Listening to crickets

Every month, the economy improves, little by little. We have the lowest unemployment in four years, the stock market is at an all-time high, and the deficit has been cut by a large amount.

Now certainly if any of those things had gotten worse, you’d be sure to hear how it’s Obama’s fault. Hell, you actually hear it now from people who apparently never read anything about the economy.Obama-shrug

The real fact is that the President can only do so much to help the economy. That’s true of every President. Somehow people think the President has some sort of magic control box on his desk and can switch the dial from “economy bad” to “economy good” whenever he feels like it. “If I had the power to make gas prices go down,” Obama said last summer, “what possible reason would I have not to do that?”

But the President certainly does have some power — Bush’s decision to cut taxes for the very wealthy hurt us economically and now that they’re gone, the economy has started to improve, for instance. But he didn’t do it alone; he had congress’ help. Obama’s problem is that he is facing a party that has said, many times, that its main goal is to prevent Obama from accomplishing anything. That’s why congress has passed no jobs bills, no matter how much we need them.

Obama fought them when they declared that the way to solve our economic problems was through “austerity” — which means basically cutting everything, throwing many people out of work, and somehow all these now poor people without jobs or income would help the economy by — well, they never exactly explained that part. We know it doesn’t work, because in every European country that tried it, their economy fell head-first into terrible depression and massive unemployment.

So the fact that the economy is improving despite the Republicans seemingly doing everything they can to prevent that should mean that Obama gets some credit, right?



6 thoughts on “Listening to crickets

  1. Actually unemployment only looks good because of clever number manipulation, They dont take into account the 50,000 kids entering the worforce daily, nor the people that have run out of unemployment, they only count the people they are paying out to, so sure they are paying less out to people, that does not mean there are jobs available… And the stock market is even a bigger joke, all time high, so what how many people own stock? 10 percent or so of Americans have anything invested, again it makes the rich richer, you think the guy at walmart, KFC or on a park bench give a damn what the stock market does?


  2. Here’s the thing: While I agree with you, these are the things that conservatives always point to when they talk about how the economy is doing. So by their own standards, they should be congratulating Obama now. It’s the hypocrisy I’m addressing here.

    Is the economy doing as well as it should? No, of course not. But even under the most pessimistic view, you can’t deny it’s improving.


  3. And in 2014 these very same Republicans could very well take a majority in the Senate because the states being contested are largely Southern and Mid-Western where this insanity reigns. They will almost certainly maintain their gerrymandered majority in the House. With constant obstruction, outright lies and endless votes to take America back to the 1800’s, there isn’t much chance of any changes until 2016. It will be a miracle to see much if any further improvement with these endless attacks. Best we can hope for is the rapture takes away all these demented morons and allows us to work at fixing all the damage they have caused.


    • If they take the House, I think it will have more to do with gerrymandering than a majority of the people wanting them in there. That certainly was the case in 2012, where a majority voted Democratic but the GOP kept its hold.


      • But gerrymandering has nothing to do with State wide races like US Senate. It just means the insanity continues. Would a Hillary landslide in 2016 reverse this irregardless of the gerrymandering? Could we win back the House and Senate from the whackjobs in 2016? But even then unless they do something about the filibuster they can obstruct progress. Still it is amazing what the President has accomplished considering the insanity against him.


  4. Who cares about the stock market rebound? The millions of Americans who have IRA and 401k retirement investments certainly do. The Bush Great Recession wiped out trillions of dollars of assets and not all of it was held by rich folks. And the Republicans still try to kill Social Security and replace it with a equity investments which have this risk. It is insane. Keep Social Security intact to prevent this. Why are Republicans hell bent on destroying the entire safety net that was built up after the Great Depression? Is it just about making bankers and the 1% every dime we have?


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