Quote:
Originally Posted by Greedy,Greedy,Greedy
The collapse really occurred before Obama take office, so he didn't get a chance to fix it. My general feeling is he managed it very well given what he had to do with.
Bush should have seen the crash coming a mile away and did squat to prevent it - his approach to the economy was to cut taxes to deal with every problem, and he really only realized what he'd done by doing that after it was too late, and he just couldn't do, and didn't really want to do, a 180 in the last 6 months of his administration.
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The following touches both your point and Hank's argument that Obama was a would-be big spender.
To get the full history, you have to go back to HW's Presidency. The 92 recession was followed by a jobless recovery. The internet boom came along, however, and the economy did pretty well for the next 8 years. Then that collapsed. Bush II was facing a recession with another jobless recovery. To get around that, he helped to create a speculative economic boom with his "ownership society" (everybody gets a home, regardless of credit). Greenspan enabled it, of course.
Obama rolled into office with two choices: (1) take a centrist traditional (actually quite old school Republican) approach to the economic disaster; or, (2) go hard left (nationalize banks, bailout main street instead of Wall Street, give widespread debt forgiveness to borrowers, revamp the bankruptcy code to allow for negotiation of primary residence debt). He chose Option 1, against a lot of heat from the left of his own party.
I hear Hank's argument that Congress kept Obama in check, and maybe it did a bit following his drubbing in 2010. But for two years prior to that, he could have done almost whatever he liked. He could have flooded the states and fed govt with money to create govt jobs, to assess one aspect of his economic stewardship during the time. Instead, he actually put the govt on a diet, again against much anger from the left of his own party, as well as Krugman and Summers and Stiglitz and many other esteemed voices.
One can argue whether Obama's response was wise or unwise, but I don't think it's in debate that he was fiscally quite stingy in a time when it could have benefited him to spend in an MMT fashion.
And his spending in 2008-2010 is most important because, regardless of what Congress looked like after the midterms, if he had started huge spending programs, they would have carried through the duration of his first term, second term, and probably still be with us today, as Congress is never able to take away benefits once it confers them on people.
Obama cannot be credibly charged with having been reckless with the checkbook, or even with having been a wanna be spendthrift.
