So, as I said, the odds are that barring major mistakes, the next four years will be much better than the past four years.
Does this mean that U.S. economic policy has done a good job? Not at all.
Bill Clinton said of the problems Mr. Obama confronted on taking office, “No one could have fully repaired all the damage that he found in just four years.” If, by that, he meant the overhang of debt, that’s very much the case. But we should have had strong policies to mitigate the pain while households worked down their debt, as well as policies to help reduce the debt — above all, relief for underwater homeowners.
The policies we actually got were far from adequate. Debt relief, in particular, has been a bust — and you can argue that this was, in large part, because the Obama administration never took it seriously.
But, that said, Mr. Obama did push through policies — the auto bailout and the Recovery Act — that made the slump a lot less awful than it might have been. And despite Mitt Romney’s attempt to rewrite history on the bailout, the fact is that Republicans bitterly opposed both measures, as well as everything else the president has proposed.
So Bill Clinton basically had it right: For all the pain America has suffered on his watch, Mr. Obama can fairly claim to have helped the country get through a very bad patch, from which it is starting to emerge.
Four more years
The labor force shrank by 368,000 jobs in August and the douchebags who read us the news all day long on every radio and tv station are in a panic. Somebody should tell these dummies that because the baby-boomers are retiring that number of “old” people will be leaving the labor force each and every month for the next 20 years. That’s one more reason that we should be encouraging people to sneak across the border illegally. My Columbian gardner is a very nice fellow. (Forgetaboutit ICE, that’s only a joke.)
….and, one more thing, im. The unemployment rate will drop even further as soon as the thugs in the the House and the Senate are sent home. Any asshole would know that Obama has a jobs bill on the table in the House that they have refused to act on even though they know a million or so jobs would have been created by it.
I’ve voted for the Dems all my life and sometimes the presidential candidate wasn’t always what we thought he was cracked up to be. This time around I’ve been dissapointed that Obama allowd those thieving, torturing, lyin-assed liers, Bush/Cheney to skate. He looked too goddamned concilliatory especially to the AA community of which I am a part.
I say send the honkeys to prison for life, as has Bishop Tutu in recent comments. Wrong is wrong, no matter who does it! (And had the shoe been on the other foot, guess who’d be facing the gallows?)