Silver lining, I’d much prefer it if you started threads with a stated position. We frown on threads that start with just links and no attempt at placing it in context. Please do so in the future.
Obama borrowed billions and had the weakest recovery since the great depression. You can look it up. He left with a decline in the labor rate ( which Trump has since reversed ) and a record amount of people on food stamps. If that is not enough, he accumulated more debt than ALL other Presidents combined.
Obama’s part of the top 1% now, taking big money and making speeches from the wall street firms he scolded. Of course not one of the wall street crooks were prosecuted under Obama. Face it, he’s a sell out these days
Iiandyiii,
I can see you have a lot to learn. Perhaps its not your fault as your news doesn’t; report such facts. Whether you will admit what you learn shall be an exciting development. Okay, you want links, I will produce them. All I ask is you read them, and please no excuses as the data are the data without an agenda.
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1 ) Low Rate Rate for Obama.** Only 62.7% of the population was working. Many of the millions who lost jobs during his tenure never found them and were forgotten as Unemployment only counts people out of work for a year.
https://data.bls.gov/timeseries/LNS11300000
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2 ) President Barack Obama “added” $6.5 trillion to the national debt in his first term, more than the $6.3 trillion added by the previous 43 presidents combined!**
3 ) Food stamps way up under Obama.
I did not say one thing that was false. Your reply?
Flyer,
Agreed. Fact are facts. The recovery was weak. if you want to see a good recovery that did not put the USA in terrible debt, see Reagan who took over Carter’s mess.
Well, you said at least one false thing, that “nemployment only counts people out of work for a year”. In fact, the commonly reported official unemployment rate counts anyone who has looked for a job in the last four weeks.
You also said things that are misleading: yes, labor force participation was as low as 62.7 when Obama’s left office. As of last month it was… 62.8 and trending back downward.
Further, food stamp enrollment numbers have been dropping for a good while, starting years before Obama’s second term ended. This is not a magic Trump deed.
You know what? I’ll be charitable. I’ll grant you that. I’ll grant you that what you say is factually accurate from top to bottom. It doesn’t matter, because like the accusation that Obama had the worst race relations since Jim Crow, these are by and large profoundly unfair accusations. Let me just pick out two statements.
Sure thing! Here’s another fact - Under Obama, America had a recovery which absolutely blew the rest of the developed world out of the water. This claim is, objectively, true. The US absolutely destroyed the Eurozone and Japan in terms of relative GDP growth over the same time period. Yet I bet you would object to looking at just that one figure and declaring, “Obama fucking killed it on the great recession!”
The great recession had the slowest recovery since the great depression because it was a different beast from every single American recession since the great depression. Other recessions have been caused by things like artificial shocks in oil prices, or the fed deciding to depress rates. The great recession was far more complex - something which is a lot harder to stick a band-aid on. I’m no expert on economics, but comparing the period of 2008-2010 to most other recessions is blatantly unfair, because you’re comparing apples and (attack of the) killer tomatoes.
And of course, there was more that Obama could have done to address the recession. He could have passed a larger stimulus package. He could have pushed for more investment in infrastructure - given how interest rates were stuck at the zero lower bound and people weren’t investing (so the risk of crowding out was very low), it would have been the perfect time for it. That… didn’t happen. I wonder why… Instead, we did exactly the wrong thing in the case of a liquidity trap - we committed to cutting spending, which led to even less demand in a market starved for demand. Whose idea was that, again?
Again, sure! This is technically true! It’s grossly unfair for a large number of reason, foremost in my mind being that the truly expensive things that happened under his watch were not his idea and were in fact things he wanted to get rid of but couldn’t, like the Bush tax cuts and the Iraq war, but like the above, this graph does not work as a pithy slogan, so in terms of out-and-out propagandizing, your idea, as unfair and unreasonable as it is, is more likely to stick in people’s minds.
Oh come now, do you really think the problem is “the news just ain’t reporting it!”? We’ve all heard these little stingers. The problem lies elsewhere, specifically with this statement:
It’s just not true. The “facts” you have on offer? They paint a highly misleading and dishonest picture. They ignore important bits of context. They miss the bigger picture in significant ways. Obama presided over the worst recession since the great depression and struggled to get any course-correcting measures passed through an unprecedentedly hostile republican party in congress - no shit his recovery is going to be slower than, say, the 1970 stagflation. No shit there’s going to be more people on food stamps and a lower labor participation rate. That’s what happens when the economy shits itself inside out.
You’d do well to remember the classic saying: “There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.” Because you’re saying exactly the opposite, and that’s why you’re just wrong.
At the link, there’s a graph showing the change in national debt as a proportion of GDP during every Presidential administration from Ike to Obama.
You’ll notice that Reagan and Obama are basically tied for second, behind Dubya. And Obama was dealing with the worst recession since the Great Depression, while the Carter recession was the shortest and mildest of all of the post-WWII recessions in terms of job losses. (It’s the yellow line in the upper left.)
Also, interesting distribution of blue v. red in the chart at the first link.
Reagan blew up the national debt by 186% from when he started. By comparison, under Obama the debt grew by about 68%, and while Reagan’s (and Bush II’s) deficits continued to increase year after year, Obama reduced the deficit through most of his tenure, while Trump is wildly increasing it so far.
Facts are difficult in backing Trump and conspiracy theories, but they remain facts.
Hey Silver lining, are you an Obama fan yet? Please no excuses - after all, facts are facts, and the data are the data without an agenda.
Seriously I don’t know what we’re arguing about, but I can tell you nobody is getting very hard up Scott’s pyramid of arguments.
Single facts are when someone presents one fact, which admittedly does support their argument, as if it solves the debate in and of itself. It’s the same sort of situation as one of the better gotchas – it could be changed into a decent argument, with work. But presenting it as if it’s supposed to change someone’s mind in and of itself is naive and sort of an aggressive act.
“The UK has gun control, and the murder rate there is only a quarter of ours.”
“The fetus has a working brain as early as the first trimester.”
“Donald Trump is known to have cheated his employees and subcontractors.”
“Hillary Clinton handled her emails in a scandalously incompetent manner and tried to cover it up.”
These are all potentially good points, with at least two caveats. First, correlation isn’t causation – the UK’s low murder rates might not be caused by their gun control, and maybe not all communist countries inevitably end up like the USSR. Second, even things with some bad features are overall net good. Trump could be a dishonest businessman, but still have other good qualities. Hillary Clinton may be crap at email security, but skilled at other things. **Even if these facts are true and causal, they only prove that a plan has at least one bad quality. At best they would be followed up by an argument for why this is really important.
**
I think the move from shaming to good argument is kind of a continuum. This level is around the middle. At some point, saying “I can’t believe you would support someone who could do that with her emails!” is just trying to bait Hillary supporters. And any Hillary supporter who thinks it’s really important to argue specifics of why the emails aren’t that bad, instead of focusing on the bigger picture, is taking the bait, or getting stuck in this mindset where they feel threatened if they admit there’s anything bad about Hillary, or just feeling too defensive.
Bolding mine. :rolleyes:
So you’ve said. Do you actually remember what it was like back in 2008? When the Stock market lost almost half its value in 6 months? When the unemployment rate was skyrocketing with no end in sight? There was serious concern that we would fall into another depression, complete with 30% unemployment and breadlines snaking around the corner. It was a bumpy road, but given the hand he was handed and the fact that the Republicans whose sole goal was to see him fail did everything they could to make that happen regardless of the cost for the country.
As an analogy, with both engines on fire Pilot Obama fights off his suicidal co-pilot to safely brings his plane into land in a cornfield, only to be faced with a plane full of passengers who are upset that they missed their connecting flight.
I didn’t bother to look at the other stuff you posted, but this one is proven false by your own (self-identified as right wing) citation. The headline from your citation is “Obama Has Now Increased Debt More than All Presidents from George Washington Through George H.W. Bush Combined”. So it doesn’t include the 42nd or 43rd POTUSes, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush.
I await your apology.
You can’t possibly be taken seriously if you act like Reagan didn’t put the U.S. in “terrible debt”. Why did his successor, a Republican, raise taxes in 1990 to reign in the size of the deficit?
And given the recession of '81-'82, wasn’t the Reagan recovery really a recovery from his own “mess”? Or do you take the position that it takes a little while for a president’s policies to get implemented, and it’s ridiculous to act like what happens on day 1 (or even year 1) isn’t a reflect of the predecessor?
So, how much did Obama increase the national debt compared to **all **previous Presidents put together, including H.W. Bush and Clinton? A hint: more.
The Dems tried this sort of thing against Reagan - “who are you gonna believe, me or your own lying eyes?” Maybe they will try it again, using their time-honored economic principles -
[ul][li]The President is responsible for all good things about the economy (except if he is Republican)[/li][li]The President is not responsible for any bad things in the economy (except if he is a Republican)[/li][li]Good economic performance is due to Congress (unless it is controlled by Republicans)[/li][li]Bad economic performance is due to Congress (unless it is not controlled by Republicans)[/li][li]a Democratic majority does not constitute control of Congress, so they are not to blame for anything happening or not happening[/li][li]a Republican majority does constitute control of Congress, so they are to blame for everything that happens or does not happen[/li][li]Blaming everything on Bush is perfectly appropriate, because he is not running[/li][li]Blaming anything on Obama is not appropriate, because he is not running[/li][li]The economy is not doing well, so we need to focus on the Mueller investigation.[/ul][/li]
Regards,
Shodan
Is “weakest recovery since the great depression” the latest Fox News catch-phrase?
At least part of Dem sloganeering should be something along the lines of “Donald Trump – even worse than we thought!”
We don’t really have a great economy right now, despite the employment figures. There are real anxieties out there in Middle America and the Dems will do themselves no harm and possibly much good by talking about affordable healthcare and how to be prepared for the jobs the future will bring us.
Cite away. Lots of dogmatic assertions here, and no evidence.
But cites aren’t your thing, are they? Just say No, right?
Disregards,
Ace
Try a cite instead of a “hint.”
If I thought it’d help, I’d suggest Democrats run on a Make America Dignified Again platform.
I’m going with Make America America Again.
Yep – Dubya’s crash totally totalled the economy to the point where it went into long-term recuperation.
So, obviously we need to go back to the policies and party that *caused *the Great Recession, right? MAGA!