CHESSNOID

The public started to hate Bush so much that they fell in love with Obama with the same intensity similar to a rebound relationship (you just know it won’t last).  For quite awhile it seemed the media didn’t want to scrutinize any of his administration’s actions until many months after he was elected.

I think the media overall is no longer objective.  This has been proven and demonstrated in many documentaries since they joined forces with the government during the Bush administration and started spewing propaganda.  Watch Weapons of Mass Deception if you don’t understand what I am referring to.  It is free to watch on Google videos now:

The reason I bring that all up is no one offered any criticism for the Obama administration’s actions until recently.  The media wants to cheerlead all the way instead of reporting news.  Who cares about polls?  What is more important are  actions and decisions that are working and  not working for the American people.

Is the economy better than before Bush started?  Everyone in the media wants to say it is getting better, but reality on the streets knows it is not.  9.5% unemployment nationally is not good, and that number is grossly understated for reporting purposes.  The percentages go up if you actually count everyone who is unemployed, working multiple part time jobs, or just given up looking.

You don’t find too many economists willing to be honest about the economy and the Obama administrations’ performance.  I did find this one economist who basically says what Ron Paul has been saying.  I agree with both.

Ask the Economist:

Desmond Lachman: He’s making things worse

Resident fellow, American Enterprise Institute, former chief emerging-market economic strategist at Salomon Smith Barney

I think he inherited a real mess. But my view is he’s compounding a mess and not really putting the economy on the right track. I think he really botched the whole stimulus package. Most of it comes into play 2010, 2011 rather than 2009 when it’s really needed.

There are two things that worry me. One is, Are they laying the basis for a good recovery from the current recession? The second issue is, Where are they putting this country from a long-run point of view? When I see the fiscal numbers the Congressional Budget Office is projecting, it’s really scary. They’re rather cavalier with how much health care is going to cost, how are we going to finance it. I just think they’re being plain irresponsible.

I don’t see how you can get a recovery of any significance going when unemployment goes high. If you’ve got incomes that are declining and people are trying to increase their savings, it just means consumption’s not going to grow, and if consumption doesn’t grow, you just don’t get a recovery.

And another economist from the same article.

Martin Regalia: Budget proposals are ‘jaw dropping’

Chief economist, U.S. Chamber of Commerce

It’s very hard in this case to evaluate the Obama economic team on the basis of economics, because they have literally passed nothing other than the stimulus package. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce supported the stimulus. We didn’t like the composition of it, but it has helped. On that kind of thing you give him a C for putting together and getting a package through, though it wasn’t by any stretch an ideal package.

If you look at the housing market, they’ve put through all kinds of loan modification programs and those have pretty much failed. They haven’t addressed fundamental problem of disappearing capital in the housing market. Therefore that hasn’t worked. The stuff that’s been done with regard to capital markets and credit markets has been more the purview of the Fed, like the TALF program [Term Asset-Backed Securities Loan Facility]. It’s the Fed that gets the high marks on that. I haven’t seen much done by Obama administration that’s addressed capital markets except to get out of the way.

When I look at other areas in the economy, I think their tax policy will be a disaster, and their budget proposals are jaw dropping. The types of budget deficits he would run, the amount of government debt he would propose is staggering and would stagger the economy if they were allowed to be implemented. We can’t function in a good sense with debt levels in the 60% to 80% debt-to-GDP range. These are numbers that are beyond the pale.

The article has other economists who praise the administration with the premise he inherited a bad economy. However, that is a poor premise because virtually every recent president before (Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush, Clinton excluding Bush Jr) inherited bad economies. They seem to forget that fact and that we have had many prior recessions.