CHESSNOID

For awhile I thought we were going to have another 4 years of media ignoring the facts and just trying to focus on what the President was saying even if it wasn’t true.  I remember that is the way the past 8 years have been under the Bush administration and the 2 wars he started.  No matter how wrong it was, the media kept insisting the President was right and if you didn’t agree with those ideas then you were unpatriotic.  Most of the media was extremely ignorant and really hasn’t taken responsibility of its extreme stupidity.  If you want to understand what I mean, then you should watch the movies Weapons of Mass Deception and the War Profiteers.

Weapons of Mass Deception

the War Profiteers

Many people who put their faith in Obama simply based it on beliefs of a slogan.  The slogans were “Yes We Can” and “Change we can believe in”.  There is nothing wrong with believing in these ideas.  They are positive messages for sure.  The dilemma comes on delivering on these ideas.  What actions will come from these ideas?

I think the media overdid it by trying to ignore all the previous history Obama had. They seemed to ignore or downplay all the crazy stuff in his past.  Where was the scrutiny?  I feel like the media wanted to make  up for all its stupidity with the coverage they had during the Bush years.  Is it different now?  I really don’t think so because there are not really too many stories that are objective about the job and the performance of how our current President  is doing.

I don’t mean polls and surveys in which the media always seems to demonstrate how high or low the President’s approval rating is.  That crap is worthless and really equal to a popularity contest.  Even the questions that are asked are such that they invoke the answers they want.

The topic I like to talk about the most is the economy and the business aspect of it.  I am not talking about whether the stock market is up or down, even though I do like to follow the markets.  I am specifically talking about is our economy doing better now than 6 months ago.  I don’t want to hear more excuses that he inherited this economy.  That happens to every incoming president.  Nor do I want to hear from Obamabots that we should give him a chance, he has only been president for 3 months, 4 months, 5 months, 6 months…..2 years, 3 years 4 years.

What I want to see is a plan of action and the road that takes us from here to there.  Have you  noticed the tone of the messages  the President gives now  is not of encouragement and hope like he was campaigning?  It is more of a frustrated man asking for more time and that it is not his fault the economy was bad when he took over.   I see a man who made promises and is not delivering.

This is the first article that I have seen in mainstream media that is objective on how President Obama is doing on the economy.

Obama’s Stimulus Plan: Failing by Its Own Measure

The $787 billion stimulus plan is turning out to be far less stimulating than its architects expected.

Back in early January, when Barack Obama was still President-elect, two of his chief economic advisers — leading proponents of a stimulus bill — predicted that the passage of a large economic-aid package would boost the economy and keep the unemployment rate below 8%. It hasn’t quite worked out that way. Last month, the jobless rate in the U.S. hit 9.5%, the highest level it has reached since 1983.

The two advisers who wrote the paper, Christina Romer and Jared Bernstein, went on to land key jobs in the Obama Administration. Romer is the head of Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers, and Bernstein is the chief economist and economic-policy adviser to Vice President Joe Biden. And the stimulus bill that both economists championed became law in mid-February. What has not come to pass, however, is the boom in job creation that Romer and Bernstein predicted. A little over a month ago, the Administration said the stimulus bill had created or saved 150,000 jobs. That’s a far cry from the 3 million to 4 million jobs that Romer and Bernstein foresaw back in January.

Lawrence Summers, director of the White House’s National Economic Council, said last week that the stimulus bill was on track. This past weekend, the President rejected calls for a second stimulus package, saying the current stimulus needs more time to work, since only a small fraction of the money has been spent. From the beginning, the Administration has said that much of the boost to the economy from the stimulus plan would not come until the second half of this year. Administration officials have also insisted that it’s unfair to judge the effectiveness of the stimulus by projections they made back in January since the recession has turned out to be worse than what most economists predicted even just six months ago.

In a report released on July 13, Romer’s Council of Economic Advisers says the stimulus bill is creating opportunities for workers in health care, education and energy. The report reiterates that the economists believe the stimulus plan will create 3.5 million jobs by the end of 2010. “The various forms of fiscal stimulus are expected to provide powerful upward pressure on aggregate demand and to aid recovery,” Romer’s group says.
But while the stimulus plan may eventually reach its goal, a look at the paper Romer and Bernstein wrote back in January shows that at least for now, the stimulus plan is at best off to a slow start. The two economists did say in the report that they expect the bulk of the jobs created by the stimulus to happen in 2010 and 2011. Nonetheless, the report says that even by the middle of this year, the stimulus bill would have a positive effect on the unemployment rate. Without the stimulus, the two economists predicted, the unemployment rate would rise to around 8.5% by the middle of this year; add the stimulus, and that rate would drop by half a point. In reality, the unemployment rate is a full percentage point higher than what Romer and Bernstein predicted it would be without a stimulus.

Vincent Reinhart, a fellow at the right-leaning think tank the American Enterprise Institute and a former top economist at the Federal Reserve, says the problem with the stimulus bill is that it stimulates parts of the economy — like the health-care and alternative-energy industries — that were likely to grow anyway. He believes it would have been better to spend on U.S. manufacturing, where demand is much less certain to resurface and jobs are being shed rapidly. “I don’t buy the argument that you just have to give the stimulus package more time,” says Reinhart. “By the test they put forward to grade the stimulus, it is failing.”

I like that saying “let hope for the best, but prepare for the worst”. The Obama administration was optimistically hoping unemployment would reach a high of about 8% by the end of the year. It is just mid year and we are at 9.5% already and things are getting worse by the day not better. The Obama administration needs a reality check. Things are not working out they way they planned. Let’s fix it and not just hope things will get better by themselves. Right now most Americans are changing their lifestyles to live within their means. They are saving and doing less borrowing. The Obama administration might actually try fiscal responsibility and start only spending what we can afford.

The economy has become worse in the 6 months Obama has been in office because of his own actions and not because of Bush. He is trying to do what his predecessor Bush did in his previous terms which is spend his way out of a recession, but on a more massive scale. It is history repeating itself.  It didn’t work for Bush and it won’t work for Obama. Please no more bailouts, no more stimulus packages, and no more deficit spending on ideas that have no concrete plans or support.

http://www.time.com/time/video/?bcpid=1485842900&bctid=24027567001