Posted on 05/10/2016 9:03:43 AM PDT by Academiadotorg
As President Obama's second term nears its end he has begun a media tour emphasizing what he claims are the positive aspects of his policies. The complicit media, of course, have long worked to inflate positive impressions of Obama’s legacy, and this latest set of interviews is no different.
"In two recent interviews, with The New York Times Magazine on his economic legacy and with The Atlantic on his foreign policy legacy, Mr. Obama expressed a common sentiment: He had achieved big things and avoided even bigger mistakes, and yet most people just shrug," wrote Mark Landler for The New York Times on April 28.
Landler writes that this may be because Obama describes his successes as negatives, that "without the steps he took—or didn’t take…things would have turned out so much worse."
Saying that things could have been worse without Obama's policy interventions is an argument based on counterfactual reasoning, as if the President could somehow know the future that he avoided.
Yet President Obama and the mainstream media have fooled each other enough for each to think that the public's problem is that President Obama simply hasn't explained himself well enough.
"'How people feel about the economy'…is influenced by 'what they hear,'" President Obama told the Times in Andrew Ross Sorkin’s April 28 lengthy feature touting Obama's economic legacy. President Obama then went on to blame Republicans for constantly telling their base that the nation’s economy has not improved.
But even the Times had to admit in that article that average family incomes are "$4,000 less than…when Bill Clinton left office," and that the nation faces growing economic inequality.
"The private sector has added jobs for 73 consecutive months—some 14.4 million new jobs in all—the longest period of sustained job growth on record," writes Sorkin for The Times. "Unemployment, which peaked at 10 percent the year Obama took office, the highest it had been since 1983, under Ronald Reagan, is now 5 percent, lower than when Reagan left office."
As we have cited, the labor participation rate is currently under 63 percent—the same as it was in the 1970s. A low unemployment rate means little if Americans are no longer searching for work in the first place. And that is the main factor driving the unemployment rate down. The rate of unemployment alone does not tell the true story. Not even close.
As an example, last Friday the Bureau of Labor Statistics issued their monthly numbers, and said that 1.7 million people "wanted and were available for work, and had looked for a job sometime in the prior 12 months. They were not counted as unemployed because they had not searched for work in the 4 weeks preceding the survey." The same press release said that there were six million people working as "involuntary part-time workers" because they couldn’t find full time jobs. Yet the administration, and their friends in the media, want you to look at that five percent unemployment figure and assume that the economy is doing well.
Roger Aronoff is the Editor of Accuracy in Media, and a member of the Citizens’ Commission on Benghazi. He can be contacted at roger.aronoff@aim.org. This column is excerpted from an article that he wrote for AIM.
We need to scrub his legacy out of the record, like the Egyptians did to Akhenaten.
(They look alike too.)
Outside of the technology industry and the finance industry (professions dominated by the coastal regions of the USA), Obama’s legacy will be the erosion of the industrial base and the rapid decline of the middle class.
Debt!
The list of negatives associated with Obama will fill volumes as history tries to document the carnage.
So let’s start with what legacy has not yet been fully written.
1. He closed Gitmo!
2. War with Iran (backed by Russia and China)
3. The fall of USA credit rating
4. The reason for Austerity in America as subsidies must be cut when America is no longer able to borrow because of the debt ratio. Checks will stop.
The rise of part-time and temp jobs.
It's true that government loans to banks (the "bailouts") helped with the consolidation of some of those institutions, and allowed them to stay afloat and restructure. But I'm not certain that the markets couldn't have come up with a solution on their own.
Even if you believe that the government bailouts helped, Obama and his defenders always likes to sell that period in time as one of irresponsibility on the part of Republicans, especially George W. Bush. Yet, there are no specific Bush administration policies that led to the activities going on at Bear-Sterns, Lehman Bros. or AIG. In fact, the Senate was controlled by Democrats at the time, and one could argue that they overlooked their responsibility to provide oversight to the banking industry.
Regardless, a true historical accounting would show that Obama's "investments" and changes to the banking and financial industries were more damaging than helpful. Instead of a robust period of growth after a recession--especially after nearly 8 years--we're seeing low unemployment numbers with much larger numbers out of the work force completely.
working factories are harder to find than book stores
You guys are way too harsh. Everything is great, the Dow is up 195 today! / another super sarc
It just mystifies me that the establishment (media, etal.) still talk about “the weak recovery.” We’ve been in a Depression for 8 years.
The democrat senators caused the banking crisis.
They told the banks that either they loan out money to people who cannot pay back the loans or they would be investigated. The banks chose the lesser of two evils.
When the banks suffered huge losses, the dims stepped in with bail out money, but with strings attached.
The plan all along was to get governments reach farther and farther into the banking system.
I seem to recall that the loan originators did not really suffer losses on the mortgages themselves, as they sold the loan to another party shortly after closing it. The banks didn't make as much as they would had they held the loan for its entire term, but they made money on the origination and closing costs. If you recall, you couldn't turn on the TV or radio without some finance company trying to either get you a mortgage or a re-finance in the mid-2000's.
As banks and lending institutions needed a high volume of loan business to generate revenue, many of those loans were given to high-risk applicants; e.g., those with little credit history, or those with unverifiable income. Didn't matter to the banks and lenders because they were selling off the loans anyway.
What about those companies that bought the loans, how did they deal with the risk? For starters, housing prices were rising, and interest rates were low, so it didn't matter at first. At some point though, some clever people decided to create derivative instruments around those loans--instruments that could be bought and sold in the financial markets. They "bundled" good loans with the bad ones, and then sold them. They also sold options on these bundled loans, allowing certain investors to hedge their bets in the even of a loss.
I'll be honest, I have a conceptual idea of how this all works, but I have a hard time determining whose job it was to apply the brakes and say, "sorry, too much risk here, not enough collateral behind these options." I assume banking regulators, but Moody's and Standard & Poor's didn't do their jobs of correctly assessing the ratings either.
You got the bundling part right, but the problem was that up until then, the mortgages bundled together were all of a similar value and risk. The buyer banks of these mortgage packages found out that they had some real stinkers on their hands and that was when the poop hit the high speed prop.
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