What America Needs to Return to Normalcy

[Politico]

I am willing to cede that it is possible your conversations abroad have been more amicable than mine. However, I am not making false statements. My experience leads me to belief that Europe loves Obama because America is failing under him. I certainly do not see the level of respect among Europeans that was there for Kennedy, Reagan or Clinton. The difference between those three and Obama: Again, America is failing under Obama.

A couple of things...

First of all you experience is purely anecdotal and so was mine.

Second point Europe is not monolithic.  I spent most of my time in a relatively small part of Europe.

Having said that my experience with Europeans is they are more cynical than Americans (Europeans please feel free to jump all over me about this broad generalization and stereotype).  Although they gladly allow more government involvement in their lives they don't see politicians as gods.  For example they have much less of a desire to have a "family values" politician telling them how to raise their children.  I routinely heard Europeans say cynical things about their own politicians and sometimes our president (although that was 95% of the time comments about Bush).

I frankly find people have a lot of admiration for Obama in Europe.  I find they have sort of a love hate relationship with America.  I think Americans take things way to personally.  My European friends do not wish ill upon America and they certainly never cheer if America is not doing well.  They do think we are fat war mongers but they admire our academic and business achievements.

To be perfectly honest you are the first person I have ever heard put forth this theory that Europeans are happy that America is having problems and that they think the source of the problems is Obama.

Not THE source of the problems, but a POTUS that is unable to turn the tide on the problems (our key problem being a lack of confidence among consumers, as previously noted in the thread).

Much of Europe enjoys watching America stumble and not recover like it does. America will eventually recover, though (under a new president, unfortunately. I say unfortunately because a new president implies that this is going to take a lot longer than anybody would like, whether it's two years from now under Romney or six years from now under somebody else if Obama gets re-elected).

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I had confidence that the stimulus would have been the right sort of stimulus that would produce the type of projections that were made in early 2009, but now I am beginning to think it was a boondoggle for special interests in return for support in 2008. Solyndra does not inspire a lot of confidence, and may merely be the tip of the iceberg.

As for "we could have easily gotten far worse," failure is failure, and failure should not be rewarded unless you want more failure.

Obama had his chance, failed and now it's Romney's turn.

1)  The stimulus was watered down by Republicans so it was not big enough
2)  Data that just came out a few months ago indicates the economic disastor was even bigger than we realised so even if the stimulus wasn't watered down by the Republicans it still was not big enough.

The fact of the matter is we did not do a stimulus of the appropriate size.  That does not mean an appropriately sized stimulus wouldn't work.

Any doctor will tell you if you need 10 days of antibiotics 5 days isn't going to cut it.

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Much of Europe enjoys watching America stumble and not recover like it does.

Again this is your opinion and in the years that I lived in Europe I never saw this attitude exhibited.  Perhaps some of our European posters can weigh in and tell us what they think.

[Politico]

I had confidence that the stimulus would have been the right sort of stimulus that would produce the type of projections that were made in early 2009, but now I am beginning to think it was a boondoggle for special interests in return for support in 2008. Solyndra does not inspire a lot of confidence, and may merely be the tip of the iceberg.

As for "we could have easily gotten far worse," failure is failure, and failure should not be rewarded unless you want more failure.

Obama had his chance, failed and now it's Romney's turn.

1)  The stimulus was watered down by Republicans so it was not big enough

I expect better from somebody of your intelligence level. This is pure and utter hackishness. The Democrats had the largest majorities in Congress since the 1970s.

2)  Data that just came out a few months ago indicates the economic disastor was even bigger than we realised so even if the stimulus wasn't watered down by the Republicans it still was not big enough.

Spending $800 billion on crap gets the same results as spending $1.6 trillion on crap. $800 billion, the largest fiscal stimulus in American history, should have produced better results than it did. It was not a problem of not spending enough; it was clearly a problem of not spending $800 billion the right way.

Any doctor will tell you if you need 10 days of antibiotics 5 days isn't going to cut it.

Any doctor will also tell you that using expensive placebos is not necessarily going to cut it either. And they will also tell you that you do not use a saw in surgery when a scalpel is sufficient. Finally, a lot of damage can be done in the operating room with the right equipment, but the wrong execution by the surgeon and their operating staff.

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the largest fiscal stimulus in American history

Careful.

Do you mean that in real or nominal terms?  I haven't run the numbers but I smell the odious stench of someone pulling a fast one... could be wrong but I'm going to shoot from the hip anyway.

[Politico]

the largest fiscal stimulus in American history

Careful.

Do you mean that in real or nominal terms?  I haven't run the numbers but I smell the odious stench of someone pulling a fast one... could be wrong but I'm going to shoot from the hip anyway.

Clearly nominal terms, but it is no doubt in the top three in real terms, too, if not number one if you exclude WW II spending. It was MASSIVE and it was definitely not spent well or we would not have these sort of lackluster results right now.