Yes, Yankee. Maybe we could have gotten a bigger stimulus and more meaningful health/financial reform had the Repugnicans made their first priority helping the economy instead of sabotage meant to bog down the President.
And SJoyce,
I'm going to bite and make a decent response.
Obama was never trying to court Republicans for the stimulus package. His advisors wanted to push through a smaller one that had more job creation instead of tax cuts, but Obama wanted to do the opposite.
The problem with the stimulus was it's aim. It did not tackle job creation. It did not include shovel ready jobs. I would have supported a bill that had vast amounts of nation building projects, updating our infrastructure, and streamlined other types of industries. Instead, we got a watered down bill that did not have bipartisan support anyway, did not create many jobs at all, and just ran up our budge deficit. Obama could have done so much more with $800 billion that would have actually put people to work, created demand that government sometimes must create, and fixed some of our aging highways/bridges and other public buildings. The stimulus was a huge opportunity missed.
And yes, Obama has created jobs, but any fool in the White House would have. It is the law of cycles. An economy will not go down forever, and the recession of 2008 was so awful that we were bound to bounce back somewhat eventually, and we have. That said, the recovery has been extremely weak, and analysts are now saying we may be on the brink of yet another recession.
So while you might be better off than you were in 2008, and many of us are, we aren't THAT much better off. Our portfolios might be up, but wages are still down, incomes are in the toilet, more people are dropping out of the workforce every day, and people are losing hope.
