Kevin_Kennedy
Defend Liberty
- Aug 27, 2008
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I think we'd have other stuff that would be as bad, like saber rattling at North Korea and Pakistan and other foreign policy stuff that would be ratcheting up aggression globally. We'd also have continued ignorance of the fact that there are problems in the economy. At least with Obama in office, having run on the economy, attention is on it and so something will be done with it.
Figure it this way, the recession started in 12/07 but Bush did squat to fix it except bail out the banks, and McCain thought it was dandy. I doubt they'd be giving it any attention - except maybe more tax breaks for the wealthy, which doesn't make sense to me.
I like cap and trade, personally, being a Cali-girl. Got to g et off fossil fuels, there's no way around it.
Obama's policies, to the extent he has any, with regard to Pakistan and NK are basically the policies Bush left in place. With respect to the economy, no one understood what was happening until the financial crisis struck with full force, not Geithner, who was president of the New York Federal Reserve Bank with oversight responsibilities over the Wall Street firms that crashed, not the Dems in Congress with oversight responsibilities, not Bernanke, who precipitated the crisis by raising interest rates as a precaution against inflation rather than in response to strong data suggesting inflation was a real danger, and certainly not our slogan meister in chief who has been consistently wrong in everything he has said about the economy and whose policies of reckless borrowing and spending have been cited by the Chinese and Germans as posing a threat to the entire global economy.
It may give you some comfort to imagine that this whole mess was just the result of a Republican blooper, but in fact no one in the administration, in Congress, in the Fed, in the financial community or in any of the other governments in the world was able to put together the very public facts about the financial system and foresee the crisis that was coming. That's why its effects were so widespread throughout the global economy and so deep within each of the developed economies. That's why Congress was dumbfounded when Paulson told them that while they were so busy politicking the economy had fallen into a financial crisis that could wipe out our financial system and wreck the real economy and why they issued a collective gasp when he demanded $700 billion from them to buy up the distressed assets that the markets would not longer touch - as it turned out, a small fraction of what would really have been needed. Everyone knew all the facts, but no one was able to come to the right conclusions.
Even if you believe we are in a continuing process of global warning entirely caused by greenhouse gases due to the use of fossil fuels, this cap and trade bill will have such a minor effect on the global output of these gases or even on the per capita output in the US that it will change nothing about global warming even in the most optimistic scenario, but it will raise the cost of electricity to households and to businesses, giving households less money to spend to help revive the economy and causing businesses to raise prices to account for higher overhead costs, making US businesses less competitive, thus costing US jobs, and raising the cost of living even further. This bill is all about politics and ideology and not at all about good outcomes for either the environment or the economy.
But on the factory floor of a steel mill in Oregon, the fellows were discussing whether the Depression would hit before or after the 2008 election in 2007. So all of the people that you state were ignorant of the actual state of the economy are either lying, or stupid. There were economists like Krugman that were predicting a major negative move in the economy well before it happened. Then there was a Republican President and Republican Presidential Candidate stating the soundness of the economy on the Sunday before Meltdown Monday.
Out on the factory floor, we well realize the worst is not yet here, and the only good news is that it is getting worse at a slower rate. Will President Obama's policies work? I don't know, but the policies of people that constantly refuse to recognize reality surely will not work.
Krugman did not see this coming in the least. He called for the Fed to create a housing bubble to get us out of the dot-com bust, but he didn't predict this anymore than the Republicans you cited or the Democrats you conveniently ignored.