Obama is lying again!

[BeAChooser]

The statement that "we have inherited an economic crisis as deep and dire as any since the days of the Great Depression" is clearly a judgement.

All Obama did was lament that folks have lost jobs. He didn't prove this crisis is as deep and dire as any since the Great Depression. He just claimed it. And he didn't say "in my judgment". He stated it as if it were fact ... using the office of the President to make the public believe it ... trusting that the public will believe it just because during his election he promised he and his administration would be nothing but honest. But they aren't being honest and neither are the liberal mainstream media that are regurgitating his lies. And the lies are all to get folks to sign on to this so-called stimulus/recovery/pork/socialist/monstrosity that both want. Because it will increase dependency and therefore the democrat party's power.

could as well argue even though unemployment as a percent is lower now than it was in '81-82, the situation now is much dire.

Can't you be more specific? Can't you tell us exactly why the recession now is more dire than the one in '81-82? Inflation back then was double digit. Is it now? No. The prime interest rate back then was about 20%. Is it now? No. The unemployment rate was 10.8%. Is it higher now? No. Over 4.2 million people lost their jobs between July 81 and September 82. Is that more than the number that have lost jobs in the current recession? No. Yet somehow back then we managed to recover from the recession without throwing a trillion dollars down a democRAT hole. How can that be?

Maybe you think this recession is worse because of the fear of bank failures. By mid '82 bank failures reached a post-depression high of 42. In fact, here's a chart of bank failures between 1980 and 2005. http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_otfwl2zc6Qc/RzGk5q6PFMI/AAAAAAAACto/EiFkuI8vhJo/s1600-h/banksfail.bmp As you can see, there was a period in the late 80's when between a 100 and 200 banks were failing EVERY YEAR. Did the US economy collapse? No. Back then, they spent just a billion dollars propping up the banks. Why hasn't the nearly trillion dollars they've thrown down the rat hole this time fixed things? Maybe because they don't really understand the problem? Maybe because they aren't really trying to fix the problem? Afterall, they want people dependent on government. Why have we lost faith in the ability of the free market system to make corrections and recover from situations like this? It's worked repeatedly in the past. Why now can we suddenly not tolerate a single bank failure without voicing predictions of gloom and doom. Do you know how many banks failed in 2008? Less than 10. Do you know how many failed so far this year. A fraction of the number that were routinely failing each year in the 80's ... even during the height of the 80's recession. Could it be that our increasingly socialist government doesn't understand the problem? Why is it that all of the sudden democrats think our government can do what no other government has successfully done ... manage an economy?

I notice on the economic indicators you selected, you left out the Federal deficit, the stock market and other measures.

I didn't leave out anything. I just linked you to an article that you didn't really read ... one that addressed most of the factors that actually do indicate recessions. But if you'd like to talk about the deficit and stock market, fine.

If deficits are a sign of dire recession (which they aren't), then does it make any sense for Obama to explode the deficit with a trillion dollar pork barrel bill? Or propose another trillion in foreign aid on top of that (his global poverty act)? And why are democrats proposing reparations (some blacks want a trillion dollars for that as well)?

Regarding the stock market, the article I linked points out,

With one exception - the steep 45 percent drop in the S&P 500 stock index since October 2007 - few other indicators of economic distress could support this being the worst postwar recession. Thanks to low inflation, for example, real disposable income rose every month during the fourth quarter - at an annual rate above 6 percent.

If folks would be calm and let the system work as it has in the past, then in a year or two most stock prices would be back to where they were. At least those stocks that were based on real products rather than just speculation. But democrats are impatient. They demand change. Solutions now. So they sell their devalued stocks (even the good ones) and make the losses real. Stupid. Why is that my problem? For the same reason that their losing houses because they took out risky loans is my problem?

The sad thing is that if democrat tinkering results in a long term recession (as is now being predicted by numerous economists), then the stock market losses may become real for most of us ... certainly anyone that is a decade or so from needing to withdraw money from the market. Maybe that is the democrat plan. Share the misery. Make sure that we all become more dependent. Because afterall, democrats love people to be dependent.

 

[BeAChooser]

>500,000 jobs lost/month for +3 months is a rather dire fact.

But is it more dire than any recession since the Great depression, which is what he claimed to be fact? No. In fact, here is chart that shows job losses for the last 6 recessions (including this one so far).

Notice that the 3 month rate of loss was just as high during the 1974 recession and just as high at times during the 1981 recession (and as you can see, we haven't passed the '81 recession in absolute percentages). Now here's my question. Since we recovered from both the 1974 and 1981 recessions without the massive trillion dollar pork barrel spending now being advocated and passed by democrats, why do we need to do that now? Isn't this proof enough that the recession is simply an excuse for democrats to get that pork passed ... to increase the size of government ... to make future generations poorer so that they have to depend on government and thus make the democrat party stronger? I think it is.

 

[BeAChooser]

I guess, then, we should just do nothing. I'm sure the market will fix itself.

It has in the past. Why would now be any different?

 

[BeAChooser]

One metric is market capitalization. In October of 2007 the total market capitalization of all the companies traded on the world's securities exchanges was $63 trillion, and by November 2008 it was $31 trillion.

But most of those losses are not real. They are just paper losses which will disappear once the recession ends. If democrats allow it to end.

By the way, do you know that the total value of the NASDAQ fell from $6.7 trillion in March of 2000 to $2.7 trillion by March of 2001. Yet we are still around and in fact the economy boomed not too long after that fall, despite 9/11. The point is, economies will recover IF YOU LEAVE THEM BE. It's when government interferes in the free market, that recessions get prolonged. Just as the Japanese learned. In fact, just look at what happened during the Great Depression. It was government interference ... the same type of massive spending programs that Obama is pushing now ... that prolonged that decline. In fact, the New Deal lengthened the depression so badly that the only thing that brought us out of it was a World War.

 

[BeAChooser]

Those stats, like unemployment, are increasing each month. We don't know when and where it will peak so I don't think you can really compare it to previous recessions/depressions until the peaks have subsided.

Yet Obama is doing it and using it as justification to spend over a trillion dollars ... to create 4 million jobs. That's over a $250,000 a job ... and many of those jobs will just be temporary things (how often can you redecorate government buildings and replace it's fleet of vehicles?).

At the very least, our economy is incredibly vulnerable right now.

So what? You could have said it was just as vulnerable back in 1981-82. So why didn't we spend a trillion dollars to *recover* then? Why wasn't that even necessary?

 

[BeAChooser]

And I think that structurally, we are much, much worse off than we were a year into the Great Depression.

Now that really is a *judgment*. But based on what? What do you mean by "structurally"? If anything, I would suggest that if we are worse off, it's because right now people expect something for nothing. The folks in the Great Depression didn't have that philosophy. That was yet to be encouraged by liberals.

 

[BeAChooser]

The current one is pretty much in the middle of the pack.

Maybe. Or it might already have reached it's peak if the government hadn't interfered. You have to admit that government action has clearly prolonged the banking crisis, credit crunch and those are what put us in a recession. Maybe the recession wouldn't even have occurred had the government let the free market system deal with failed institutions the way it has done countless times in the past ... with success?

 

[BeAChooser]

Anti-stimulus propganda from the Cato Institute

Why is it that liberals call anything they can't actually challenge with facts propaganda?

They repeat the tired line that The New Deal did not pull the United States out of The Great Depression. Then what did?

A war ... in part caused by a prolonged depression.

http://newsroom.ucla.edu/portal/ucla/FDR-s-Policies-Prolonged-Depression-5409.aspx?RelNum=5409

FDR's policies prolonged Depression by 7 years, UCLA economists calculate

... snip ...

"President Roosevelt believed that excessive competition was responsible for the Depression by reducing prices and wages, and by extension reducing employment and demand for goods and services," said Cole, also a UCLA professor of economics. "So he came up with a recovery package that would be unimaginable today, allowing businesses in every industry to collude without the threat of antitrust prosecution and workers to demand salaries about 25 percent above where they ought to have been, given market forces. The economy was poised for a beautiful recovery, but that recovery was stalled by these misguided policies."

... snip ...

By 1939 wages in protected industries remained 24 percent to 33 percent above where they should have been, based on 1929 figures, Cole and Ohanian calculate. Unemployment persisted. By 1939 the U.S. unemployment rate was 17.2 percent, down somewhat from its 1933 peak of 24.9 percent but still remarkably high.

So you see ... the Great Depression/Recession wasn't over even in 1939. But it was soon after. Now what happened in 1939? (Trick Question).

Now consider this ...

http://www.usnews.com/articles/business/economy/2008/04/11/did-the-new-deal-work.html

In 1995, economist Robert Whaples of Wake Forest University published a survey of academic economists that asked them if they agreed with the statement, "Taken as a whole, government policies of the New Deal served to lengthen and deepen the Great Depression." Fifty-one percent disagreed, and 49 percent agreed. Whaples today says that the New Deal remains a thorny issue for economists because it's so difficult to measure the effects it had on the country. "You need a credible model of the economy, and not everyone is going to agree on what that model should be," he says.

Yet most economists, including defenders of the New Deal, do agree that Roosevelt's policies were far from perfect. The National Industrial Recovery Act of 1933, in particular, gets a lot of blame. It created the National Recovery Administration, a federal bureaucracy that limited competition in various industries by setting prices and wages above market levels. The ensuing upward pressure on the price of goods and unemployment may have turned a bad situation worse.

... snip ...

One explanation is that in addition to the harm done by the restrictions imposed by the NRA, the "soak the rich" rhetoric coming from the Roosevelt administration had a chilling effect on economic growth by making people fear for their property rights. Who knows, maybe Uncle Sam would just start wholesale confiscation of the fortunes of America's wealthy or the nationalization of industries—Americans were already observing that going on across the pond with the rise of communism in Russia and fascism in Europe. This uncertainty, along with a jump in the top federal income tax rate from 25 percent in 1931 to 79 percent in 1936, may have deterred investment.

And does that sound familiar?

 

[BeAChooser]

Like this one, of jobless figures?

... snip ...

(From: http://www.speaker.gov/blog/?p=1683 )

Notice, as BPSCG pointed out, that Speaker Pelosi is the one who put that figure out and there is a lot left out of it. See the chart I posted above. Why do you suppose Pelosi left out the curves corresponding to the 1974 and the 1981 recessions? Was she practicing how to LIE with statistics?

 

[BeAChooser]

Of course, BeAChooser might wish to argue that really, things weren't all that bad, and that Paulson and Bush were simply conspring to find a way to give tax money to their friends in the banking industry.

You think Bush and Paulson don't have friends in the banking industry? And perhaps Bush and Paulson are just infected by the same disease that democrats have long had ... thinking bigger government, more government control and more spending are the answer to everything. In case you haven't noticed, one of the biggest complaints by conservatives about Bush is that when it comes to spending, he hasn't been all that different from democrats. In fact, I've heard many a liberal on this forum make the argument that Bush was worse than democrats in that regards.

I think a more straightforward explanation is that things really and truly were pretty massively screwed up.

Well then I think you should be able to quote folks citing facts that prove that. Or are we now supposed to just take the word of those in government when they demand more and more money but give no fact filled explanations? If so, I'm sure democrats will be particularly pleased.

 

[BeAChooser]

We have a crisis.

If so, then we had a crisis back in 1981. Banks were failing. Unemployment was high. The auto industry was in shambles. There were a host of problems. Yet we didn't need to spend a trillion dollars on a stimulus/recovery package to recover. Why? Because it wasn't needed. Well maybe it's not really needed now, either.

There is hardly any credit available.

As structured, the stimulus bill is not going to solve the credit problem. In fact, it hardly addresses that problem. In fact ...

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid=aTPOyxTJMzbU&refer=home

The unprecedented stimulus package that President Barack Obama is trying to wrestle through Congress may end up being wasted unless the administration can find a way to restart stalled credit markets.

Now we already threw $700 billion (the TARP) at the credit problem. You seem to be agreeing with many others that TARP didn't solve the problem. For example ...

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2009/01/best_stimulus_homebuyers_tax_c.html

A Wall Street Journal analysis (subscription required) reveals that the lending at the nation's largest banks actually declined after they received $148 billion to help unfreeze the credit market. Only three of the 13 largest banks increased lending after receiving billions of dollars.

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid=aTPOyxTJMzbU&refer=home

We really haven’t seen any breakthrough yet in the credit logjam,” said former Federal Reserve Governor Lyle Gramley, who is now a senior economic adviser at Stanford Group Co. in Washington.

And worse, Mr Gramley points out that

“We’re going to get limited benefit from the stimulus program unless people can finance their normal operations.”

So the current credit crunch may be another good reason not to just throw a trillion dollars at the economy at this time ... unless you want to waste it or have another agenda (and I think that's really what is going on with democrats).

In fact, I think the stimulus bill might actually make the credit crunch even worse. Because to pay that trillion, the government is going to have to borrow a trillion.

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2009/feb/04/cbo-obama-stimulus-harmful-over-long-haul/

President Obama's economic recovery package will actually hurt the economy more in the long run than if he were to do nothing, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office said Wednesday.

CBO, the official scorekeepers for legislation, said the House and Senate bills will help in the short term but result in so much government debt that within a few years they would crowd out private investment, actually leading to a lower Gross Domestic Product over the next 10 years than if the government had done nothing.

Understand this ... the stimulus package is the same thing (buying things one can't afford) that led to the credit problem in the first place.

Greenspan called it "once-in-a-century credit tsunami" and "a critical pillar to market competition and free markets did break down." So add him to your "liars".

I never said the credit crunch isn't a problem. It most certainly is one. But not one that the trillion in "stimulus" money will solve. And it's one that probably would be close to solution now had government not interfered in the first place ... had government just let the free market do what it already knew how to do through such time tested mechanisms as bankruptcy and the firing of bad managers back when banks were starting to fail over bad mortgages. In fact, it probably wouldn't have occurred at all had democrats not fought Bush, McCain and republicans years ago when they wanted to reform Fannie and Freddie. And it most certainly wouldn't have happened had Obama, Barney and liberal organizations like ACORN not pushed for massive loans to people who couldn't afford them and then pressured Fannie and Freddie to back them up. I don't know why you folks think you can use more debt to solve the problem of too much debt, especially since you aren't spending that new debt on productive capacity. I don't know why you folks think government can allocate and spend resources more effectively than individuals and the free market given that not one has ever done so. I don't know why you folks think the rest of us are fooled as to your real motives in pushing this stimulus package.

 

[Dr Adequate]

But is it more dire than any recession since the Great depression, which is what he claimed to be fact? No. In fact, here is chart that shows job losses for the last 6 recessions (including this one so far).

Now put that together with everything else you know, or, in your case, don't know, about the economy ... don't you see anything at all worrying?

Notice that the 3 month rate of loss was just as high during the 1974 recession and just as high at times during the 1981 recession (and as you can see, we haven't passed the '81 recession in absolute percentages). Now here's my question. Since we recovered from both the 1974 and 1981 recessions without the massive trillion dollar pork barrel spending now being advocated and passed by democrats, why do we need to do that now? Isn't this proof enough that the recession is simply an excuse for democrats to get that pork passed ... to increase the size of government ... to make future generations poorer so that they have to depend on government and thus make the democrat party stronger? I think it is.

Your paranoid fantasies, though amusing, are not evidence of anything except your state of mind. With which we are already familiar.

 

[BeAChooser]

Obama -

(speaking in Fort Meyers, Florida, today):
Quote:
Now, of course, there are some critics—always critics—who say we can’t afford to take on these priorities, but we have postponed and neglected them for too long. And because we have, ... snip ... Our—our schools still fail too many of our children.

Why is it that Obama thinks the problem with our schools is one that can be fixed with more money (taken from taxpayers' pockets)? If he believes that, then he should be able to explain why the students in Washington DC, which spends about $12,000 per pupil per year, do much worse in testing than students in Utah, which spends about a third of that per pupil per year?

 

[BeAChooser]

I was surprised to read that the longest recession since the great depression was 16 months. We are currently in month 14

BUT, had the US government done what they did in previous recessions ... i.e., not interfere with the free market's way of dealing with recessions ... then this recession might already be over. The banks that needed to fail would have failed, their assets would have been reorganized and put under new management, and credit would now be available. Instead, because of government intervention in the normal process, credit is still not available and THAT is what has prolonged this recession.

Here, I think you should read the following:

http://www.cnn.com/2008/POLITICS/09/29/miron.bailout/index.html?iref=mpstoryview "Commentary: Bankruptcy, not bailout, is the right answer"

 

[JoeTheJuggler]

All Obama did was lament that folks have lost jobs. He didn't prove this crisis is as deep and dire as any since the Great Depression. He just claimed it.

Are you saying anytime someone makes a statement without proving it it is a lie?

So if I just said that in a right triangle the square of the hypoteneuse is equal to the sum of the squares of the other two sides, but didn't prove it, that it's a lie?

As for Obama's speech, I don't think the vast majority of his audience doesn't believe this is an extremely dire situation. I think the purpose of his speech was other than to persuade economic-crisis-deniers that we're in a bad state.

 

[BeAChooser]

4) Ron Brown and Vince Foster were assassinated by the Clintons.

Now, gdnp, you have your chance to debate that subject here:

http://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/showthread.php?t=134001

Are you afraid to do that? Were you just feigning interest when you claimed to have some expertise in reading x-rays and wanted to see the x-rays of Brown's skull for yourself? I provided them but you never showed up. Why the cold feet?

 

[joobz]

http://timeswampland.files.wordpress.com/2009/02/six_recessions3.gif

Notice that the 3 month rate of loss was just as high during the 1974 recession and just as high at times during the 1981 recession (and as you can see, we haven't passed the '81 recession in absolute percentages). Now here's my question.

I did notice that. Thanks for proving my point.

 

[BeAChooser]

Because WWII actually stimulated production of something other than make-work jobs, maybe?

Good point. If the current stimulus package spent a trillion on something truly bold ... such as building nuclear power plants across the country ... I would probably be less opposed to it. That would provide plenty of highly skilled jobs. That would free us from our dependency on foreign oil. That would reduce our carbon footprint and mean a cleaner America. That might give us an edge in the worldwide market for nuclear power. That would improve our national security. That would stimulate other technologies ... like electric cars. And that would be a long term investment ... as opposed to paying folks to mow the lawns around government buildings.

 

[BeAChooser]

I don't think the vast majority of his audience doesn't believe this is an extremely dire situation.

Why is the situation any direr than the 1981 recession? None of the statistics so far cited would indicate that's the case. So why is it necessary to rush through a trillion dollars in pork? Why can't any of you answer that question? Why the rush to spend money that will mostly do nothing but saddle this and future generations with more debt? Very little in this bill will produce long term change ... grow the economy. So the minute you stop spending, those people will be back out of work. Without any restructuring of the economy ... which is part of the NORMAL business cycle ... having taken place. It's like giving morphine to a man with a broken leg. You haven't really fixed the problem. Why the rush when in past recessions the economy recovered without anything of the sort being done? Why don't you liberals just admit that you want to make government bigger and people more dependent on it because that will increase your constituency. And you want to pay back your constituents for their help in the election. You think we don't see that?

 

[gdnp]

It has in the past. Why would now be any different?

Ask the Japanese. Or google the phrase "zombie institutions".