In Defense of Obama

[Paul Kemp]

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Read the rest: http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/in-defense-of-obama-20141008

Thank you, Mr. Krugman for this tremendous piece. Obama 2016.

[Paul Kemp]

An addendum: The Obama Hope and Change Index: 6 Years of Progress, By the Numbers

[King]

The internet libertarians have already hit the comment section to talk about the QE and the ShadowStats and the liberty.

[Lief 🗽]

Great article, thank you for posting it!

[All Along The Watchtower]

but what about drones

[All Along The Watchtower]

The internet libertarians have already hit the comment section to talk about the QE and the ShadowStats and the liberty.

To be fair, they are competing with comments like this:

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[King]

What great irony at the end there. We should invite this man to post on the Atlas.

[Rockefeller GOP]

but what about drones

Something tells me that you'd condemn drones as a war-mongering and "conservative" policy if Obama weren't such a frequent user.

[Atlas Has Shrugged]

Ironic, because Paul Krugman is the very essence of a Very Serious Person.

[bedstuy]

Ironic, because Paul Krugman is the very essence of a Very Serious Person.

Didn't he coin that phrase or at least popularize it though?  I've always taken "very serious person" to mean the David Brooks/George Will types.  You can certainly criticize Krugman for a few different things, but he's not that kind of annoying blowhard.  And, at least on the basic macro-economic questions, love or hate him, Paul Krugman was proven right in the past 5 or 6 years.

[Lief 🗽]

Paul Krugman is literally the opposite of a "serious person." In fact he spends most of his time arguing with them.

[Paul Kemp]

I'm just glad Truthteller S showed up here to set everyone straight!

[Deus Naturae]

but what about drones

Is foreign policy off limits for criticism?

And, at least on the basic macro-economic questions, love or hate him, Paul Krugman was proven right in the past 5 or 6 years.

Such as?

[bedstuy]

And, at least on the basic macro-economic questions, love or hate him, Paul Krugman was proven right in the past 5 or 6 years.

Such as?

-The economic stimulus worked and probably should have been even bigger and heavier on spending as opposed to tax cuts.
-QE didn't lead to a giant economic collapse or runaway inflation
-Obamacare has worked better than expected.

[AggregateDemand]

He's trying so hard to put on a brave face, but Krugman is an economist, and he knows damn well how little Obama has accomplished. The credit he gives Obama is actually genuine surprise that Obama's policies didn't thwart market corrections, particularly to healthcare costs. Krugman excuses another decade of liberal mediocrity by blaming the Great Irrelevant Satan of the American right-wing.

Everything you need to know about political economics in the US can be gleaned from this article. Democrats understand that society has evolving needs, but they can't evolve because they've anchored their party to the handouts of the past. Democrats crumble. Republicans take over, and since Republicans have virtually no social capital, and they are incapable of manufacturing any social capital, reform gets put on the back burner for another decade.

To be fair, Obama did suffer one intolerable slight from the Sean Hannity wing of the Republican Party, who whined when Obama tried to cut $500B from Medicare over 10 years and install oversight panels. However, Democrats didn't need/want Republicans to get the original ACA bills through. In the end, it was Democrats who went weak in the knees when AARP and the health insurance companies showed up with clinched fists. But the Great Irrelevant Satan is always scapegoated in the end.

[eric82oslo]

Peak unemployment, October 2009: 10 percent
Unemployment rate now: 5.9 percent
Consecutive private sector job growth: 55 months
Private sector jobs created: 10.3 million
Federal deficit, 2009: 9.8 percent of GDP
Deficit in 2013: 4.1 percent of GDP
Average under Ronald Reagan: 4.2 percent of GDP
Average tax rate for highest earners 2008: 28.1 percent
Average tax rate for highest earners 2013: 33.6 percent
Banks regulated as too big to fail, 2009: 0
Banks regulated as "systemically important financial institutions" — a.k.a. too big to fail — 2014: 29
Billions returned to consumers by Consumer Financial Protection Bureau enforcement: $4.6 billion
Americans compensated for being swindled by banks, lenders and credit card companies: 15 million
Dow Jones close, inauguration day 2009: 7,949
Dow Jones yesterday: 16,719
Required MPG (miles per gallon) for cars when Obama took office: 27.5
Required MPG for light trucks/SUVs when Obama took office: 23
MPG requirement by 2016 for cars, light trucks/SUVs: 35.5
MPG required by 2025: 54.5
Gigawatts of wind power installed when Obama took office: 25
Gigawatts of wind power installed through end of 2013: 61
Peak summertime solar power generation June 2008: 128 gigawatt hours
Peak summertime solar power generation June 2014: 2,061 gigawatt hours
Coal burned in electrical generation 2008: 1 billion short tons
Coal burned in electrical generation 2013: 858 million short tons
Reduction: 14.2 percent
EPA-proposed CO2 reductions for power sector by 2030: 30 percent
Pell grant funding 2008-2009: $18 billion
Pell grant funding 2013-2014: $33 billion
Adults gaining insurance under first year of Obamacare: 10.3 million
As a percentage of the uninsured: 26
Annual cost for birth control prior to Obamacare: Up to $600
Annual cost for birth control under Obamacare-compliant policies: $0
Prescriptions now required to obtain emergency contraception: 0   
2009 projection for Medicare going broke: 2017
2014 projection for Medicare going broke: 2030
Troops in Iraq, inauguration day 2009: 144,000
Troops in Iraq today: 1,600
Osama bin Ladens alive 2009: 1
Osama bin Ladens alive 2014: 0
Troops in Afghanistan, day, 2009: 34,400
Troops pledged in Afghanistan by end of 2014: 9,800
Guantánamo detainees inauguration day 2009: 242
Gitmo detainees today: 149
Drug offenders eligible to seek early release under new sentencing guidelines: 46,000
States with medical marijuana, 2009: 13
Jurisdictions with medical marijuana today: 23 states, plus Washington, D.C.
States with legal recreational pot 2009: 0
States with legal recreational pot today: 2
Jurisdictions with marijuana legalization on the ballot in 2014: Alaska, Oregon, Washington D.C.
States where gay marriage was legal inauguration day 2009: Massachusetts, Connecticut
States where gay marriage is legal: 24, plus Washington, D.C. (soon to be 30 plus D.C., following Supreme Court refusal to intervene)
Immigrants brought to the U.S. illegally as children now shielded from deportation: 800,000

[Deus Naturae]

You're seriously crediting Obama with CO and WA legalizing marijuana?

[Lief 🗽]

You're seriously crediting Obama with CO and WA legalizing marijuana?

Why not? Obama's DOJ allowed it to go through with no federal interference in both states. I doubt that would have been the case under Presidents McCain or Romney.

[Beet]

Lots of things have improved under Obama.

Some of the stuff he's come under criticism for are overblown. ISIS, as tragic as it is, remains largely a Middle Eastern problem, driven by sectarian conflict. It's possible those grounds could be used as a staging area for a terrorist attack on the U.S. homeland, ala the Taliban in 2001, but then again so could a number of other places. Obama has kept U.S. ground troops out of it, and thus kept U.S. troops safe.

[dead0man]

I'm not quoting the thing because that's annoying, but you are aware that a good chunk of that would have happened under Romney or anybody.  I know you figured the point was to make the list of "accomplishments" to be HUGE and intimidating, but watering it down as much as you did with crap like ...well, all the economic stuff, the increase in solar and wind power and the accompanying decrease in coal, the weed legalization thing (as was mentioned), the gay marriage stuff.

I'm not saying nothing he's done is good, as I'm not a hater of the man, but padding the list with crap doesn't help your case.

[Antonio the Sixth]

Krugman continues to be the best.

[Paul Kemp]

I'm not quoting the thing because that's annoying, but you are aware that a good chunk of that would have happened under Romney or anybody.  I know you figured the point was to make the list of "accomplishments" to be HUGE and intimidating, but watering it down as much as you did with crap like ...well, all the economic stuff, the increase in solar and wind power and the accompanying decrease in coal, the weed legalization thing (as was mentioned), the gay marriage stuff.

I'm not saying nothing he's done is good, as I'm not a hater of the man, but padding the list with crap doesn't help your case.

He didn't make that list. It was in a link posted above.

[King]

It's not certain that a lot of those things would have happened with anybody.

The problem with McCain and Romney, even if they aren't completely horrible, is that they empower HP by being in office. Even if Romney wasn't a dedicated extremist on the issue of abortion or evolution-creationism, the Department of Education and HHS would be filled with Religious Right nutbags right now shilling abstinence to our youth if he were President.  Even if Mitt is kind of a nice guy, he would be signing bills that had Louie Gohmert and Jim Inhofe's disgusting hands on them.

Until the Teabaggers are neutered completely by the GOP establishment, any Democratic President is infinitely more successful even if they do absolutely nothing, because they prevent an absolutely terrible something. It keeps the GOP in quarantine until they get better.

This is why Dems need to stop dreaming and start supporting Hillary Clinton. It's the 8th inning of the WS against the Nutbags and it's time to call Mariano Rivera out from the pen to pitch the save.  After 16 years of Democratic rule, maybe we can finally get a Republican Party to emerge that we can be proud of existing.

[The Mikado]

I give Obama a huge amount of credit for appointing Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan to the Supreme Court.  At the end of the day, Supreme Court appointments are the single most important part of the Presidential post in terms of long-term consequences, and Obama nailed both his shots.

In terms of policy his record is paltry in the first two years and nonexistent in the next four, but the latter part of that is due more to Congress.  The first part is on the White House and Democratic Congressional leadership, though.

His foreign policy, though it has had some setbacks, is still a net positive by any reasonable standard.

Barring events (and events will happen over the next two years) I would be surprised if Obama is considered below a C to C+ president, and could well end up in the B- or B range.

[🦀🎂🦀🎂]

The saddest of his legacies is the failure of cap and trade. Not because I think emissions trading is a particularly good policy (it's not), but because it gave a signal to the rest of the world that the largest, most important economy was not interested in the greatest issue facing humanity. (It makes me wish snap elections were possible in the US system)