youthathletics wrote: ↑Sun Dec 08, 2019 12:43 pm
MDlaxfan76 wrote: ↑Sun Dec 08, 2019 10:11 am
youthathletics wrote: ↑Sun Dec 08, 2019 9:06 am
a fan wrote: ↑Sat Dec 07, 2019 4:57 pm
youthathletics wrote: ↑Sat Dec 07, 2019 3:42 pm
(YA - No, but let's fight fair....it gets higher and higher under every POTUS)
Nope. The deficit went DOWN for two years in a row under Obama. Remember the sequester? And if it makes you happy, go right ahead and give Boehner credit for that. He passed that bill, after all.
And remind us all again what employment looked like? Certainly you know that. Oh wait, but BHO's stimulus was not pumping money into the economy?. Sure it was...maybe even his deal with those Common Core people, who also propped up his advance on his book deal.
youth,
Take a look at the chart on unemployment rate. Notice anything?
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS14000024
Perhaps that employment was decimated by the Great Recession, which began before Obama was elected, so unemployment skyrocketed?
Then straight down year after year after year under Obama, as the economy survived with the initial stimulus package backed by Bush and then the GOP with Dems under Obama, and eventually strengthened despite sequester. It was 4.7% in 2016, which was historically quite low.
It's 3.5% today as the trend continued under further economic juicing. It likely otherwise would have been continuing to go lower but at a lower pace.
The question is whether that immense amount of additional stimulus was actually worth the squeeze in terms of wages and standard of living (continued increases in health care costs on the consumer have eaten up any positive impacts).
I have no idea what your jibe about "Common Core" has to do with that, so am not responding to that one.
We are saying the same thing, I believe. We needed that stimulus, its just that the BHO Admin wasted a ton of it on those "shovel ready jobs" that never took place; see Solendra ref. My point, was that there is a correlation between recession/unemployment and debt.
The Common Core piece was his administrations donation to
Pearson Education that was driving the development of Common Core....to only then have that same company provide him the 65 mm book deal....is that quid pro quo; maybe?
I have been on record numerous times crediting BHO for righting the ship and acknowledged the unemployment rate trending downward...no argument there at all. So in the same breath, Trump is clearly following BHO's lead or simply NOT screwing up a good thing, b/c the trend line continues downward. If Trump is such an idiot, unemployment should be heading back north, b/c he knows nothing as you all say, but it is not.
I don't think Solendra was part of the stimulus package per se, but I would agree about "shovel ready" as well as picking individual companies as likely to be problematic, with certainly some misses.
On Pearson, no, I'm pretty sure that was an auction process. Other bidders were simply outbid, not a 'quid pro quo'...that would be a hard right anti-Obama conspiracy theory, not justified by the facts:
https://www.ft.com/content/6da8931a-fde ... 00c5664d30
On Trump, yes he could well be an idiot and yet unemployment continue to be reduced. After all, what he did was simply to sign the GOP tax bill, an enormous stimulus package.
Not exactly genius, though one might well say that taking on massive debt is something he is quite comfortable with doing from his business practices. So is declaring bankruptcy. If he has demonstrated any 'genius' in his business practices, it has been his savvy use of Other Peoples Money, losing massively, yet isolating his own risks in doing so and preserving the upsides for himself. Also quite savvy in his tax avoidance schemes, some of which, reportedly, went across the line of being legal.
So, is Trump 'smart' in that he understood that an already strong economy would get a further boost from being juiced with the tax cut, and that he'd be out of office long before the debt would actually be called?
Maybe.
Heck, he might even have been smart enough to understand that most of the actual benefit of the tax cut would flow to a very small class of folks including himself and his family. Probably so.
Did he also understand that much of the tax cut impact would flow to foreign nationals with large US corporate holdings through stock buybacks?
Maybe...indeed the Saudis, for instance, have very large such holdings...so do a lot of other folks who seem to have his ear.
So, he may well
not be an idiot.
On the other hand, he could well be a 'useful idiot' to those various interests, aligning his personal benefit with those encouraging him in the same direction.
But we the taxpayers end up holding the check.
And so, we need to ask ourselves: Did we remotely get the benefit of that massive stimulus package, incurred at a time when the economy was already very strong, unemployment was already within historic lows?