“Reagan inherited a mess, but instead of whining, he got to work and fixed it. It took a couple of years for his policies to take affect, but when they did, the economy did very well. barry inherited a smaller mess and has made it much worse.”
I don’t know that Obama inherited a smaller mess but it is certainly much different than the stagflation that Reagan had to deal with.
Reagan’s team correctly deduced that the economy was suffering from a supply constraint. As long as this was the case any increase in the money supply would go to pure inflation. The solution was to shift the supply curve to the right and a program of regulatory relief and tax cuts allowed this to occur.
Obama’s economic program is driven by politics, not by a desire to improve the life of the American middle class. He’s a leftist, a socialist, a small ‘c’ communist, whatever you want to call a politician for whom controlling everybody is the highest goal. He is making the economy worse, but I suspect that he is just fine with that outcome.
President Obama inherited a mess of his party's own making, including his own.
How the Democrats Created the Financial Crisis: Kevin Hassett
Bill Clinton blames Democrats for the mortgage mess
With landmark lawsuit, Barack Obama pushed banks to give subprime loans to Chicago’s African-Americans
So yes, President Obama did inherit a mess, from Senator Obama and attorney at law Obama.
Reagan’s team correctly deduced that the economy was suffering from a supply constraint. As long as this was the case any increase in the money supply would go to pure inflation. The solution was to shift the supply curve to the right and a program of regulatory relief and tax cuts allowed this to occur.
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I don’t think that the role of cheap oil should be underestimated. Reagan talked the Saudis into jacking up supply of oil and collapsing the price. That bankrupted the old soviet union—which was dependent then as now on oil revenue to fund the government. But cheap oil in the 1980’s also was pure oxygen to the US economy.
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Obama’s economic program is driven by politics, not by a desire to improve the life of the American middle class. He’s a leftist, a socialist, a small ‘c’ communist, whatever you want to call a politician for whom controlling everybody is the highest goal. He is making the economy worse, but I suspect that he is just fine with that outcome.
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Awful thing is that the USA fracking revolution is going to make Obama look good whether he likes it or not and despite his best efforts to kill it. The fracking revolution will cover over Obama’s worst sins. The economy may not do much but it won’t go down. Not when the USA is producing a million barrels@day more each year for the last three years. The IEA is predicting million barrel annual increases for 2014 and 2015. A five year run like this bigger than the great russian run from 2003-2006 that reversed Reagan’s work in the 1980. A five year run is as big as the great Saudi oil expansion from 1968-1973. But I think the IEA is off by about three years. I think the run will go for 8 years. I think there will be million barrel@day expansions annually through 2018. Why? Because the drillers have only begun to horizontal drill in the Permian basin.
The upshot of this for Obama is that the economy will not be great but it will be good enough to get him to nearly a balanced budget by the time he leaves office.
He will take the credit for it even though he had nothing to do with it and what efforts he did make were to stymie it at every turn.
Curiously the same thing happened during the Clinton years.