stimulus package. This “booster shot” to the economy, consisting primarily of rebates to individual taxpayers, was supposed to head off recession. At the time, the unemployment rate was under 5%.
A year later, Pelosi found herself with a new dancing partner in Barack Obama. President Obama’s subsequent stimulus package dwarfed that of President Bush. Passed when the unemployment rate was not yet 8%, it was promised that the $800 billion stimulus would hold joblessness below a peak of 9%. This package also failed, and today the unemployment rate is in double digits.
Leave it to government to insist we continue down a path with such a sterling record of failure. It is time to abandon the Krugman-championed policies of Keynesian economics. Government cannot create jobs by taking money out of the economy, funneling it through a wasteful bureaucracy, then directing it to the most politically connected and favored industries. No economy has ever been successfully powered by such a model.
The best thing Democrats can do is to stop threatening to destroy so many industries via regulation and government control. This would reduce the uncertainty hampering investment. If they combined that by lowering the rates of the most destructive taxes, such as the corporate and capital gains taxes, an improved job market would follow. Otherwise, we can continue banging our collective heads against the wall while insanely expecting an outcome other than pain.
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An interesting perspective on different presidents (and congresses) and their contributions to the national debt:
Hat tip: Econosseur
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The primary benefit of a free market system is that it rewards companies that are capable of meeting our needs and demands, while punishing those that do not. Economist Joseph Schumpeter famously referred to this process as “creative destruction.”
The collapse of General Motors and Chrysler is evidence of the process in action. As Greg Mankiw recently noted on his blog, the 2009 Consumer Report ranked Chrysler dead last, recommending zero percent of tested cars for purchase. General Motors came in next to last, with 17% recommended. At the top was Honda with a score of 95%.
Standing in the way of this capitalist process was the administration’s of both George W. Bush and Barack Obama. Obama in particular has above and beyond in his counterproductive effort to prevent GM and Chrysler from facing the consequences of producing shoddy products. He opened the corporate welfare spigot in a flawed effort to save the floundering companies, but to no avail. Like the grim reaper, the bankruptcy of capitalism knows when the time has come for a business to be put to rest, either to be reborn again as a new company (even if it’s under the same name), or for good.
Democrats who pushed for a passage of corporate welfare bills to prop up the automakers portrayed bankruptcy as an unacceptable course. Gov. Rendell flat out called it “a disaster to put them in Chapter 11.” Obama seemed to share this aversion to bankruptcy when he asserted a need to “figure out ways to put the pressure on the automakers the way a bankruptcy court would. Demand accountability, demand serious change, but do so in a way allows them to keep the factory doors open.” Yet despite the efforts of Obama, the GM and Chrysler of yesterday that ranked at the bottom of the 2009 Consumer Report will finally be laid to rest. Having finally realized that the best way to “put pressure on the automakers the way a bankruptcy court would” is to let an actual bankruptcy court do it, Obama should now get out of the way and let the capitalist process make the ulitmate decision on the survival of their new incarnations as well.
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The subject of torture is suddenly unavoidable. I suspect this is a deliberate effort to distract from poor economic news and the recent tea party backlash against big government. Be that as it may, the narrative needs to be addressed.
America, and Americans by and large, do not believe in torture. This has always been true, and it’s no more true today than it was in the Bush administration. Any government that seeks to avoid torture must, by necessity, define just what torture is. The Bush administration sought to do this. Now the Obama administration, not happy with the prior definition, seeks to adopt its own. It’s to be expected that, when a new party comes into power, issues such as this will be readdressed and new positions taken. But Obama is going one step further. Not only does he find the Bush definition wrong, he wants to label it criminal.
This is a frightening development for anyone who supports our democratic system. The United States has enjoyed a long track record of peaceful transitions that most of the world can only dream about. A large part of the reason for this is that we do not seek to criminalize political differences. When your average Latin American military junta assumes power, the first order of action is to jail everyone in power previously. The United States is better than that. It used to be, anyway.
Barack Obama is willing to leave open the possibility that Bush administration officials may be tried for drawing a line in a slightly different place than Obama draws it. Not, mind you, for wantonly and maliciously running torture dungeons where any and all practices were acceptable, but for approving a single tactic which Obama did not like, and which is routinely conducted on our own soldiers for training. Peaceful democracies are not supposed to handle complicated legal and moral issues by jailing those who take opposing positions. If Obama wants to elevate the game to that level, he should keep in mind that his entire economic agenda is flagrantly unconstitutional; whereas if he has his way on waterboarding, we might just have to start calling it criminal as well.
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Mark Steyn notes how some in the leftmedia are still stuck on stupid when it comes to George W. Bush:
In turbulent times, it’s good to know some things never change. After a week in which President Obama thanked himself for inviting him to the White House, compared AIG executives to suicide bombers, and did the first Presidential retard joke on national TV, I was impressed to find that Slate is bravely keeping up its Bushism Of The Day feature.
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President Obama has, to much liberal fanfare, undone the Bush era decision not to prohibit federal funding of embryonic stem cell research. He then, with a straight face, attacked Bush for putting politics ahead of science.
It’s laughable that someone could seriously claim that politics has no place in science when he just finished using a political act to influence science. Yes, Bush made a political decision regarding science when he decided not to fund embryonic stem cell research (and he also made a moral decision – an issue which Obama and the left wants to pretend doesn’t exist). But Obama is just as political when he decides to fund it as Bush was when he decided not to.
Government is inherently political. If politicians are deciding what scientific endeavours deserve funds, those decisions will inevitably be political. Federal funding is what brings politics into science. The only way to truly remove politics from science would be to remove government from science. Every indication is that Obama wants to do the opposite. He has all kinds of pet projects that he – based on his ideology – thinks are worthy, from embryonic stem cells to “green energy” and global warming research. He wants to take more money from the private sector, thus diminishing the capital it has to allocate to research, and decide himself where it should go. That won’t remove the influence of politics from science, it will enhance it.
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Asked by the New York Times if he was a socialist, President Obama responded with a simple statement that, “the answer would be no.” But apparently the question gnawed at him so much he had to call later and add to the record.
…“It wasn’t under me that we started buying a bunch of shares of banks,” Mr. Obama said. “And it wasn’t on my watch that we passed a massive new entitlement, the prescription drug plan, without a source of funding.”
He added, “We’ve actually been operating in a way that has been entirely consistent with free-market principles, and some of the same folks who are throwing the word socialist around can’t say the same.”
…But his budget plan prompted criticism suggesting that he was intent on undoing the dominance of conservative ideas that started under Ronald Reagan, and that he had revealed himself as a free-spending liberal.
Mr. Obama pushed back against that characterization in the phone call and, in the process, issued one of the sharpest critiques that he has directed toward the Bush administration.
“By the time we got here, there already had been an enormous infusion of taxpayer money into the financial system,” he said, adding, “The fact that we’ve had to take these extraordinary measures and intervene is not an indication of my ideological preference, but an indication of the degree to which lax regulation and extravagant risk taking has precipitated a crisis.”
Ignoring the discredited account of the crisis that Obama is pushing in the last paragraph there, his statement is quite revealing. The best defense he can come up with to explain why he’s not a socialist isn’t a philosophical defense of freedom, liberty or markets – which we would expect if Obama was the great intellectual his faithful proclaim – but a red herring. All he had to offer was: “Bush did it too!”
What he’s really done here is to point out what many of us have been saying for years: Bush is not a principled conservative. The biggest thing that does is show how much the left lied for 8 years. Now, all of a sudden, they remember that he pushed a “massive new entitlement,” something a real conservative wouldn’t do. We are once again reminded that the truth is just whatever view the left finds most useful at the moment.
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I am a libertarian-conservative blogger living in the DC area. I have a Master's degree in Political Science and work in public policy, but please don't hold that against me.
