Obama's problem

[faethor]

Salon hits it on the head :
http://www.salon.com/news/politics/war_room/2011/09/04/favoritesonsanddaughters

"If would be one thing if Obama were failing because he was too close to party orthodoxy. Yet his failures have come precisely because Obama has not listened to Democratic Party voters. He continued idiotic wars, bailed out banks, ignored luminaries like Paul Krugman, and generally did whatever he could to repudiate the New Deal. The Democratic Party should be the party of pay raises and homes, but under Obama it has become the party of pay cuts and foreclosures. Getting rid of Obama as the head of the party is the first step in reverting to form" -- Bingo! Too bad the article couldn't bring themselves to say 'Reagan Republican' as that's more accurate than anything DFL based.

Seems I'm not the only one who thinks the problems here are Obama's right of center bent.

 

[redrumloa]

There you go again. Obama, who you defended for a long time, is an undisputed failure, so you want to pretend he really is a Regan republican.

 

[FluffyMcDeath]

There you go again. Obama, who you defended for a long time, is an undisputed failure, so you want to pretend he really is a Regan republican.

He is a failure because he didn't do all the pinko lefty things he said he would (and for which people voted). Instead he veered right but the comparison to Reagan is not fair because Obama is to the right of Reagan.

 

[metalman]

Paul Krugman says "war is good!"

Krugman says that FDR's New Deal programs did not end the Great Depression, WWII did.

So shouldn't you now be thanking George W. Bush for the two wars he started? Luminaries like Paul Krugman, who won a Nobel Prize in economics, say war is the best way to create vast economic growth!

Zakaria says that digging a ditch and then filling it in, is productive work. So since the last Keynesian stimulus plan was "shovel ready jobs" does that mean the stimulus would have been better if they had been "spoon ready jobs" instead?

.

 

[FluffyMcDeath]

Paul Krugman says "war is good!"

Krugman says that FDR's New Deal programs did not end the Great Depression, WWII did.

WWII was just a bigger injection of government money in the form of debt. War is always easier to sell than hospitals, especially to the people with power.

So shouldn't you now be thanking George W. Bush for the two wars he started? Luminaries like Paul Krugman, who won a Nobel Prize in economics, say war is the best way to create vast economic growth!

No, because of the down side. It doesn't actually create growth, it creates debt. All the things that are built for war are built to be destroyed therefore create no long term capital. Stimulus along the lines of rebuilding infrastructure (while it may seem like digging a ditch and filling it) creates ongoing capital to replace capital that will shortly fail. Building munitions and tanks which will then be destroyed has a net negative economic benefit because that productivity could have been used for wealth creation instead.

Zakaria says that digging a ditch and then filling it in, is productive work.

War IS digging a ditch and then filling it.

 

[faethor]

There you go again. Obama, who you defended for a long time, is an undisputed failure, so you want to pretend he really is a Regan republican.

Red I don't think I've hidden my dislike for Obama. I'd still strongly advocate he was a better choice than McCain. IMO had McCain been in office we'd not be waffling if barely out or in a recession. We'd be in a depression.

So shouldn't you now be thanking George W. Bush for the two wars he started?

Net change in employment between 2001 (Bush swearing in) and 2009 (Obama swearing in) was ZERO. If you really think wars stimulate then Bush used war to cover a recession and failed to fix it. Which passed it to the next guy. Surprise here we are in a political climate where people are scratching their head and wondering why in 2 years could we not clean up the problems of the last 8. DUH!

 

[Glaucus]

One must also factor in that in the 1940s commodities were dirt cheap. Iron ore and oil were practically free, it was man power that was needed more then anything. After all, they say the US manufactured it's way to victory. All nations had fairly easy access to raw materials at the time, it was man power that defeated the Germans.

 

[FluffyMcDeath]

Krugman says that FDR's New Deal programs did not end the Great Depression, WWII did.

Having said what I said above about the economic non-benefits of war (ask the Soviets how stimulating Afghanistan was) there is a big difference as far as the US is concerned between WWII and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and that is, the US didn't do much of the fighting in WWII. The US was much more interested in the Pacific War and put more of its own resources into securing the assets of the Empire of Japan.

However, all this fighting was much more affordable to the US. It had plenty of its own oil and it was selling its arms to Britain (and later loaning a lot of money to Britain). All in all the US was able to make money from the European war while acquiring military bases off of the east coast of Russia and China at the cost of a third of a million ordinary people's lives, about the same number of military personnel that the French lost, and that the British lost (and also the Italians) but at a fraction of the infrastructure and civilian losses - plus the old powers of Europe were virtually destroyed leaving the US as the major manufacturing and military power on the planet.

Britain paid off the last of their war debt to the US at the end of 2006. Now the US does a huge share of its manufacturing in the conquered lands of the old Japanese Empire and in China - who it owes.

 

[FluffyMcDeath]

All nations had fairly easy access to raw materials at the time, it was man power that defeated the Germans.

Germany had to invade other countries to acquire sufficient coal and oil (and they were blocked from the oil producing regions) and they used Jews for slave labor. Of course, huge numbers of those slave laborers died on the job but far more died after the allies cut the supply lines thus preventing food and zyclonB from reaching the camps (the vast majority of zyclonB was used for delousing) thus unleashing starvation and typhus on the camps.

 

[Glaucus]

Germany had to invade other countries to acquire sufficient coal and oil (and they were blocked from the oil producing regions) and they used Jews for slave labor.

True, but the Germans were smart to foresee this and built up a huge arsenal BEFORE the war. Many other nations, including the US, were caught flat footed. But yes, much of Germany's war drive was directed at the oil fields and also lead to their eventual demise.

 

[FluffyMcDeath]

True, but the Germans were smart to foresee this and built up a huge arsenal BEFORE the war. Many other nations, including the US, were caught flat footed.

Not entirely flat footed. By the time that the extent of the buildup was noticed it was impossible to catch up in the near term but that is partly what Neville Chamberlain's appeasement was all about. It was simply factual that Britain could not have entered into war with Germany at that time and expected victory. Appeasement bought time for the allies to build up.