Expecially when the Republican Party opposes anything he proposes as a political tactic.
That's a myth propagated by Democrats. The Republicans opposed Obama when he advocated policies they didn't agree with. They supported him on policies they did agree with. The record is very clear actually.
That is not a fact, despite what you've heard. It as opinion most likely formed by way of motivated reasoning. Certainly not formed in good faith. And equally certainly leading on to the necessity of tax cuts for the rich and an end to the Death Tax.
Ha. How the hell would you know? I challenge you or anybody here to find anywhere that I've contradicted the worldview I espouse. I have over 7,500 posts here, and I guarantee it can't be done. That's because I always post my beliefs in good faith.
And there it is. All very plausible sounding and utterly spurious.
The overcapacity in 2008 was in the financial sector. That, of course, was a direct result of removing the Glass-Steagal restrictions and the subsequent reckless marketing of debt. Just as people like me predicted.
What you have typed is mostly nonsense. Overcapacity in the financial sector? What does that even mean except that there were too many people working there? Which is true, I suppose, but maybe 150,000 jobs were eliminated after 2008, and that's a drop in the bucket compared to the economy as a whole. Also, Glass-Steagall was bad policy, and its repeal had nothing to do with the housing bubble. If anything, the fact that there were independent investment banks made the crash worse. Of the five largest investment banks, all are either bankrupt (Lehman), acquired by a commercial bank (Merrill and Bear), or have turned into commercial banks (Goldman and Morgan Stanley) on their own.
As for the bubble itself, well, bubbles do happen from time to time. They are as much a part of the human condition as war. Of course, there was massive fraud happening at the level of mortgage origination. The financial machinery to turn loans into AAA-rated bonds of course gave the big banks incentive to ignore the fraud (if not indulge in it themselves), but ultimately there was a failure of policing on the part of the credit rating agencies and, ultimately, the investors in such crap.
Once the crash came the financial sector had marketed unsustainable debt to large parts of the population which it had never reached before, backed by the pension funds of millions of people who saw them evaporate.
What pension funds evaporated? For the most part retail people weren't exposed to the toxic mortgage debt. More likely they were the ones that benefited from taking out a big mortgage and then defaulting on it (while getting to live in their home for 7 or 8 years).
There is no similar case to measure the 2008 Crash with, and thus no similar recovery. There has been a recovery, which was not a given back then.
Of course it was a given. See
Mosler's Law: "no financial crisis [is] so deep that a sufficiently large fiscal adjustment cannot deal with it."
It would have been nice if this fiscal adjustment had been made by cutting the wage tax to zero, but eventually the automatic stabilizers in the economy created sufficiently large deficits to build up private sector savings again.
(This kind of relaxation of credit wasn't confined to the US, of course, but it was particularly marked there and in the UK. The obvious run-up to the next crash is particularly marked in the US as well, but then sod-all's been done to prevent it.)
One success of Obama, and indeed of Bush before him (to the extent which anything can be creditied to Bush), was not to follow the Republican policy of reproducing the 1930's. The "austerity" which has kept recovery just as slow, if not slower, in Europe, and which cannot be blamed on Obama.
I agree with that. Austerity is idiotic. Fortunately, neither Democrats nor Republicans have the will to impose austerity in the US. For the record, though, austerity was not a Republican policy in the 1930s. You might not know this, but FDR attacked Hoover ferociously in 1932 for having too large a budget deficit.
And while we're on Republican policy, it's hard to see shutting down the government as a sensible one. And yet it happened.
Shutting down the government in the US means that some national parks close. 90% of the government is on autopilot. It was a non-event. Also, it was just as much Obama's and Harry Reid's fault. The Republican House passed a budget bill, and Harry Reid, at Obama's direction, refused to allow the Senate to vote on it.
Eight years on is a bit soon to start rewriting History: this is still current events. There was no such expectation. What happened is that Bush was desperate to get a leave-date agreed before he left office in a pathetic attempt to rescue some small shard of his reputation. It failed.
Utterly false. I'll have to dig up some of my references, but Bush, as was his nature, wanted to give his successor some breathing room while still not locking him into any one policy on Iraq. The agreement was for three years specifically to give Obama a say in any new SOFA, without forcing him to make a high pressure decision early in his term.
As has been pointed out, the US population wanted the troops out, and the Iraqis wanted the troops out. ISIS hit the scene six years later, when Iraq was supposed to have its own army in place, and by all rights should have done. US troops weren't going to be kept there in anticipation all that time. The idea is nonsensical.
Some of the US population wanted the troops out, but that's meaningless. We have a representative democracy. We don't hold referenda on military strategies. The President should do what's best for the country, not what's best for his short-term approval rating. The Iraqi government actually did not want US troops out, and the Sunnis certainly didn't. The man on the street mouthed platitudes about getting rid of the US troops, but that's sort of par for the course in the Arab world. Say one thing, and mean another.
What is an abvious fact is the Bush regime's reckless invasion of Iraq and abject handling of the aftermath removed the option of US troops being put on the ground for a generation, even where it would actually make sense. That's an option removed by the Bush administration. Just as the budget surplus it inherited was an option not bequeathed to its successor.
Actually, what I would say instead is that the Democrats' cynical exploitation of a difficult occupation for political purposes quashed any chance of using US troops on the ground for another Presidential cycle. It truly is odd how Iraq has been cemented in the public consciousness as some sort of disaster. The alternative scenario (leaving Saddam in place and allowing the sanctions to erode) could have been pretty nightmarish. It was probably also inevitable that Iraq would go the way of Syria if Saddam stayed in charge, although by the time the civil war began, he might already have had weapons of mass destruction.
