First of all, no blaming Bush and his deficit spending anymore. I’m not really sure how this would enter into the thread, but Obama keeps blaming Bush for his (admittedly) massive debts while simultaneously increasing the deficit. It’s like complaining that you have no money because your wife ran up $1000 on the credit card last month while you charge up $2000 this month.
Maybe it was all of the focus on UHC or the stupidity (yes Bush signed it but Obama approved of it) of shoving money to corporations without oversight. Those who fail to study history are doomed to repeat it. Both Hoover and Bush/Obama thought of giving banks money so that they would lend and both were wrong and the banks hoarded the money. But as much blame as you can place on Bush (and even as a Republican I blame him as well as the Demos for creating this mess), the fact remains that after a year in office the job situation is as dire as ever.
The only uptick was a seasonal increase that heralded the end of the recession :rolleyes: The unemployment figures are completely misleading considering they do not count people underemployed or those whose benefits ran out. The press reports the fact that less people filed first time claims than last month as if that’s good news. But that is a second derivative! It really means more people lost their jobs. What are we at now officially? 10% unemployment? Remember when Obama told us that if we didn’t spend money like Jim Bob drunk at a titty bar that we may get alll the way to <gasp> 8% unemployment?
Is it time to admit that Obama has completely failed at addressing the job situation? Do you Dems need to be reminded the last time a president was told, “It’s the economy, stupid.” Can you finally admit that it Obama is in way over his head or do you still cling to, “It’s Bush’s fault even though he’s been in Crawford for over a year.”?
Dems like Paul Krugman who have been criticizing Obama’s economic policy from day one? Is he someone who needs to be reminded?
ETA: Obama’s not in over his head. He’s chosen a very corpratist/financial industry friendly approach to dealing with the recession. I would think Republicans would be happy with it.
First you tell us no blaming Bush. Then you spend the rest of your post outlining exactly why it is in fact Bush’s fault. You’re sending mixed signals.
I’m really left to wonder what it is that people think McCain would have done differently? Reversed the bailouts? Cut spending? Balanced the budget? Get rid of Bernake? I’m having trouble picturing McCain doing any of these things. I suppose he would have pushed through another round of tax cuts, but it looks like Congress is moving towards extending the Bush tax cuts anyway.
No I’m not. I said not to blame Bush’s DEFICIT SPENDING because as many times as the White House wants to blame that they ignore that Obama has increase the deficit even more. I do blame Bush for his “Fuck it.” attitude during his lame-duck year.
As for being corporate/financial friendly - so was Hoover and we all saw how effective that was.
Then let me clarify it for you. There is plenty of blame to go around, but over the first year of Obama’s administration the job situation has worsened. Are Democrats willing to admit that Obama can’t handle the problem?
I agree. I think Obama’s making a big mistake here. If Project Constellation does get canceled, it will mean billions of dollars wasted and thousands of man-hours lost. I’m all for commercialization, but not when it means that a project that’s already significantly underway is canceled, rendering all the progress worthless. This cancellation will also mean that all the contractors and subcontractors who have been involved with the endeavor will suddenly have a gaping hole in their work, most likely resulting in job losses. If Obama is serious about spurring jobs growth, I don’t think he should be putting many highly educated people out of work.
The economy is shedding jobs at a much slower rate. That is progress. Then Obama trying to appease the repubs made the stimulus bill 1/3rd tax cuts. that was a mistake. His jobs program has created and saved a lot of jobs. He has been in office for only a year and jobs improved and the market rebounded. Why do you guys bitch so much?
Omama has plans to deal with the deficit as soon as we get on more solid footing. Bush and Cheney and the neo-cons said deficits don’t matter. So who had a better grasp on reality?
no sympathy for the finance execs here, but what’s so holy about NASA engineers? Why don’t they go out and use their brains and technical expertise to do something useful for a change instead of taking part in huge government waste of money? While they are at it, why not fire some of the useless lawyers, bureaucrats and similar with whom NASA is probably just as infested as other government agencies?
As Obama said at the start, it’s a two-year stimulus program. Way too soon to tell if it’s a failure. I’m sure any reputable economist would agree.
At any rate, given where he started and what he had to work with, it is rather hard to imagine what he might have done, that might have been significantly more job-stimulative than what has been tried.
While I’m generally in favor of the NASA budget and the killing of Constellation, one thing that was unconscionable was killing it without having a plan for its replacement other than some vague studies without any hard requirements.
The result is going to be the loss of thousands of engineers from NASA, and much of the money that is going to be spent on the new programs will be wasted. Every engineer knows that throwing billions at programs that have no measurable goals or CTQs is a prescription for waste and program bloat. It’s important to carry out these programs with some kind of goal in mind.
Constellation sucked, but the need for a goal hasn’t changed, and NASA no longer has one. Watch it drift.
Look, I’m a spaceflight fanatic, but if we have choose between spending limited national resources on another Moon mission or a high-speed rail system, I prefer the one we can use. There is no obvious economic return on going to the Moon again, and there are cheaper ways to conduct scientific exploration, and there are much better ways to prove America is still Number One.
Spaceflight means racial survival. As Jerry Pournelle said, “There is no physical reason humanity cannot survive another ten billion years” – once we establish a self-sustaining human population not dependent on a single, fragile planetary ecosystem. But nobody is going to go live in an orbital habitat, nor on the Moon, nor will any business enterprise or government invest in such, solely for the sake of such a distant, abstract thing as “racial survival.” The “need for a goal” is finding something in space (other than space tourism, which is essentially transitory) that will yield a profit, and in the short run. The Constellation program, I’m afraid, would have accomplished very little along those lines. It would have been just another dog-and-pony show like the Apollo program, the main goal of which was just to prove the thing could be done – and once that’s been proven, why do it twice?
NASA’s budget was actually increased. This wasn’t a deficit reduction measure.
And I’m not arguing for the Constellation program - I think the Ares rocket system was fatally flawed, and I see no reason why private industry can’t do the job of ferrying men and materials to ISS - it’s a steady run, it can be priced. So I’m all in favor of that part of the budget.
But what I’m not in favor of is just letting NASA drift without some overarching vision or goal. In engineering, you always want to know what you’re working towards - it helps focus the mind and the team, it gives you yardsticks, and it allows you to make reasonable trade-offs.
I’ve been on large projects that had no overall vision. They suck. They collapse under their own weight. NASA’s been told to spend its resources on some kind of heavy lifter, for some kind of unspecified mission, on some unspecified future date. There are no requirements, no deadlines, no metrics. If you don’t think that’s a recipe for a mess, you haven’t been around engineering teams much.
I just have to nitpick this because it drives me absolutely crazy.
**Unemployment figures are NOT based on the number of people drawing unemployment, and they never have been. ** The unemployment rate is not affected by people having their “benefits run out.”
People lose their jobs every month, obviously, even when times are good. The critical question is whether the number of people who lose their job is greater than the number of people who FIND jobs.
Wasn’t that in the same breath with something like, “The stimulus plan is going to create a multitude of jobs by funding ready-to-go infrastructure construction projects”
Seems what really happened was the money ended up in supporter, lobbyist and politician’s pockets, as usual
shrug Humor is in the eye of the beholder. Personally, I think that, whether he posts in a thread or not he is always at the top of any (reasonable) list for ‘award for most incomprehensible OP by a known poster’…but then this really isn’t about him, ehe Hentor?
If you have an issue then feel free to flag my post to an OP and I’m sure they will be around to properly chastise me to your little hearts content…
I think Obama should be blaming Dubya more. And he should have spent more money to create more jobs. Those 2 mistakes are likely to cost him a 2nd term. He should have been pimping the narrative that the Republicans screwed things up bad and he was gonna do everything in his power to fix things but that it was gonna take years to recover. And he should have followed through guns blazing. Then when the job market wasn’t looking so great in 2012 (which was always in the cards) the electorate might be more forgiving.
But it’s not fair to say Obama has completely failed to address the job situation. As people have said, things could be worse if he hadn’t pushed through some stimulus. He made the usual lame effort and got the usual mixed results. Wimp.