Did you actually read what Happy Lendervedder wrote? Because you seem to have seized on a single word (triangulation), and seem to be focused on nitpicking that to death.
Nothing he said changes the fact that Obama gets the most liberal legislation possible every single time.
The fact that some of the ideas were Republican ideas in the past doesn’t change that either. Political positioning changes. DOMA was once favored by Democrats, I guess if Republicans pass a new version of it they can claim it was a Democratic idea.
If they don’t cooperate, Obama should be able to rally voters against a “do-nothing Congress” in 2014.
A strong President doesn’t need to wait for election time to strike fear into the hearts of Congressmen. A strong President persuades the public to call their representatives.
You do realize that there is consensus among econmists across the scpetrum that the stimulus worked. Some argue whether it was worth the long term costs but there is consensus that things would have been worse. There is also near consensus that Bush’s tax cuts did not have a very stimulative effect.
Not all opinons are equal. Michele Bachman’s opinion on the effects of vaccines is not as valid as the opinion of the CDC, NIH and every other health organization in the world. The fact taht she might get equal time doesn’t make her any more correct.
You mean when the Republicans were being unreasonable? It is clear that it would have been the Republican’s fault.
Republicans don’t stop being obstructionist by virtue of the fact taht the Democrats didn’t capitluate to all of their demands. The title of obstructionist goes to the one who UNREASONABLY refuses to compromise. Insisting that planned parenthood defunding be part of the debt ceiling debate is unreasonable. Agreeing to a budget and then refusing to fund that budget is unreasonable. You can’t rewrite 2 year old history, those copies of time and the economist are still in the little basket next to the toilet in my bathroom.
I don’t think single payer was ever in the cards, but the public option was.
He’s done that once or twice.
Yes, it worked on the payroll tax cut.
Now, as for the stimulus, it’s fine to say that economists think it worked, although the opinion is hardly universal. But it can never be proven. If they can’t predict the present, which they completely failed to do before the stimulus, how can they claim to predict the future?
So unemployment was what, 8%, and they said that with the stimulus unemployment would be 7%? Something like that? So that ends up not happening, so they just say things were worse than they thought. But if they and their models were wrong about that, how can they claim that the second set of models were right? Doesn’t it sound like a classic ad hoc explanation?
Obama never negotiated in good faith as a liberal on the economy and health care. As soon as the Republicans made the least little objection to his proposals, his response was generally to rear back and give the Republicans 95 percent of what they wanted. Now if I were to negotiate like that with you over a used care you’d think I was either a fool or had a hidden agenda. Obama is not a fool. He had a hidden agenda … Romneycare was what he wanted, because he’s basically a Reagan conservative. Same with the economy. That’s why Obama is saying the Republicans will cooperate with him. He will probably give them 110% of what they want if he is re-elected. Of course they will cooperate with him.
Nice try. I was contesting your false claim that, “The only evidence that the stimulus worked is a theoretical model the CBO used.” Here it is:
That’s the second time I cited it. I accept your retraction of it, as you did nothing to back it up. Again, all 3 mainstream professional forecast operations come to the same conclusion.
It’s a standard methodology. Compare what actually happened to a baseline. It’s called a counterfactual technique: evaluate the significance of a policy by comparing what would have happened in the abscence of that policy. The conservative economic historian Fogal won a Nobel for that.
Oh, I can do that too. Paul Krugman read the Republican Party like a book back in January 2009: Suppose that we’re looking at an economy that, absent stimulus, would have an average unemployment rate of 9 percent over the next two years; this plan would cut that to 7.3 percent, which would be a help but could easily be spun by critics as a failure.
And that gets us to politics. This really does look like a plan that falls well short of what advocates of strong stimulus were hoping for — and it seems as if that was done in order to win Republican votes. Yet even if the plan gets the hoped-for 80 votes in the Senate, which seems doubtful, responsibility for the plan’s perceived failure, if it’s spun that way, will be placed on Democrats.
I see the following scenario: a weak stimulus plan, perhaps even weaker than what we’re talking about now, is crafted to win those extra GOP votes. The plan limits the rise in unemployment, but things are still pretty bad, with the rate peaking at something like 9 percent and coming down only slowly. And then Mitch McConnell says “See, government spending doesn’t work.” That’s pretty much what happened, except that in March 2009 it turned out that a) the downturn was worse than it had appeared in Dec 2008 and b) Snowe cut about $100 of the spending with the highest multipliers from the package. Use a multiplier of 1.6 and that exceeds 1% of GDP, which is not a trivial amount of foregone growth. Stimulus arithmetic (wonkish but important) - The New York Times
So they were wrong about the present, wrong about the future, but somehow their modelling of what happened must be right.
The only way to prove a theoretical model is for it to be useful at predicting the future. If you agree that we’re both starting in Arizona and if I board a train I’ll get to Wyoming in 36 hours, but it takes me 72 hours, it doesn’t do much for your prediction to give me the ad hoc explanation that I was actually starting in Peru. Oops.
adaher. If you want to understand the impact of a policy, you have to compare it to a hypothetical. That will involve a model.
You need to read a little more carefully. Krugman correctly predicted that the stimulus package would be too weak and he correctly predicted the resulting Republican jabber. The fact is though there’s a broad consensus among professional forecasters -those hired by companies in other words- that the stimulus worked. If you want to see the effect in a couple of charts, look here:
You can see the recovery in the 2nd chart, immediately after the act was passed in Feb 2009. You can also see the carnage preceding it.
Thank you for dropping your incorrect statement about the CBO presenting the only evidence that the stimulus worked.
How can a recovery start after an act is passed, but before money is spent? And how come job growth was faster after the stimulus money was done being spent?
Check the charts. We didn’t start to get steady job growth until after the Nov. 2010 elections. Which would indicate that confidence may have been an issue, as Republicans kept on saying. Once the Democrats lost the ability to pass legislation, companies started hiring.
Unemployment when stimulus passed: 8.3%. Unemployment in November 2010, when most of it had been spent: 9.8%.
Dude, he’s a Democrat. That’s why people elected him; to sign and pass liberal legislation. The problem is the healthcare reform bill is not liberal legislation, despite all the wailing and gnashing of teeth from the right trying to spin it otherwise. It’s a compromise, which is something the Republicans have for the most part refused recently.
It’s a compromise with Blue Dogs, not with Republicans. And are you sure he was elected to pass liberal legislation? Was Clinton elected to do that? If so, he did a pretty poor job of it, yet was wildly popular. His legacy includes welfare reform, NAFTA, spending cuts, a smaller federal workforce, and he even tried to invest the SS trust fund in the stock market.
That’s what compromise and triangulation looks like.
Passing conservative healthcare reform is compromise with the Republicans.
Then passing a new version of DOMA and Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell would be a compromise with Democrats by that logic.
Anyway, Bill Clinton says the election will end the logjam:
http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/
So is this a necessary lie, or do they believe this? Personally, I think that if Republicans lose, they’ll be more amenable to compromise. If Republicans win the Senate, then they’ll just send bills to Obama’s desk and it’ll be up to him whether to obstruct or not.
-
The money started being spent in May-June, IIRC. Expectations can easily turn things around after a bill is passed.
-
It’s the nature of recoveries to be self-sustaining. The whole point of a stimulus package is that you don’t have to do it forever. It’s pretty simple really. As soon as the package passed, job destruction declined. As spending picked up, lower contraction transformed into positive growth.
Look. The economy doesn’t care so much about who is in office. To a large extent it just reacts (with some allowance for confidence). A conservative package of higher military spending and temporary tax rebates would have done the same thing. And if the Republicans had bargained for something like that, the Dems would have caved.
- Your charts begin in 2010, not 2009. Yglassias is a fine blogger though and worth reading.
If you are interested, I made up an employment change graph in FRED. Here it is:
http://wm40.inbox.com/thumbs/5e_130b60_256989a5_oP.png.thumb
You can see employment losses increase from Jan 2008 until maybe Sep 2008. Then they stay the same until the Spring of 2009, when Obama takes office. From there, job losses slow, but actual job growth doesn’t occur until early 2010. Note that the big changes occur before Nov 2010.
The graph doesn’t care which party you are from.
Look, I think Obama made a number of unforced errors with regards to the economy: he should have tried for a bigger stimulus package and he should have pushed harder for Fed appointments. But the fact remains that Republicans opposed recovery every step of the way – and that when their guy was in office they made decidedly Keynesian arguments. Smart businessmen should rethink their support. Never mind the 99%, 100% of Americans benefit from a strong economy.
- Confounding effects. These are important. So after you look at the relationship between 2 variables, you need to think about what other variables may have played a role. In other words you need an economic model, of the sort outlined above by Moody’s, Macroeconomic Advisers, et al. And they agree with textbook economics: the stimulus package worked.
Only within the rich modern conservative imagination. Nothing in your cite implies obstinacy, merely a statement of fact.
Here’s a more detailed treatment of the Jan 2009 meeting: http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/politics/2009/01/i-won-president/
President Obama: “Look, we are all political animals here, If we don’t do this, we may lose seats. I may not be re-elected. But none of that’s going to matter if we don’t pass this because the economy will be in a crisis and the American people will be hurting.”
Cantor (R) explains some ideas he has.
Obama: “Eric, I don’t see anything crazy in here.”
And here’s the part where delusional Tea Partiers get the panties in a twist: Mr. Obama did voice opinion on some differences on the issue of whether the lowest individual tax rates should be cut from 15 percent to 10 percent and from 10 percent to 5 percent.
As the president, he had told Kyl after the Arizonan raised objections to the notion of a tax credit for people who don’t pay income taxes, Obama told Cantor this morning that “on some of these issues we’re just going to have ideological differences.”
The president added, “I won. So I think on that one, I trump you.”
…
While Republican leaders felt that Obama was at least receptive to their ideas, unlike their Democratic counterparts, they continued to express reservations about the plan despite the meeting. No evidence of obstruction. In fact, quite the opposite. Once again, we are back to modern conservative logic:
I wish that P were true.
Therefore P is true.
Let’s review. The Republicans pass spending requirements. They pass taxes. The two don’t line up. Then they refuse to raise the debt ceiling and expect Obama to pick up the pieces. That’s called, “Holding the nation hostage.” And it worked according to plan: S&P cut the credit rating after witnessing that nonsense. Republicans need to man up and get to work.
The problem with using a theoretical model is that even if it doesn’t work, you get a ridiculous outcome. So we had 9.8% unemployment after most of the stimulus had been spent. But the stimulus must have worked, all the mainstream theories say so! So therefore, unemployment would have been 11% without it!
No, that doesn’t make any sense. Because in order to do that, you have to admit the model’s initial assumptions were wrong. But if the initial assumptions were wrong, how can we trust the later assumptions? We can’t.
I agree about expectations though, we had the sharpest drop in unemployment right after the 2010 elections.
So it doesn’t matter to you at all that the vast majority of reputable economists agree that the stimulus prevented a worse recession? You are effectively putting your economic chops on par with almost every respectable economist in the country.
Your opinion simply doesn’t matter at all. Their opinion does. In fact, people pay them for their opinions.