Who Wants Obama to Fail?

[Schlenkatank]

Then you’ll get nowhere, because the differences between the GOP and the Dems is just window-dressing.

There is zero practical difference between the two parties, in terms of economic policy.

Wrong. This all occurred because the federal government has been far too squeamish about allowing businesses that made bad decisions to fail.

This didn’t begin in 2008. It didn’t begin in 2000, or 1992. It began, at an absolute minimum, in the 1970’s when the federal government decided some businesses were “too big to fail” and deserved government assistance.

That started the snowball, and we’ve been rewarding bad behavior and overly-risky investments for the past thirty-some-odd years, at least.

We’re finding out now that we cannot possibly afford it, and yet the gov’t is still too frightened to imagine life without Citi, AIG, and GM. This despite the fact that the market has passed its judgment on these companies, and it wasn’t lenient.

If we had privatized gains and privatized losses, bad investments wouldn’t have been propped up and allowed to compound for years before we all got served with the bill.

While I’m 100% opposed to it, socializing gains and socializing losses would make more sense than our current system of privatizing gains and socializing losses (for certain entities, not all).

Hey tGunslinger, aren’t R’s known for their whole belief in “the government that governs least is the one that governs best”? Hrmmmm, I think someone famous said that. But you know, its not like Obama has inforced regulations and openly called out poor investment practices, right?
Oh wait, yes he did.

And again, if you looked through a lens with a resolution finer than (D) vs. (R), you’d see that the (R)'s have failed miserably in living up to their stated convictions.

Yes, the government that governs least governs best. That is absolutely correct, and it’s tragic that the GOP has wholly forgotten the notion.

However, it’s incorrect to blame the small government philosophy for this current situation since no large-scale attempt to draw back the size, scope, and cost of government has been tried in the last century.

Even GOP-stalwarts like Reagan did not shrink the gov’t, they merely slowed its growth. Bush grew the gov’t more than most (D)'s that have had the White House.

Now Obama has taken it to another level; that’s hardly “countering”. By Einstein’s definition, you’re insane if you think we’ll get any different result under Obama than what we got under Bush.

So how on Earth can you blame small government for, well, anything happening now? Blaming the philosophy of small government for this mess is like blaming Tom Landry for the Cowboys’ flops the last two years.

But of course, you’d know that if you looked beyond (D)'s vs. (R)'s.

The nation needs a firm government presence to make the investment market more stable, and to balance the effect of very poor republican leadership for the past 8 years.

Like a hole in the head, and 2000 points says I’m right…

I appreciate your well thought response. As I said, economics is not my strong suit and so i can only argue from a pure political standpoint.
I agree with most of what you say here. Bush was certainly a terrible representative of the republican party and a terrible president.
Without addressing point by point what you said, the small government philosophy when brought specifically to the very large and complicated world of Lending does not match. Bush assumed that he could lift regulations in an attempt to promote the republican goal of the trickle down effect.

Turns out, it caused chaos. I believe that the lifting of regulations certainly does constitute small government thinking soooooo it seems it does have a bearing on our economy.
As a young student I agree with nearly everything you’ve said. It’s simple though, a republican motto when applied to the wrong setting created an economic meltdown.

If you think i’m some kind of a blathering, republican hating democrat who knows nothing about economics you’re only right on one account:) anyway, I stick with my first post in the general sense as one hundred percent true. This country needs a lot more than just economic change and I think Obama will do just fine.

[tGunslinger]

[quote]Schlenkatank wrote:
I appreciate your well thought response. As I said, economics is not my strong suit and so i can only argue from a pure political standpoint.
I agree with most of what you say here. Bush was certainly a terrible representative of the republican party and a terrible president.

Without addressing point by point what you said, the small government philosophy when brought specifically to the very large and complicated world of Lending does not match. Bush assumed that he could lift regulations in an attempt to promote the republican goal of the trickle down effect.

Turns out, it caused chaos. I believe that the lifting of regulations certainly does constitute small government thinking soooooo it seems it does have a bearing on our economy.[/quote]

What regulations, specifically, were lifted that you think caused this? I think I know what you have in mind, but I want to you specify.

In any event, this has nothing to with regulation, and everything to do with Citi and companies like them disregarding risk because our gov’t has been subsidizing bad investments for decades.

Because our benevolent gov’t had prevented some companies from paying the piper after they got burned from bad investments, other companies had no logical choice but to disregard risk and chase huge returns.

Even if they lost, they’d get bailed out. If they acted responsibly, they’d lose market share to companies who didn’t and got a hand from the feds.

In truth, the banks that are dying now did not act illogically. They were playing by the rules our gov’t set up, the rules that you had to play by if you wanted to keep up.

It all comes to back our gov’t bailing out bad businesses, and that is anathema to the philosophy of small government.

Finally, regarding the bolded statement: Why not? Why can’t lending operate efficiently without gov’t oversight? Do you think the money lending and investing industries didn’t exist before the gov’t regulated them? That they failed? That overwhelming riskiness and volatility made paupers of all who participated in them?

You’d be wrong. Risky investments like the ones that have killed Citi, AIG, Lehman, et al., were once confined to a small corner of the industry, exactly because companies knew they could bankrupt you in a heartbeat.

They were home-run investments, investments into which you’d throw some pocket change that you expected to lose.

But our gov’t’s habit of bailing out bad investments gave companies no choice but to make these risky investments a cornerstone of their operation.

And now that’s coming home to roost.

BTW: Bush championed bailouts. So has Obama. Sure sounds like “countering” policies to me. They’re both idiots in this matter.

[quote]As a young student I agree with nearly everything you’ve said. It’s simple though, a republican motto when applied to the wrong setting created an economic meltdown. If you think i’m some kind of a blathering, republican hating democrat who knows nothing about economics you’re only right on one account:)

anyway, I stick with my first post in the general sense as one hundred percent true. This country needs a lot more than just economic change and I think Obama will do just fine.[/quote]

Well, I’m not certain of your opinion of the GOP or your political registration, but I agree with your statement here.

[tGunslinger]

[quote]Mufasa wrote:
Excellent post, tgunslinger…

It needs to be a sticky.

Mufasa[/quote]

Thank you!

It’s nice not be called impolite names every once in a while.

[Tiribulus]

[quote]Mufasa wrote:
Excellent post, tgunslinger…

It needs to be a sticky.

Mufasa[/quote]

i pretty much agree.

For the 1000th time. Conservatives do not hate Barack Obama as a man and do not wish death and misery on him and his family. Conservatives hate liberalism regardless of who is practicing it. From the bottom of my being I view the expansion of centralized power and influence, which by absolute definition also means the diminishing of individual liberty and responsibility, that we’ve seen explode in this country especially since the sixties, as a smoking bubbling corrosive acid on our national soul.

How, in the name of God could I ever want it’s most profound expression in our nations history to succeed? HOW!!!

[Tiribulus]

[quote]Mufasa wrote:
Excellent post, tgunslinger…

It needs to be a sticky.

Mufasa[/quote]

i pretty much agree.

For the 1000th time. Conservatives do not hate Barack Obama as a man and do not wish death and misery on him and his family. Conservatives hate liberalism regardless of who is practicing it. From the bottom of my being I view the expansion of centralized power and influence which by absolute definition also means the diminishing of individual liberty and responsibility that we’ve seen explode in this country especially since the sixties as a smoking bubbling corrosive acid on our national soul.

How, in the name of God could I ever want it’s most profound expression in our nations history to succeed? HOW!!!

[Aragorn]

[quote]Schlenkatank wrote:
Greed is not to blame. It is a scapegoat. Besides no one can regulate greed especially the government. Greedy people get around regulation – thus is the nature of greed.

Instead of more regulation government needs better enforcement. As it is they have more regulations than they can enforce.

Greed is an everpresent problem in our society. Your right, no one can regulate greed except the will of an individual, it is beyond government regulation.

However, our government definately has the ability and responsibility to require bankers and the like to not grant loans to people who can’t pay them off. Your right, greed wasn’t the problem it was an effect.

By the way, bush removed the regulations so that republican ideology could be achieved, people could get rich, trickle down, etc… He hoped that this would stimulate the economy. Instead it made it crash. [/quote]

But see, here’s the thing: removing regulations is not entirely a bad thing, even in the context you tried to put it in. The problem comes when large companies make stupid investments and then are not forced to reap the whirlwind of their mistakes.

If you remove regulations but make companies live and die by their investments, you give them incentive to be responsible in the way they manage risk. Private gain, private loss.

If, on the other hand, you guarantee bailouts to companies, then you remove the incentive to be responsible with investment. This is privatized gain, socialized loss. It is a long held axiom of economics that privatized gain and socialized loss is to be avoided at all costs. This is a sort of economic appeasement that inevitably leads to failure. You must let the old forest burn to fertilize the new growth.

This is exactly what the government has done, and it goes far, FAR beyond Bush 2’s years. You are only looking at the surface if you blame Bush for all this. Furthermore, Obama seeks to advocate the same policies that got us into this mess, and is attempting to expand them exponentially past what Bush 2 did.

Finally, although I agree that Bush is in part to blame and that BOTH parties bear responsibility for this catastrophe, I point out that in 2003, and again in 2006, the Bush administration or Republican congressmen put forward bills to overhaul the regulation of Fannie and Freddie in order to curtail risky investments by what at that point had become the largest mortgage holder in the US, and had held the vast majority of high risk/unpayable mortgages dictated by “affordable housing” policies. In both instances they were shot down and the legislation died. In 2003 Democrats feared that the Republican-proposed increased regulation would hurt their goals for “affordable housing” policy and successfully blocked the legislation. This effort was spearheaded in large part by Barney Frank.

So, even though Bush gets the blame for having ultra-fucked the economy, the truth is the dangers were seen as much as 5 years ago and an answer to them was proposed (twice). It was blocked by the Dems. Bush gets nailed to the cross for not getting things done when he should have attempted to railroad Congress into doing what it needed to, but he at least saw part of the problem, even if he contributed to other parts of it. The Dems on the other hand crammed their heads into the sand and refused to see any of the problem whatsoever.

That, however, is only part of the story. The rest goes back much earlier than Bush.