John McCain is President... Obama lost... How different does America look right now?

[foolsguinea]

Some of these contradict each other:

possibility 1) Our masters on Wall Street would first react with initial horror that McCain won, since they deliberately timed the crash to prevent him in particular from winning the Presidency. There would be a split, between those who insist on keeping the economy in depression and getting a Democrat in in 2012, and those who try to mitigate the damage done under a GOP government. Eventually, the narrative that might become dominant is that things are bad because of John Scapegoat McCain, not the GOP nor Wall Street.

possibility 2) The Democrats would very nearly dissolve, as being unable to win in 2008 implies a level of incompetence far too great for a major party.

possibility 3) If the Democrats don’t wither up and blow away, then the GOP would have to bribe the American people to stay in power. McCain could keep going back to Congress for more stimulus, and get 3-5 times as much stimulus by May 2012 as Obama did in his timeline.

possibility 4) McCain probably would clean up the CIA secret prison system.

possibility 5) Dems would very likely take the House in 2010, and hold it in 2012.

[ElvisL1ves]

@Shodan

Sure, as long as you recognize that Obama increased the national debt more in three years than Bush did in eight.

Is this the part where you tell us again that Clinton’s surpluses were because the House is responsible for the budget?

Wow, imagine how much worse the deficits would have been without the Bush tax cuts that the House Republicans refused to allow to end, huh? :rolleyes:

[Buck_Godot]

@Shodan

No, the amount by which Obama has increased the national debt and deficit is unprecedented. There is no reason to assume McCain would borrow and spend at nearly the levels Obama is doing.

Other than the fact that he would also have to deal with the same implosion of the economy that Obama did, and would need to make some stimulus in order to avoid the next great depression. Unless you think that he would cut military spending or drop the bush tax cuts. If McCain were in charge, the Republican philosophy would have stayed with the “deficits don’t matter” view they held through the Bush administration. The only reason Deficits became such a big issue was that Fox news saw it as a way to attack Obama and so astro turfed the tea party.

[Ravenman]

@Qin_Shi_Huangdi

Bullshit…no that’s inadequate… BULLSHIT. Simply put first of all McCain himself is not a creationist and Courts won’t allow it (it didn’t happen under Bush) and McCain is sympathetic to illegal immigrants. Your ideas are even more laughable than ralph124c’s.

Well, the fact is that it isn’t as far afield as ralph’s comments. McCain would have tried to cut taxes and he would have gotten us into TWO more wars, Libya and Syria. ralph’s baseless prediction of 5% unemploment, similar growth, and a peaceful revolution in Iran aren’t even on the same planet.

I agree that the creationism and the border thing are far fetched, but just because someone is criticizing a Republican does not make their points more ludicrous than the strange things that your fellow conservative (that is, ralph124) occasionally dreams up.

[Little_Nemo]

nm

[Der_Trihs]

@Buck_Godot

Other than the fact that he would also have to deal with the same implosion of the economy that Obama did, and would need to make some stimulus in order to avoid the next great depression.

Assuming he wants to avoid the next Great Depression, instead of kicking it off and making it as bad as possible. The Republicans are heavily infested with “Starve the Beast” lunatics who’d love to do that, and with rich people who see the advantages to being the only ones with money.

[BigAppleBucky]

@ralph124c

. . . We’d have about 4% unemployment now, . . .

Bwahahaha

[etv78]

@iiandyiiii

Bin Laden is alive, GM is dead, with a smaller or no stimulus the economy is worse, we still have lots and lots of troops in Iraq, we have troops in Libya, Syria, and Iran, Hillary is on the way to being nominated for the Dems (and will win in a landslide), Obama is still a senator.

That sounds about right.

[Monocracy]

@Shodan

No, the amount by which Obama has increased the national debt and deficit is unprecedented. There is no reason to assume McCain would borrow and spend at nearly the levels Obama is doing.

Regards,
Shodan

Obama increased spending in four years less than GWB did in either of his 2 terms.

The problem for Obama is that revenue decreased greatly because of the recession, which accounts for most of the rise in the deficit. There is no reason to think that McCain would have had different revenues than Obama unless he increased taxes. Any other policies would take at least a couple years to see results.

[Buck_Godot]

@Der_Trihs

Assuming he wants to avoid the next Great Depression, instead of kicking it off and making it as bad as possible. The Republicans are heavily infested with “Starve the Beast” lunatics who’d love to do that, and with rich people who see the advantages to being the only ones with money.

No, the rich want a good economy with strong economic growth as much as the rest of us, they just want all of the growth going to them. The only reason they are playing brinksmanship now is that they think Obama will get blamed if things go south.

[Gyrate]

@BigAppleBucky

Bwahahaha

No, seriously, after the “market forces” reassemble GM and the banks into vibrant, booming businesses, they employ virtually half of all the unemployed people in America. Plus they invent an ice cream-pooping unicorn!

[Shodan]

@Monocracy

Obama increased spending in four years less than GWB did in either of his 2 terms.

No, I am afraid that isn’t true. Here are the figures; do the arithmetic.

Taking the 2001 budget as the baseline for Bush, he increased spending by $500B in his first term, and $700B in his second. Obama increased spending by $500B in his first year, and expects to spend $700B by the end of his term.

There is no reason to think that McCain would have had different revenues than Obama unless he increased taxes.

I can think of 787 billion reasons why Obama has a higher deficit than McCain would have.

Regards,
Shodan

[Snarky_Kong]

@RickJay

Any realistic expansion of the armed services would have very little noticeable effect on unemployment, as is quite obvious if one just examines the math. At last report the unemployment rate was 8.1%, which comprises 12.5 million Americans out of work who want to work. Realistically, even a major expansion of the armed services would be, what, 300,000 people? The Army can only absorb so many people at once, after all. Even if we were to assume every one of those 300,000 people was unemployment before signing up - which of course absolutely would not be the case - you’d be reducing the unemployed to 12.2 million instead of 12.5 and changing the official number of people employed by zero. So the unemployment rate would go from 8.1% to… about 8.1%.

Woooo.

7.9%

[Monocracy]

@Shodan

No, I am afraid that isn’t true. Here are the figures; do the arithmetic.

Taking the 2001 budget as the baseline for Bush, he increased spending by $500B in his first term, and $700B in his second. Obama increased spending by $500B in his first year, and expects to spend $700B by the end of his term.

Ok, i’ll lay out the numbers for you, starting with Clinton’s last submitted budget:
2001 $1.9 trillion (Clinton)
2005 $2.4 trillion (26.3% increase) (Bush)
2009 $3.1 trillion (29.2% increase) (Bush)
2013 $3.8 trillion (22.6% increase) (Obama)

Those are the numbers from the link you provided. They show that Obama increased spending less than Bush increased spending for each of his terms.

[dtrobson099]

One thing we can be sure of, if any “liberal” justices had resigned from the Supreme Court (it is more likely that they would have stuck it out), McCain would have pushed the balance further to the right. More likely than that, a few of the older conservative justices would have taken a step down to be replaced by younger versions.

I’d have to think that the Tea Party would not have materialized, and that any legislation passed would be very watered-down, at best. I think it would be safe to say that health care wouldn’t have been a priority, but there might have been some push from Congress to get an even more watered down bill than there was, perhaps on all fronts (financial reform, consumer protections, etc.)

The Bush ban on stem cell research (can’t remember the details) would still be intact.

I think McCain would have saved GM, though. It was only a bad idea to Republicans, I think, because Obama seemed to support it.

Foreign policy wise, we’d probably be in roughly the same boat. The Iraq drawdown was predetermined from the Bush era. Obama took credit for it, but the wheels were already spinning. OBL may or may not have been dead. I take the accounts of Obama’s indispensability on that from both sides with a grain of salt.

There would have been some initial blowback on the country being unable to elect a black president, but I think that actually doing it brought to light how racist some of this country still is. I think that America’s racism would have been less front and center over the full course of the term.

I believe another poster beat me to it, but I bet Democrats would still have been able to pass some civil rights legislation on the gay marriage and DADT front. The pulse of the nation is the pulse of the nation, and it was time, I don’t think it would have mattered who was in charge. I happen to like Obama, but I think he does take quite a bit of credit (and politically he has no other choice), for things that may have happened anyway.

Sarah Palin would have been less of a public figure than she is now. They would have locked her in a room where nobody could hear her say stupid things. Probably should have done the same with Biden.

[Ravenman]

@dtrobson099

The Iraq drawdown was predetermined from the Bush era. Obama took credit for it, but the wheels were already spinning.

McCain has criticized Obama for not keeping tens of thousands of US troops in Iraq. There’s no way we would have been out of Iraq today if there was a President McCain.

[dtrobson099]

@Ravenman

McCain has criticized Obama for not keeping tens of thousands of US troops in Iraq. There’s no way we would have been out of Iraq today if there was a President McCain.

I’m too lazy to cite a source, but IIRC there was an agreement with the Iraqi government prior to Obama taking office to leave when we did. McCain wouldn’t have had much of a choice. And I have to take what Republicans say as hyperbole almost all the time, since they’ll just spout off whatever talking point Fox News tells them to anyway, and they by default have to find a way to criticize Obama’s every move. They’re marginally less ridiculous when they’re actually in office.

[Ravenman]

@dtrobson099

I’m too lazy to cite a source, but IIRC there was an agreement with the Iraqi government prior to Obama taking office to leave when we did. McCain wouldn’t have had much of a choice.

Sort of, but that’s only part of the story. The agreement was basically that if US troops were to stay (like for a training mission), the US would insist on a status of forces agreement that would lay out things like US soldiers would not be arrested and prosecuted by Iraqi authorities. The Obama White House attempted to negotiate such an agreement, but the Iraqi government told the US to pound sand: no way would US troops be “above” Iraqi law. So, Obama made the call: no US troops would remain in Iraq if criminal matters were to be in Iraqi courts rather than US courts martial.

McCain said the withdrawal “was a serious mistake” and “threatened everything we achieved there.” Add that to his earlier statements about staying in Iraq for 100 years, and it isn’t even a subject for debate: McCain strongly opposed the withdrawal from Iraq, and would have done anything in his power to keep tens of thousands of troops there. If McCain read this very paragraph, he might object to the “100 years” reference, but I severely doubt he’d have any substantive objection to how I summarize his views.

[dtrobson099]

Fair enough, I have a fundamental problem ever disagreeing with someone who uses the phrase “pound sand” so perfectly. Love it.

One prediction I left off under a McCain presidency. I personally would have stabbed my own eardrums out after 3 months of hearing that whistling old coot try to pronounce words with the letter “S”.

[Bryan_Ekers]

@Monocracy

Ok, i’ll lay out the numbers for you, starting with Clinton’s last submitted budget:
2001 $1.9 trillion (Clinton)
2005 $2.4 trillion (26.3% increase) (Bush)
2009 $3.1 trillion (29.2% increase) (Bush)
2013 $3.8 trillion (22.6% increase) (Obama)

Those are the numbers from the link you provided. They show that Obama increased spending less than Bush increased spending for each of his terms.

So one of you is right in absolute numbers and the other is right in percentages. Can we agree on that?