patrick.net

What is this a joke?

Who is this idiot posting campaign speeches as some kind of proof?

Get it right at least: "Obama SAYS he prevented a depression."

Was it Obama? Or was it Helicopter Ben that prevented a depression? ;-)

Heck even Bush did massive bailouts. But when Obama did it the far-right called it pork.

The crash of 2008 and subsequent bailouts forced me to completely rethink my political beliefs.

Stump speech from either side is pretty much devoid of truth. At best it can be called "truthy" as coined by Steven Colbert, which applies to a statement that feels true so we assume that it probably is.

Actual title: Obama says administration prevented another Great Depression

And of course this is ridiculous because we are in a depression and have been for six years. Just because we aren't walking jaggedly in a sepia background wearing 1930s clothing doesn't mean we aren't in a depression. Did you really expect the world to go monochrome during a depression? Just because all the footage from the First Great Depression was in black-and-white doesn't mean people didn't actually see in true color back in the 1930s.

Of course this depression isn't going to feel like the last one. We're not all going to huddle around giant radios running on vacuum tubes. Food stamps have replaced soup kitchens and technology has advanced so much that this depression is less painful than the last, but economically speaking, this depression is as bad as the last one. Unemployment is as bad. Wages have fallen in real terms since 2000. Just because we have iPads and Smart Phones doesn't mean we aren't in a depression.

Furthermore, the depression will last at least another three years, possibly eight more.

This depression could have been avoided if the too-big-to-fail banks were allowed to fail and the housing prices were allowed to quickly collapsed. Doing so would have gotten all the bad debt out of the system and punished only those who gambled on housing. Instead, the government under both Bush and Obama decided to let the speculators avoid loses by spreading out that pain across the general population and across many years, prolonging and deepening the economic consequences.

The depression was created by bailing out speculators at the cost of you and me. It was a wound inflicted on the common man by high ranking politicians who are bought out by banks and other financial firms. And this depression could have been avoided in many ways even up to the year 2006.

It's true because we believe it!

We are not in a depression. We are not even in a recession anymore.
http://www.tradingeconomics.com/united-states/gdp-growth

When Obama became President we were heading straight towards a depression. He gets credit for preventing one, and that is his greatest achievement for the economy.

Lets give the man credit where credit is due.

Raw says

We are not even in a recession anymore.

Really? I can't tell. Neither can the massive throngs of the unemployed/underemployed.

freak80 says

Raw says

We are not even in a recession anymore.

Really? I can't tell. Neither can the massive throngs of the unemployed/underemployed.

The definition of recession is - 2 consecutive quarters of negative growth.
As we don't have that, we cannot be in a recession.

I'm not trying to blame Obama or anything. But we need much faster growth to get back to where we were before the crash.

freak80 says

I'm not trying to blame Obama or anything. But we need much faster growth to get back to where we were before the crash.

I agree.
Faster growth will come, but for now we just have to be happy we did not end up in a depression.

I respect Obama.

However I think we didn't prevent the GD 2.0, we just softened the initial blow of it by extending it for many decades. The structural problems that created a distorted bubble economy, are still in full force, in some ways they are worse. Big stupid banks were encouraged to get even bigger.

Obama said he prevented a depression and Clinton said "I never had sex with that women". Hahahahahahahahahah. LMAO.