I haven’t read everything that Ezra Klein has ever written but I still feel comfortable saying that this is the best thing he has ever written. It’s long. It’s really, really long. But it’s long because the subject matter demands it. It also confirms for me what I concluded about six months ago. The Bush administration screwed up our economy so badly that it wasn’t possible to fix it. The hole that they created was so big that it was not politically possible to fill it. The Obama administration should have asked for a substantially bigger stimulus bill, but it wouldn’t have mattered even if they’d succeeded in getting one, which they wouldn’t have. The hole in the economy was so large that even if the administration had known how big it was, they couldn’t have devised a way to spend enough money to fix it. Klein is right. With better information, things could have been done better and our current situation would be modestly improved, but the damage was really so severe that there was no escaping a prolonged period of pain.
The sad thing is that we could fix our problems and Europe could fix theirs. We could all fix this if the solutions weren’t so easy to demagogue. But they are.
. Yep, and with the expenses of the Afghan and Iraq adventures, military spending and Bush tax cuts, the past administration knew how deep they would dig the hole for the American people and generations to come! Great Obama is such a gentle person, FDR made clear from the start by whom the blame lies. I’ll buy into the analysis below … Who Broke America’s Jobs Machine? More plausible explanations have been floated for why the rate of job creation seems to have fallen. One is that the federal government made too few investments in the 1980s and ’90s in… Read more »
That’s not FDR from the start. It’s from 1936. I can’t tell how Obama is gonna be in 2012. Don’t have a time machine. FDR promised to balance the budget in 1932. He was an enigma at that point.
more myth of FDR indeed. also, re: how Obama speaks to the nation, ppl forget that Obama is black, a man who made it with the support of his [white] mother and grandparents and his own gifts and perseverance in a country that pretty much assumed all of these couldn’t exist. FDR was white, from the 1%, as it were.
I see no evidence that Obama speaks to the country in any servile, “Yaz, Boz!” type of way. Indeed, I’ve heard many complaints that Obama talks down to people, like they were ignorant children and he is the wise parent. In this regard, demagogues like Perry, Palin, Bachmann, etc etc, are succeeding because they do the opposite, pandering to the great prejudiced unwashed, not only supporting their lunacy, but asserting things like that they no better than “pointed headed librul perfessors(sic).” FDR was always evidently upper class, but he had the knack of talking to people like an equal, while… Read more »
Reagan has technique, too.
Yes, conceeded. But not like Clinton IMHO.
appreciate Clinton’s technique. just pointing out, Obama is dealing with constraints, kind of the old saw about Ginger Rogers – she did everything Fred Astair did but backwards wearing high heels.
sorry for brevity. very very limited internet access here
Sorry for your limited access, Errol. But Clinton also had a Republican House. Do you remember Newt Gingrich? Can you ever forget Newt Gingrich, no matter how much you want to?
I don’t understand the point about Obama being Black to mean he speaks in a servile way. Rather, it’s that he needs to be really circumspect. No sudden moves, reassuring tone, lest he be seen by large percentages of white voters as aggressive or angry. He doesn’t have as many rhetorical options as any white President.
That’s being servile! My point.
Well, do you think that butting heads with US racism might have something to do with it? That maybe it’s not a personal quality of the President but a social quality of the country?
I don’t think “talks down to people, like they’re children” quite hits the target. Just the opposite, Obama demonstrates a respect for his audience, assumes they’ll be able to handle complicated and nuanced statements, more than any other prominent politician I can think of. Think about the Philadelphia “A More Better Union” speech.
I think the problem that charge gets at is that Obama is cerebral, not visceral. This makes him come across as aloof, even elitist, to people who want President Feel-Your-Pain.
It’s perception. Electoral politics is all perception.
Absolutely. What Obama has NEVER understood is that if he will not blame the repukeliscum, he will get the blame. It’s a simple math thing:
0 – Obama’s bipartisanshit
-10 = Repukeliscum statement that Obama and Dems are to blame
0 + (-10) / 2 = -5
The public are sheep. They hear two statements, and they average them.
Obama needs to WAKE THE FUCK UP, and CALL OUT THE REPUKELISCUM. He has started, and kudos for that. He needs to do it more. We need a FULL-THROATED BLAME OF BANKERS and BANK WHORE REPUKELISCUM.
Honestly, the hole was starting to yawn open at the end of the Clinton administration. Jobs were flying out of the country but there were so many jobs that it wasn’t noticed. When the dot com crash came it was evident, but Bush was in power because “Al Gore is wooden” and “People would like to have a beer with Bush”. That beer was hemlock. Al Gore would have taken action, not because he was so liberal. He wasn’t, except in contrast with Bush. But because his political fortunes and support were intimately tied to the telecom and internet industries.… Read more »
who is he? what does he know? how old is he now?
i couldn’t even bother to log in. just lost my will, even after your great endorsement, because i was reminded, “who the fuck is ezra klein?”
there are just so many more insightful people on the planet.
and that’s what’s wrong with the world. people reading ezra klein.
and plug your ears then.
just oozing with political dishonesty: well, it’s complicated, Maude; ins and outs and whatnots. what a mess.
Here’s how honest people talk about the economy:
http://theautomaticearth.blogspot.com/2011/10/october-6-2011-occupy-this-mark-banks.html
It’s perfectly defensible for a government to lend money to a bank in trouble that is important to its economy, in order to try and save. However, it borders on criminal negligence, if it isn’t outright criminal behavior, to lend that money without being perfectly aware of what assets that bank holds. Thus, here we are, once again, at another Lehman moment, Europe on the brink (and we with it), all due to gob-smacking (criminal) dishonesty. do a word search in Klein’s article for “mark-to-market,” FASB 157, “criminal,” or “accounting.” “We didn’t keep our foot on the [stimulus] accelerator,” my… Read more »
that anyone on large amounts of drugs sounds like an idiot.
Which you do.
What is your drug of choice?
taking bong hits off Obama’s criminal ass?
Couldn’t see article. Removed adblock. Still no article. Signed in (with FB), still can’t see article. What’s the trick?
Which article? Mine? Or Klein’s?
Klein’s.
The solution is to click the print button (to anyone who can’t see the article).
With better information, things could have been done better and our current situation would be modestly improved I disagree. I don’t think better information would have done jack. I think what will be the most underlooked narrative in the article is Democratic intellectual bankruptcy. It was only broached in terms of Republican response, but it was telling how the stimulus was described as “pulling every old Democratic idea off the shelf.” Look at the party’s agenda. It’s all old shit that people pouted over not getting to implement during the Clinton or Bush years. Has any democratic policymaker invented a… Read more »
I think we could return to full employment if they had the political will to spend the money. But on another note, I think you’re correct. Maher and Trumka had a little spat about this on Friday. I’m more on the side of Maher with this. People can talk about trade agreements being to fault all they want, but globalization is inevitable regardless of those agreements; they need to stop whining about them, and figure out a way to make the country employable in spite of this reality. Maher seemed to hint that he doesn’t believe there are enough jobs.… Read more »
I’d replace Democratic with leftist and globalization with automation (globalization is only a stop gap in the process of eliminating unskilled labor from production) but otherwise spot on.
It also confirms for me what I concluded about six months ago. The Bush administration screwed up our economy so badly that it wasn’t possible to fix it. The hole that they created was so big that it was not politically possible to fill it. The Obama administration should have asked for a substantially bigger stimulus bill, but it wouldn’t have mattered even if they’d succeeded in getting one, which they wouldn’t have. The old Confirmation Bias at work, n’est pas? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confirmation_bias I wonder what would have happened if the incoming President had listened to a different set of… Read more »
I’m not sure if you read Klein’s piece or not. It seems not.
He didn’t need to. Ezra’s only focused on being the next David Broder, if Chait and Cohn don’t get there first. He is a stenographer for the administration. Did you read Krugman today? He takes Klein to task for the drivel that column is.
I read the article. Before you linked to it. Yes, I know what the people Ezra linked to said about previous crashes and recoveries. And I know what Ezra concluded. But I do NOT buy the idea that “it was going to be bad no matter what” implies “so therefore the fact that the Obama administration dramatically underperformed didn’t make a difference.” And the way Ezra dismisses the possibilities that HAMP provided with one line – sorry, I like Ezra’s writing but for someone who does this as his full-time employment that was just lazy. HAMP offered… Read more »
Both Krugman and Klein are partly right. Klein is right when he talks about how difficult the situation was and how hard it was to fix. Krugman is right when he says that there were things that the Obama Administration could have done that it didn’t. Klein is wrong when he states that we couldn’t have done better – we could have. Krugman is wrong when he underestimates the political difficulties that we faced in trying to fix the economy. I say this because I think that it’s clear that Obama couldn’t have passed more than a $1T stimulus no… Read more »
Geithner/Summers didn’t make those predictions. Romer/Bernstein did.
When I want economic honesty I go to Krugman.