Obama is Failing IV

Obama is Failing

It’s now more that a month past my first post about President Obama’s First two quarters in office,  and the outlook is not any better. Obama is presiding over an economy with accelerating  job losses when he promised job gains with TARP’s passage. The economy is the key thing worrying the country right now, and his entire party and administration seems oblivious to that fact.

Here’s a graphic map that visualizes job losses through time at Slate, please hit the start button, then the green play button. You will see that job losses accelerated dramatically from November when he was elected through to the present.

Even his most ardent supporters cannot step forward in the face of this and say that he is succeeding in his election promise of saving and creating jobs. If he wants success there he’s got several long rows to hoe and with the course that he has set the outcome will be Congress facing elections with the US poorer and unemployment still high in 2010. This will occur even though the economy has turned and our basic economy is sound.

The contentious cap and trade and health care bills in Congress insure economic restraint through uncertainty if they are passed, and if they fail then they must fail dramatically to end the uncertainty. Both will introduce huge new costs to consumers, businesses, state economies, and local economies. These costs are unknowns which keep bean counters at every business in America awake at night because they can’t make forecasts with any hope of reasonable accuracy.

Bottom line:

  • High energy prices created by Cap and trade legislation will turn the economy down, not up, as President Obama promised.
  • Increased taxation from the Health Care bill will retard rather than progress the economy as Obama promised.

Cap and trade has been called “Cap and Tax” for a reason: one outcome will be increased energy costs for consumers and businesses, and high energy prices  drive all other things in the economy.

Indeed there are good arguments to be made that the rest of the world’s countries implementing cap and trade policies in prior years led to the fragility which tipped us over the brink in the banking and mortgage loan industries. Without high energy prices the past several years the system might have been able to sustain with a lower burden of defaults, and mortgage companies might not have so many “toxic assets” on the books. High energy costs stifle economies worldwide, so why would you intentionally make them higher at a time of severe economic malaise?

The other problematic bill in congress is the Health care bill  – the unknowns are more daunting than the knowns since the bill is a nightmare of cut and paste confusion as Pelosi’s staffers and lobbyists crammed like they were writing a term paper they had blown off all semester to get this before Congress in time. The resultant mess in the lower congress from “rushing to woo” the public is a crazy patchwork quilt of conflicting measures that can be interpreted any way opponents want to. This has been a real boon for grenade throwers like Sarah Palin and others.

The outlook for both bills has seriously worsened since I wrote this post, however I still expect pared down versions of both to pass. You can bet that some Republicans in congress do want some of the energy investments in the “energy bill portion” of Cap and Trade, and you can bet there are some health care reforms that Republicans and Blue Dogs could get behind. If Obama wants a cosmetic win in getting both passed then he’s going to have to give up the Pelosi and Waxman versions and cross the aisle to sanity.

To me that’s a failure since the Dems have a big lock on majority and should be able to get pretty much anything through. The struggles they are having now really demonstrates how truly incompetent their legislators are.

UPDATE: Charles hits the nail on the head about the political sideshow of the “DeathPanel” debate, with fact checking on the provisions provided by ABC. Also note that Rick Moran’s been taking a lot of heat over his stance on this, but he’s right.

UPDATE: Slick Willie Preps the diehards for the deal they will have to make if they want a health care bill.

UPDATE: Middle Class and Independent voters would prefer no Bill instead of House Plan by strong majorties.

6 thoughts on “Obama is Failing IV”

  1. “Pared down” versions of Cap-and-Tax plus homicidal Deathcare’s vulgar Statist sphagetti will be the camel’s nose, made worse by lulling inattentive voters into false security. Even watered down, these extraordinarily counter-productive, economically and socially destructive measures pose profound threats to constitutional rule-of-law. Blanket invasions of every privacy imaginable, from bank accounts to medical records, child-rearing and even dietary habits (!), allied with specific immunity from all judicial oversight is a recipe for atavistic tyranny of the worst sort.

    The fact that elective public employees –Executive, Legislative, Judicial– self-servingly exempt themselves from medical, pension, and other aspects of these duplicitous and fraudulent proposals is ground enough for breaking out the guillotines. Has this country really degraded to the point where no-one knows or cares what nihilistic Luddite sociopaths openly proclaim?

  2. Well ok if you want to wax apocalyptic about things that aren’t going to happen, well just feel free. I’ll stick to real world, and real problems and leave the hyperbole for those who have a dash of coffee with their morning bile. Come back when the paranoia wears off.

  3. I suspect that congress will let the controversy over these two bills drive immigration reform into next year. That way in the run up to the election they will have that divisive debate on the table instead of this, and immigration is one of those discussions we will lose ground in.

  4. Thanos, I usually appreciate your reasoned logic, but your reply to John Blake seems a bit over the top. I agree with him that even a “watered down” version of either bill is a disaster. History is replete with examples of “watered down” bills truly being the “camels nose”. Two examples come immediately to mind. First the Federal income tax, initially passed in diluted form as a 10% tax on business profits. In the bill that passed, individual income tax was specifically excluded. A second example is Social Security, initially passed as a safety net for truly destitute seniors to prevent them from having to eat cat food.

    Once these systems (income tax and social welfare) were in place, it was an easy matter to continue to expand them at will.

    I am one who prefers delayed gratification and immediate repercussions. Out of the three possibilities you mentioned, passage of the bill, failure of the bill and passage of a “watered down” bill, I see the later as the worst possible outcome. Such an outcome would simply delay the repercussions.

    It opens the door to Federal control of the energy economy and health-care economy. I will give you three guesses as to whether that control increases in the future, and the first two don’t count.

  5. No, this is definitely over the top:

    Blanket invasions of every privacy imaginable, from bank accounts to medical records, child-rearing and even dietary habits (!), allied with specific immunity from all judicial oversight is a recipe for atavistic tyranny of the worst sort.

    If we can get some tort reform and health insurance portability along with coverage of the “uninsurable due to pre existing condition” people, I don’t view that as a camel’s nose but rather a step ahead.

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