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Originally Posted by atlcomedy
The political brilliance of the Obama camp is that they passed health care, but it doesn't (for the most part) start until after the 2012 election.
He doesn't have to run in '10.....
Let's say there are legit signs of economic recovery in '11-12.....
Things could be rosy for Obama in '12 and other than that he really doesn't give a shit.
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Quote:
Originally Posted by WTF
That is exactly right.....Obama is going to hit the Ronnie Reagan of waves on that lucky cycle.
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Maybe, but there are some very key differences.
Obama's actions have more in common with those of Richard Nixon and Jimmy Carter than with those of Reagan. He's simply making a bad situation worse.
It's important to remember the history of the 1970s. Nixon declared himself a Keynesian and announced his intention to stimulate the economy with massive increases in federal spending. (Sound familiar?) At the same time, he pressured the Burns Fed to plump up the money supply in order to ensure his re-election in '72. Of course, all this simply made the economy worse and stoked the fires of inflation.
People often forget that under Nixon and a liberal congress in the early '70s, social spending increased at an even more rapid rate than it had during the LBJ era. In fact, social spending exceeded military spending for the first time in the mid '70s. All this largesse had to be digested, and the economy was to pay a painful price.
After Jimmy Carter took office in 1977, he showed that he had absolutely no understanding of the seriousness of the problem. He failed to stand up to a liberal congress and appointed an even worse Fed chair (Miller) -- and inflation raged unabated. Only after his appointment of Paul Volcker in 1979, with a mandate to crush the back of inflation, did he show some seriousness of purpose. I have long argued that had Carter undertaken those painful, necessary steps two years earlier, he would have had a good chance to see the return of sound money by 1980 -- and get re-elected.
Instead, it was Ronald Reagan who reaped the benefits of a return to monetary rectitude.
I believe we may see something of a continuing cyclical bounceback for the remainder of '10, but that things could be rather more difficult in '11 and '12. We have gargantuan structural (not cyclical!) deficits, any they are going to have to be addressed sooner or later. Otherwise, we'll simply see a horrific fiscal train wreck.
Massive tax increases (such as a VAT) will impose strong economic headwinds. They are like a huge meal that must be digested, and it could be a slow process. You can't yank hundreds of billions of dollars per year out of the private sector without some pretty painful consequences.
At the same time, the Federal Reserve is going to have to climb down from ZIRP within the next year or so. Higher interest rates (at both ends of the yield curve) will make recovery problematic.
I think everyone here would like to see practical, effective health care solutions implemented. But health care is not the most critical issue facing us. Our economy is at risk of simply being swamped by a tsunami of spending and deficits, and this "reform" bill will significantly exacerbate the problem.
Three years is a long time, and maybe Obama will somehow regain control of these issues instead of simply stacking failure atop failure.
But he hasn't made a very good start.
save 4% this year."
