(Click the Picture to Enlarge)
I made the illustration above because I thought it would be nice for everyone to see the history of some of the more understandable parts of the economy for the last 32 years. Left of this chart was the Carter economy -- which was similar to the Obama economy except inflation was worse but the value of the dollar wasn't eroding in nearly the same rapid fashion that quantitative easing has brought us. Reagan increased tax revenues by returning growth to robust levels, but he only had the senate for part of his two terms and never came close to having the house -- so spending outpaced the increased revenue. Still, the GDP did better with even the big slow-down of his second term having a higher GDP growth rate than the vast majority of the next 32 years!!!!!!
Bush 41 had a lackluster 4 years -- Foreign Policy was his highlight with the Iraq war -- but he stopped short of capturing Saddam Hussein which came back to cost us a lot down the road. Economically, he is most known for breaking his word to not raise taxes -- which lowered the GDP a bit and was moot anyway because spending outpaced the increases.
Clinton limped into his first term having won with the help of Perot who split Bush's vote. His first two years he was quite unpopular. After his unpopularity led to the Republicans sweeping into the House for the first time in decades with their "Contract with America", Clinton restored his image by appropriating the items in the contract as "achievements" of his own. For example, after vetoing welfare reform twice -- he finally passed it and touted it as one of his greatest achievements. While this would harm the American people down the road -- helping deceive them into thinking Obama has the right plan for them since "Clinton" had such a great plan, in the short term spending went down and we enjoyed a budget surplus for the first time in decades. There were two bumps in the road (as Obama would say) at the end of the Clinton era. The moderate bump was the tech stock bubble that burst after the hype of the new information age came back down to reality levels. The severe bump came in 1999, Clinton enacted regulation to force Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to make unsecured loans to tens of millions of Americans. After some gloriously fun years of everyone enjoying 3 story homes, the housing market would collapse and bring down some of the biggest names in the financial world in the process. Tens of millions of new home owners became tens of millions of home owners fighting foreclosure.
Bush 43 would face all kinds of challenges during his two terms -- some he met quite well such as 9/11. His dealing with the economy was less stellar. He cut taxes early in his term which helped the economy recover from the depression at the end of the Clinton term which was triggered by the bursting of the tech bubble. Bush created a new entitlement drug program and the Republican senate which had reigned in spending when the President was a Democrat began to act more like their Democratic predecessors spending money without much responsibility. Despite that, after dealing with the wars in his first term, Bush's second term saw shrinking deficits, and we were on pace to a balanced budget by 2008 or 2009 (WITH the "Bush" tax cuts) when the housing crisis hit. The housing crisis to be sure was primarily an outcome of the irresponsible lending practices that Clinton enacted -- but there is more blame to go around. While it would have been suicide for his already waning popularity which was already damaged by relentless, daily mainstream media attacks, Bush could have stopped those lending practices (on a side note: the mainstream media should probably get a little of the blame come to think of it just like they will for the next four years of Obama). Furthermore, Republicans failed to stop (though they may never have even known about) a practice of insuring risky assets rather than keeping actual assets to secure the risky loans. This multiplied the effect of the housing crisis as financial institutions with hundreds of billions of dollars did not have enough to cover the utter breakdown of the housing market with tens of millions of loans failing at once. While most of the blame rests squarely on Clinton's short-sighted shoulders, where Bush most deserves criticism is in his passage of TARP to spend hundreds of billions of dollars propping up financial institutions. The thought at the time was that these institutions were too "big to fail" and needed to support the economy. The reality was that these financial institutions ended up taking TARP and investing it the way they did their funds in general -- with the credit market having crashed along with the housing market, the TARP money generally never made it to consumers where it would have done the economy the most good. Bush's spending combined with the media-manufactured "generic" unpopularity he suffered with led to his loss of both the house and the senate in 2006.
After eight years of Bush, the last 6 of which included a mainstream media creating Bush hatred as a strategy which they ramped up heavily after failing to swing the 2004 election to Kerry, the American people were sick of Bush often for random reasons or reasons they couldn't really put a finger on. In comes the blank slate community organizer and junior senator whose very lack of achievement served him well to let him be whatever anybody wanted to imagine him being -- hope and change had arrived. While the election of someone with more love of the third world than America and with an ideal view of the world as socialist is alarming, it was of greater concern due to the surprising super-majority he enjoyed in the senate where Republicans did not even have enough seats to filibuster. This was achieved by a sweeping election combined with three cases of fraud ranging from probable to definite. In Missouri, Claire McCaskill is quite unpopular, but a judge in St. Louis made a last-minute decision to keep the polls open in St. Louis and ONLY St. Louis for several extra hours on election night. This was not to let people in line vote -- that's the case ANYWAY. This was so at best people who didn't bother to go vote could change their mind -- and let's be real so people who had already gone through line could get back in it and vote again. St. Louis is heavily Democratic by the way incase you just moved to this country. Sadly, in 2012, Democrats would vote in the Republican primary so we would be stuck with Akin as a candidate -- not only did he lose the seat to the hated McCaskill, but he probably lost the Republican party a few more seats and possibly even the Presidency (remind me to slap Akin someday after Anne Coulter finishes beating him). In Alaska, Ted Stevens was brought up on corruption charges by a Democratic District Attorney -- a shoe in for the senate, he had to step down and the charges conveniently came too late for another candidate to be placed on the ticket. Later, it would come out that the charges were false and the District Attorney was the one in hot water-- nevertheless, the Democrats had yet another seat by fraud. The third seat was Al Franken who lost his senate seat, but was the benefactor of some generous Democratic voting officials who "found" thousands of misplaced ballots in the break room -- probably under a peanut butter and communist sandwich. So, with three underserved senate seats extra, and a super-majority -- Obama proceeded to let the economy continue to suffer like never before and passed Obamacare. Obamacare isn't so much a bad law as it is an establishment of ranks of unelected bureaucrats who get to make up whatever horrid policy (might as well be law) that patients and companies have to deal with. He promised costs would come down -- anyone with a brain KNEW that meant he would at least double costs -- but, horrifyingly, most of the pain in Obamacare is set to kick in after the 2012 election so 2013 is likely to be a very un-fun wild ride on a Rollercoaster with a missing section of track in one of the curves. The stimulus money he spent, while actually doing some good, was all too often wasted on political allies. When we see "green" company after green company going bankrupt -- it's not a sad day for Obama's allies but the happiest days of their lives. The hundreds of millions of OUR money Obama loaned to them then helped them get rich as they sell of the pieces of the "green" company they never had much intention of doing much with anyway. In turn, they donated millions to help reelect Obama and an entire crew of incompetent bastards. I will leave greater detail for future blogs... But take a look at the graph and prepare for it to become stunningly much worse – to the right of the graph will likely be the ugliest parts – and that’s where we are heading now thanks to our liberal robot friends who think they’re not bigots if they make sure they vote for whoever isn’t a white guy. I'll post another graph in the future making the actual debt look as impressive as Obama has made it -- probably against the waning value of the dollar.
No comments:
Post a Comment