This is not good enough:
Asked if the stimulus bill was too small, [White House press secretary Robert] Gibbs says: “I think it makes sense to step back just for a second. … Nobody had, in January of 2009, a sufficient grasp of … what we were facing.” He adds that any stimulus was “unlikely to fill” the hole the financial meltdown created.
“What the Recovery Act did was prevent us from sliding even into a deeper recession with greater economic contraction, with greater job loss than we have experienced because of it,” he says.
This answer has the dubious distinction of being erroneous and stupid. Plenty of people had a sufficient grasp of the situation to recommend a much bigger stimulus bill. The no one could have predicted line of argument is not a political winner under any circumstances but it really stinks when it isn’t true.
Now, the best answer here may not have been the most truthful one, which is that Congress wasn’t offering a significantly bigger stimulus, but it is now clear that it is not going to be enough to significantly bring down high unemployment. Rather than looking helpless, the administration should just start making the argument that we have a choice between prolonged high unemployment or another big stimulus package. Make the election a referendum on that choice.
Setting aside that his delivery was uncharacteristically terrible, the president’s statement on the economy today was pretty pathetic.
This ain’t getting it done on any level.
I’m stuck on the “not good enough” part.
Maybe they have just given up? You don’t get the sense of urgency you’d assume for a country with 9.5% unemployment, and from the Democratic party.
What worries me is the deficit fetishists who dominate the Obama economic team. Does Andrew Mellon ring a bell? As smart and well-accomplished as Herbert Hoover was, he bought right into Andrew Mellon’s disastrous economic ideas.
Something has to change, fast.
I hear that the stimulus wasn’t big enough and I hear that a lot of the money hasn’t even been spent yet.
I hear that billions of dollars was given to banks to stimulate the economy and I hear that banks aren’t lending any money out.
I hear that interest rates are at their lowest in decades and I notice that my credit card rates are 19%.
I hear that billions of dollars went to creating thousands of jobs (you do the math) and I hear that more money is needed to create jobs.
I hear that we had to bail banks out because they were too big to fail and I hear that banks are still too big to fail.
Why should I think that more money is better?
(I don’t need to be convinced that more money is needed. I just want to hear what the arguments are that more money will accomplish the goals of more jobs and fewer foreclosures and bankruptcies).
real answers or the kind of thing you’d say in the dentist’s lounge?
A hybrid, maybe – what would the Democratic congressional campaigns tell people who are sitting in the dentist’s lounge?
I don’t know how to argue for more stimulus money without acknowledging that different decisions need to be made for future money than were made for money already spent. Because from the waiting room, it looks to me like most of that money went down a hole.
“more money, spent the right way” is what’s missing. that means not tax breaks, but unemployment extension, infrastructure projects, a manhattan project for renewables. investments in green energy mean jobs: jobs designing prototypes, jobs building the infrastructure, jobs maintaining the infrastructure.
Not all of the money has been spent, but almost all of it has been committed. You don’t pay someone all the money up front to redo your kitchen. The government pays its contractors the same way.
They are lending out a hell of a lot more than would be if they didn’t exist.
Your rates went up because the credit card companies are struggling to recover from the most progressive consumer-friendly credit card reforms in history. (Familiarize yourself with the benefits).
The non-partisan Congressional Budget Office says that ‘as many as 3.3 million Americans are on the job today and the unemployment rate is as much as 1.8 percent lower’ because of the Recovery Act. You want more jobs, you need more stimulus.
(Familiarize yourself with Titles I and II of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform bill). The Wall Street Reforms provided for two new agencies that are charged with making sure firms are not to big to fail and with authority to liquidate firms that pose systemic risk to the economy. And no taxpayer money is allowed to be used for the liquidations.
Because the only way to create jobs when the private sector isn’t offering them is pump money into the economy. Tax cuts help, but they are an inefficient way to spur economic growth. In fact, according to the non-partisan CBO, they are the least efficient way to boost the economy.
“Your rates went up because the credit card companies are struggling to recover from the most progressive consumer-friendly credit card reforms in history. (Familiarize yourself with the benefits). “
Umm, isn’t that the democrats fixing what they themselves helped break in 2005, with the bankruptcy reform bill?
I mean, it’s nice to se the kid pay the window after he threw a baseball through it, but you know, the window never should have been broken (on purpose, no less) to begin with.
Yeah, blame the Democrats:
It was a Republican bill that a lot of Democrats supported, but it wasn’t something that would have passed if the Democrats were in charge.
I appreciate the answer, and I’ll stand corrected on a couple of points. But I would argue the following: The administration is doing a lousy job of making its case.
And many people in addition to me aren’t arguing that the government should have taken its hands off the wheel when the economy spiraled out of control. Instead, we have the impression that the government’s plan doesn’t rationally address the crisis and that its efforts are misdirected and wasteful.
What was the liberal opposition to the surge in Iraq? I’d say it was that the benefits will be short-lived and the costs will last for generations. And what was the underlying assumption? It was that more troops wouldn’t change the underlying conditions that allowed antagonists with disproportionate power to destroy any progress that was made. We couldn’t see how more would be better.
I trust Krugman, so I believe that more stimulus was and is needed. But I have no faith that the money will be well spent because there isn’t enough will from the Democrats to change the underlying conditions.
thanks for the andrew mellon refrence.
“no one had a sufficient grasp of what we were facing” in January 2009? is Gibbs fucking HIGH?
everyone knew what we were facing, and in fact a lot of us were extremely vocal that the stimulus was too small.
And maybe even more to the point, if they didn’t, why the hell not? I’ve been counting on the Dems coming out punching and turning this election around. I hope to all the gods that this isn’t a preview. Gibbs (and Obama) sound like schoolkids making excuses.
“Nobody had a sufficient grasp” of what was going on in January ’09?
The why are the same people still being allowed to run our economics policy?
Beyond pathetic. Gibbs should have been fired, or moved elsewhere, a long time ago. Well before his nonsense about the professional left. He’s been a horrible Press Secretary, in my opinion. He was a great campaign spokesperson. What happened?
Boo:
Have you read Joan Walsh’s latest. I think she sums it up. And she’s pissed because Obama listed deficits and debt over jobs as a priority.
“Congress wasn’t offering a significantly bigger stimulus”
uh. who designed the original proposal? some guy named Larry, i think? who decided, naah, we don’t need that much? who put a hard 999 billion limit on it because that sounded better?
Congress just wanted their political baksheesh – they would have taken some chunk out of whatever dollar figure was proposed. “oh they never woulda let us” is easy to say. the question is, did they ASK? there is zero evidence of it, and (as we are seeing now) lots of reasons to think that they did not.
This comment over at Ezra’s place sums up how I feel and one of the main complaints of the Administration that I continually harp on.
The half of a loaf and ham sandwich approach is not going to work on the economy or beat back the Republicans or win the narrative. Oh, the liberal base could use some direction too. Hell, the media might even eat it up and the Republicans are going to lie no matter what they do so might as well go down swinging, instead of this mushy crap.
http://voices.washingtonpost.com/ezra-klein/2010/08/the_cossacks_work_for_the_czar.html
OK, we’ve done this to death, but the simple rhetorical cluelessness of this statement just drive me nuts. Obama does his notorious “D for forward, R for back” thing, so then Gibbs comes along and touts the virtue of “stepping back”??? Do they really think this is what crisis-plagued Americans want to hear from their leader? Really? I just about can’t stand it any more.
I gotta say that I’m not convinced of any of it. I don’t know that more stimulus — however it’s spent is going to accomplish much of anything. What was spent was certainly misdirected by any measure. That, however, doesn’t prove that stimulus spent in another direction is going to save anyone’s ass. Call me a “doomer” but I don’t see anything that is political possible or even ideologically possible from left or right that’s going prevent a long, slow, miserable descent. We (government, private, commercial, financial) spent way too much money that we didn’t have and we’re going to pay the piper.
Maybe we have the historical analogy all wrong: it’s not that Bush II = Hoover and Obama = FDR; it’s that Bush II = Coolidge (with a lot of Harding thrown in) and Obama = Hoover. The interesting question is who comes next: FDR – or Mussolini?
Interesting you say that. This was coined back in 2009:
http://www.harpers.org/archive/2009/07/0082562
Yow! Didn’t see this at the time it appeared, but Baker had it nailed. I worry as he does about sufficiency – it’s nice that there have been major reforms – but will they accomplish enough to steer us away from the persistent danger, or utterly discredit the party that failed to do the job when it was given the mandate to do so?
I’ve come to see Obama more as H.W. Bush. Soothingly not crazy, decent man, basically centrist in attitude, cautious, beholden to the status quo in most areas of governance, believes in moderate deployment of American military power, etc.
Obama would have been a fine president in 2000. Unfortunately it’s not 2000.
When I read this post, I suspected you were drinking then you subsequently confirmed it. Besides Bernie Saunders, what damn Democratic Senator would vote for a second stimulus?! Even Barbra Boxer would scratch the President’s eyes out if dared mention second stimulus. They would have a better chance of getting slave reparations issued.
So they should just have their deficit commission, amirite?