patrick.net

Chait isn't blaming anyone for any problem. He's pointing out that liberals might not be capable of being satisfied with a Presidential record in the real world. The last time that actually happened was during the depression, when the populace was capable of expanding the Democrats' congressional support throughout a liberal presidency. Eventually FDR had enough power to rehape the judiciary's understanding of the constitution.

That's the kind of power it takes to satisfy the base. It doesn't actually happen in this day of filibusters and knee-jerk tea-party reactionism. When the electorate is capable of keeping an eye on a ball long enough for the President to have a super-majority for a whole year or more, we'll see what we can get. In the meanwhile, compromise is the name of the game, and expectations need to be realistic.

- -

We've been talking past each other in this debate. You've been trying to show that Obama (and now the Democratic party) is a failure. I've been describing how your bias in perceiving the world is a perfect example of what Chait is talking about. You focus relentlessly on everything you dislike, and drum up charges that you don't bother to adequately support to discredit successes. You seem to have these vague impressions of big issues, like the 200 billion dollar dollar stimulus bill, that can be reduced down to a 40-job layoff.

One simply cannot get an accurate view of the world using the analytical tools you're employing. All you can do is color in the framework created by your bias. Your bias is exactly as Chait describes: to climb up on a cross and bemoan how persecuted you are. (Or to interpose oneself between a man and his urinal, if you prefer that metaphor.)

Andrew Sullivan has a good piece up right now on Obama. He's defending him from the right, which you'll hate; but it fits, since you're attacking him from the right on the stimulus.

http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2012/01/15/andrew-sullivan-how-obama-s-long-game-will-outsmart-his-critics.html

The right claims the stimulus failed because it didn’t bring unemployment down to 8 percent in its first year, as predicted by Obama’s transition economic team. Instead, it peaked at 10.2 percent. But the 8 percent prediction was made before Obama took office and was wrong solely because it relied on statistics that guessed the economy was only shrinking by around 4 percent, not 9. Remove that statistical miscalculation (made by government and private-sector economists alike) and the stimulus did exactly what it was supposed to do. It put a bottom under the free fall. It is not an exaggeration to say it prevented a spiral downward that could have led to the Second Great Depression.

What a shitty President.

msilenus says

You seem to have these vague impressions of big issues, like the 200 billion dollar dollar stimulus bill, that can be reduced down to a 40-job layoff.

Actually, there are 11 more failures now, according to CBS; five have already filed for bankruptcy.
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2012/01/13/cbs_news_11_more_solyndras_in_obama_energy_program.html

Contrast that with the 2005 Highway Spending bill a republican Congress and Administration got into law, that spent $244B. Remember the Bridge to Nowhere?

How much do you think the 2005 Highway Spending bill lowered the unemployment rate by?

If memory serves the Recovery Act was about $800B, but more than half of it was tax cuts. Of the remaining half, only a portion was new spending that wasn't aid to states and localities to keep jobs. That makes the stimulus around $200B.

msilenus says

One simply cannot get an accurate view of the world using the analytical tools you're employing. All you can do is color in the framework created by your bias. Your bias is exactly as Chait describes: to climb up on a cross and bemoan how persecuted you are. (Or to interpose oneself between a man and his urinal, if you prefer that metaphor.)

Well, we have to agree to disagree. To me, Chait's job is to make excuses for the Democratic Party, he is a professional apologist. He's been hammering out article after article talking since last summer bemoaning liberal criticism.

Pointing out that the Great Deregulation which led to the Great Recession was enabled by moderate democrats is a truth some would rather us forget. Knowing that, being suspicious of the lack of re-regulation is reasonable behavior.

I had a feeling Obama was going to be a disappointment the moment I found out who his key economic cabinet posts were going to.

I'm not getting distracted by the Lilly Ledbetter act, which basically amounts to extending the period for filing a discrimination lawsuit. Nice, but it's in a far different category than getting a democratic majority congress to re-enact Glass-Steagal or veto the NDAA.

Basically, Chait's encouraging liberals to gather around the leader, while complaining that they shouldn't see Obama as the Left-wing Ronald Reagan. Why gather around a let-down of a leader with nothing but a token achievements on a few non-pressing issues?

thunderlips11 called the $220 billion of direct spending in the stimulus act

Handouts for Democratic Party contributors.

thunderclips11 supports the characterization with this much evidence:

CBS News counted 12 clean energy companies that are having trouble after collectively being approved for more than $6.5 billion in federal assistance. Five have filed for bankruptcy: The junk bond-rated Beacon, Evergreen Solar, SpectraWatt, AES' subsidiary Eastern Energy and Solyndra.

You've alleged widespread corruption, but you've come nowhere near showing that there was any corruption at all. Instead, you've backpeddled to pointing at some undetermined fraction of 3% of the stimulus funding that you think was merely waste.

When we get down to numbers, the support for your blanket dismissal of the stimulus act as raw corruption is at least 97% ignorant assumption of bad faith, and at most 3% mischaracterization of alleged waste.

And you seem satisfied with how you go about assessing reality.

If you want to understand the impact of the stimulus act, don't extrapolate from the worst anecdotes about a tiny sliver of its activity. That's foolish. Ask a goddamned macroeconomist or three if you want to understand the impact:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/17/business/economy/17leonhardt.html

msilenus says

You've alleged widespread corruption, but you've come nowhere near showing that there was any corruption at all. Instead, you've backpeddled to pointing at some undetermined fraction of 3% of the stimulus funding that you think was simply waste.

Which stimulus? Are we discussing the Recovery Act of 2009 or some other bill? Only a couple of hundred bucks of the Recovery Act was real new spending. The rest mostly went to Tax Cuts and some aid to states to keep people employed. Very little was "New Spending".
msilenus says

Ask a goddamned macroeconomist if you want to understand what went on:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/17/business/economy/17leonhardt.html

Ask Goddamned Paul Krugman if you want to know why the Stimulus failed:

Those of us who say that the stimulus was too small are often accused of after-the-fact rationalization: you said this would work, but now that it hasn’t, you’re just saying it wasn’t big enough. The quick answer to that accusation is that people like me said that the stimulus was too small in advance. But the longer answer is that it’s all in the math: Keynesian analysis provides numbers as well as qualitative predictions, and given reasonable projections of the economy’s path in January 2009, the proposed stimulus just wasn’t big enough. Let’s go back to the tape, January 9, 2009:

Even the C.B.O. says, however, that “economic output over the next two years will average 6.8 percent below its potential.” This translates into $2.1 trillion of lost production. “Our economy could fall $1 trillion short of its full capacity,” declared Mr. Obama on Thursday. Well, he was actually understating things.

To close a gap of more than $2 trillion — possibly a lot more, if the budget office projections turn out to be too optimistic — Mr. Obama offers a $775 billion plan. And that’s not enough.

Now, fiscal stimulus can sometimes have a “multiplier” effect: In addition to the direct effects of, say, investment in infrastructure on demand, there can be a further indirect effect as higher incomes lead to higher consumer spending. Standard estimates suggest that a dollar of public spending raises G.D.P. by around $1.50.

But only about 60 percent of the Obama plan consists of public spending. The rest consists of tax cuts — and many economists are skeptical about how much these tax cuts, especially the tax breaks for business, will actually do to boost spending. (A number of Senate Democrats apparently share these doubts.) Howard Gleckman of the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center summed it up in the title of a recent blog posting: “lots of buck, not much bang.”

The bottom line is that the Obama plan is unlikely to close more than half of the looming output gap, and could easily end up doing less than a third of the job.

http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/07/28/how-did-we-know-the-stimulus-was-too-small/

msilenus says

You've alleged widespread corruption, but you've come nowhere near showing that there was any corruption at all.

http://influenceexplorer.com/industry/securities-investment/0af3f418f426497e8bbf916bfc074ebc?cycle=2008

Powerful people who work in certain industries don't contribute money to political campaigns in return for nothing.

One in five dollars Obama raised in his 2008 campaign came from Wall Street:
http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/07/22/usa-campaign-obama-idUSN1E76L0PJ20110722

That's why there's been no re-regulation.

thunderlips11 says

One in five dollars Obama raised in his 2008 campaign came from Wall Street:
http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/07/22/usa-campaign-obama-idUSN1E76L0PJ20110722
That's why there's been no re-regulation.

Now you're looking at 2008 donations to infer that Obama's been in their pocket over the last four years. Fallacy left as an exercise for the reader, but here's a hint:

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/16/us/romney-perry-and-cain-open-wide-financial-lead-over-field.html?pagewanted=all

Employees of Goldman Sachs, who in the 2008 campaign gave Mr. Obama over $1 million — more than donors from any other private employer in the country — have given him about $45,000 this year. Mr. Romney has raised about $350,000 from the firm’s employees.

Since you've chosen to use Wall Street's donation behavior as a key heuristic for assessing the President (I wouldn't, but to each his own...) I'm sure you'll come around on this one.

Their response is rational, and a testament to the toothlessness of Dodd-Frank. ("no re-regulation"?)

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There's no contradiction between what Krugman is saying and what other economists are saying. Krugman's thesis is that the stimulus was insufficient to spur a vigorous recovery. Granted, and obviously the case. Others say that it was sufficient to blunt the worst impact of the recession. Also true. You (and he) are again exhibiting Chaitian liberal defeatism. Nothing short of perfect will ever be better than failure to you people. ("and their presidents fail in essentially the same ways: He is too accommodating, too timid, too unwilling or unable to inspire the populace")

The stimulus is what it is, and the quantitative estimates are reasonably consistent. We'd be much worse off without it. It is what it is. It ain't "Handouts for Democratic Party contributors."

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That's probably about all I have to say about this. I'm sure you have more Chaitian liberal doom-cant for me, and I've enjoyed wading through it to this point (thank you.) This is about all I have the energy for.

msilenus says

Nothing short of perfect will ever be better than failure to you people.

As I said earlier, all I care about is the earnest attempts to do this, even if it fails. I can get behind a try. I'll take a Truman, I don't need an FDR. But not a Clinton.

msilenus says

This is about all I have the energy for.

I agree, this argument is getting grindy.