Why ‘Obamanomics’ is working

[tyr_13]

Left-wing pundits say "poTAYto," right-wing pundits say "poTAHto," so the truth is probably in the middle.

Wrong. That's a well-understood fallacy, the so-called "fallacy of the golden mean," or "the fallacy of the middle ground." Just because to every extremist, there is an equal and opposite extremists does not mean that both extremists are wrong. If I say that the world is 5 billion years old, and a creationist says that the world is 6000 years old, that doesn't mean that the truth is world is "really" two-and-a-half billion years old.

It's also known as the 'South Park' fallacy believe it or not. It's one of my favorite.

'Hitler wants to kill all the Jews. The Jews don't want to die. So we should let Hitler kill half the Jews to be fair.' Although the standard example uses puppies. My other favorite example is, "Jill thinks she is pregnant. Bill thinks that Jill is not pregnant. The truth is probably somewhere in the middle."

 

[jimbob]

When there is a recession, politicians have a crisis through which they can pass their pets projects in the name of the crisis. For Bush, it was tax cuts. For Obama, it was the megalith of projects known as the stimulus bill. As with every recession before, we came out of it, before the microeconomic impacts of the various responses were even felt fully.

What about the agricultural depressions of the 19th Century, or the 1930's?

Every recession since the gold standard was abolished.

wasn't the Great Depression the last recession that was caused by a banking collapse. (And exacerbated by the fiscal policies of the day). So that would possibly be the best model for what would happen without governmental support.

 

[drkitten]

wasn't the Great Depression the last recession that was caused by a banking collapse.

I don't think so. I'd give that credit to the 1990-1 recession, which was caused by the S&L crisis.