U.S. 2012 Election

[Redeye]

Over at The Atlantic, Niall Ferguson's article gets pilloried by Matthew O'Brien:


A Full Fact-Check of Niall Ferguson's Very Bad Argument Against Obama

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13 AUG 20 2012, 12:51 PM ET 342
A counterfactual history of the past four years.


(Wikimedia Commons)

Celebrity historian Niall Ferguson doesn't like President Obama, and doesn't think you should either.

That's perfectly fine. There are plenty of legitimate reasons to disapprove of the president. Here's the big one: 8.3 percent. That's the current unemployment rate, fully three years on from the official end of the Great Recession. But rather than make this straightforward case against the current administration, Ferguson delves into a fantasy world of incorrect and tendentious facts. He simply gets things wrong, again and again and again. (A point my colleague James Fallows makes as well in a must-read.)

Here's a tour of some of the more factually challenged sections of Ferguson's piece.

"Certainly, the stock market is well up (by 74 percent) relative to the close on Inauguration Day 2009. But the total number of private-sector jobs is still 4.3 million below the January 2008 peak."

Did you catch that little switcheroo? Ferguson concedes that stocks have done very well since January 2009, but then says that private sector payrolls have not since January 2008. Notice now? Ferguson blames Obama for job losses that happened a full year before he took office. The private sector has actually added jobs since Obama was sworn in -- 427,000 of them, to be exact. For context, remember that the private sector lost 170,000 jobs during George W. Bush's eight years.



Of course, it's not really fair to blame Obama -- or Bush -- for jobs lost in their first few months before their policies took effect. If we more sensibly look at private sector payrolls after their first six months in office, then Obama has created 3.1 million jobs and Bush created 967,000 jobs.

"Meanwhile real median annual household income has dropped more than 5 percent since June 2009."

I can't replicate this result. It's difficult, because Ferguson does not cite his source. The Census Bureau only has data on real median household incomes through 2010 -- and it shows them falling 2.28 percent from 2009. The Bureau of Labor Statistics has numbers on real median weekly earnings that go through 2012, but those only show a 3.7 percent decrease from June 2009.

"Welcome to Obama's America: nearly half the population is not represented on a taxable return--almost exactly the same proportion that lives in a household where at least one member receives some type of government benefit. We are becoming the 50-50 nation--half of us paying the taxes, the other half receiving the benefits."

It is true that 46 percent of households did not pay federal income tax in 2011. It is not true that they pay no taxes. Federal income taxes account barely account for half of federal taxes, and much less of total taxes, if you count the state and local level. Many of those other taxes can be regressive. If you take all taxes into account, our system is barely progressive at all.

But why do almost half of all households pay no federal income tax? Because they don't have much money to tax. Here's the breakdown from the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center. Half of these households are simply too poor -- they make under $20,000 -- to have any liability. Another quarter are retirees on tax-exempt Social Security benefits. The remaining households have no liability because of tax expenditures like the earned-income tax credit or the child credit.

In other words, the poor, the old, and children. Not exactly the "50-50 nation" of makers and takers -- or "lucky duckies" -- that Ferguson imagines.

"By the end of this year, according to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), [debt-to-GDP ratio] will reach 70 percent of GDP. These figures significantly understate the debt problem, however. The ratio that matters is debt to revenue. That number has leapt upward from 165 percent in 2008 to 262 percent this year, according to figures from the International Monetary Fund."

This is incorrect. Ferguson had it right the first time -- the number that matters is debt-to-GDP, not debt-to-revenue. The former reflects our capacity to pay; the latter our willingness to pay right now. Moving on.

"Not only did the initial fiscal stimulus fade after the sugar rush of 2009, but the president has done absolutely nothing to close the long-term gap between spending and revenue."

Ferguson wasn't always a critic of the stimulus. Back in August 2009, he wrote that "the stimulus clearly made a significant contribution to stabilizing the U.S. economy." Perhaps he thinks the stimulus should have been bigger so the "sugar rush" would last lasted longer? It's not clear. What is clear is that Obama has tried to close long-term deficits -- several times! And the sequester scheduled for next January is his deal with Republicans to rein in spending. More on that in a bit.

"The most recent estimate for the difference between the net present value of federal government liabilities and the net present value of future federal revenues--what economist Larry Kotlikoff calls the true "fiscal gap"--is $222 trillion."

That's a lot of trillions! But if our fiscal gap is "really" this many trillions, why can we borrow for 30 years for a real rate of 0.64 percent? It's because this number is meaningless. First of all, it seems to project many decades of growth figures and budget decisions that we simply don't know will happen. It assumes the Bush tax cuts never ever expire and that the healthcare cost curve never ever bends. This is like projecting, in 1942, that the Empire of Japan will rule the entire Asian continent for 70 years based on a few years of battle outcomes. It's an interesting prediction, but it's not an empirical vision of the future.

"The country's largest banks are at least $50 billion short of meeting new capital requirements under the new "Basel III" accords governing bank capital adequacy."

This would be damning if we had already fully implemented the Basel III bank rules. We have not. As this handy timeline from Deloitte shows, the bank capital ratios don't take effect until January 2013. And even if they had -- which again, they have not -- it would be a bad idea to change risk-weighted capital too much too soon. Europe's banks have done just that, and the results have left something to be desired. The IMF projects their banks will deleverage some $2.6 trillion over the next year and a half -- starving their economies of credit when they most need it. In other words, Ferguson not only get the facts wrong; he gets the economics wrong too.

"The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA) of 2010 did nothing to address the core defects of the system: the long-run explosion of Medicare costs as the baby boomers retire, the "fee for service" model that drives health-care inflation, the link from employment to insurance that explains why so many Americans lack coverage, and the excessive costs of the liability insurance that our doctors need to protect them from our lawyers."

There are reasons to think the ACA will fail to address the core defects of the health care system. But it's wrong to say it does nothing to address them. Here's a partial list of the things Obamacare does. It tackles the long-run explosion of Medicare costs. It tries to move away from the fee-for-service model that drives healthcare inflation. And it cuts the link between employment and insurance. In other words, Obamacare does everything Ferguson says it doesn't do, with the exception of tort reform. Matt Yglesias of Slate has a good explainer on how Obamacare tries to do these things -- everything from IPAB, to Accountable Care Organizations and guaranteed issue. Read it.

"The president pledged that health-care reform would not add a cent to the deficit. But the CBO and the Joint Committee on Taxation now estimate that the insurance-coverage provisions of the ACA will have a net cost of close to $1.2 trillion over the 2012-22 period."

Maybe Ferguson doesn't understand the meaning of the word "deficit"? The only other explanation is that he is deliberately misleading his readers. The CBO is quite clear about Obamacare's budgetary implications. It reduces the deficit. Here's what the CBO said exactly:

[T]he effects of the two laws on direct spending and revenues related to health care will reduce federal deficits by $210 billion over the 2012-2021 period.

In other words, the law is more than paid for. As Paul Krugman pointed out, it does spend $1.042 trillion covering people, but it pays for this coverage by finding savings in Medicare and levying a surtax on investment income for high-earners. That Ferguson looked up the CBO's estimate of the bill's cost and didn't notice that those costs are paid for is peculiar indeed. Even more peculiar is that he is apparently doubling down on this falsehood. And yes, it is a very deliberate falsehood.

"Having set up a bipartisan National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform, headed by retired Wyoming Republican senator Alan Simpson and former Clinton chief of staff Erskine Bowles, Obama effectively sidelined its recommendations of approximately $3 trillion in cuts and $1 trillion in added revenues over the coming decade. As a result there was no "grand bargain" with the House Republicans--which means that, barring some miracle, the country will hit a fiscal cliff on Jan. 1 as the Bush tax cuts expire and the first of $1.2 trillion of automatic, across-the-board spending cuts are imposed. The CBO estimates the net effect could be a 4 percent reduction in output." 

Now, Obama did not push Congress to adopt Simpson-Bowles, but neither did Congress adopt it. Among those who voted against it? Paul Ryan, who Ferguson later lauds for his fiscal courage. Although that wasn't the last attempt at a so-called "grand bargain". That came during the debt ceiling standoff the Republicans forced. Obama offered a long-term deal heavily tilted towards Republican priorities -- read: spending cuts -- that the Republicans spurned. Among those who pushed the Republicans to reject it? Paul Ryan, who worried that a deal would burnish Obama's bipartisan credentials and make his re-election a foregone conclusion.

And then there's the cognitive dissonance of it all. Noah Smith points out that Ferguson reproaches Obama for both running big deficits and for closing them.

"The failures of leadership on economic and fiscal policy over the past four years have had geopolitical consequences. The World Bank expects the U.S. to grow by just 2 percent in 2012. China will grow four times faster than that; India three times faster. By 2017, the International Monetary Fund predicts, the GDP of China will overtake that of the United States."

China has 1.3 billion people. The United States has 300 million people. China's GDP will pass ours when they are only four times poorer than us. That might happen in 2017; it might happen later if China's current slowdown is more than a blip. It doesn't really matter if and when this happens. There's nothing Obama can do to prevent China from catching up -- nor should Obama want to! Economics isn't zero sum. The more money China has, the more money they have to buy things from us and other countries. This is good news, and yet Ferguson treats it like a modern-day equivalent of "losing China".

"In his notorious "you didn't build that" speech, Obama listed what he considers the greatest achievements of big government: the Internet, the GI Bill, the Golden Gate Bridge, the Hoover Dam, the Apollo moon landing, and even (bizarrely) the creation of the middle class. Sadly, he couldn't mention anything comparable that his administration has achieved."

It's bizarre that Ferguson thinks government policies didn't help create America's middle class. America was the first country to make high school compulsory. It was also the first country to make college widely accessible with the G.I. bill. This democratization of education went a long way towards laying the foundation for broad-based prosperity. And as for big things the government has achieved lately, surely moving to near-universal healthcare coverage counts?

***
In the world as Ferguson describes it, Obama is a big-spending, weak-kneed liberal who can't get the economy turned around. Think Jimmy Carter on steroids. But the world is not as Ferguson describes it. A fact-checked version of the world Ferguson describes reveals a completely different narrative -- a muddy picture of the past four years, where Obama has sometimes cast himself as a stimulator, a deficit hawk, a health care liberal and conservative reformer all at once. And it's a world where the economy is getting better, albeit slowly.

It would have been worthwhile for Ferguson to explain why Obama doesn't deserve re-election in the real world we actually live in. Instead, we got an exercise in Ferguson's specialty -- counterfactual history.

======================================================================================================

I like his final point. I find that most of the GOP's arguments and positions are simply not relevant to the real world, only the fantasy world they have created for themselves and are desperately trying to convince others is real.

 

[a_majoor]

The real world that Niall Ferguson and the rest are reacting to is summed up in this graphic. The two solid lines were used by President Obama to argue for the Stimulus (and the $5 trillion gusher of deficit spending over the last three years is impelled by the same Keynesian world view). The dotted red line is the official unemployment figure, while U3 unemployment is noted in the upper right corner at 11%.

With the number of unemployed equal to the population of Canada, it is very difficult for most Americans to avoid bumping into the real world in their own circle of family and friends, and wondering if they should be doing something different to change the trajectory of the last three years.

 

[Brad Sallows]

I see the fart-catching has begun.  Former Jimmy Carter speechwriter James Fallows apparently does not understand that the US was attempting nation-building in Iraq, or has chosen to mislead on that issue.  This isn't a matter of interpreting statistics or data differently; this is a broad-brush false revision of understanding what the US was setting about in Iraq.  I read him irregularly at "The Atlantic", but regret that I generally regard his contributions as untrustworthy - I can't tell whether he is being objective about other things if he is not objective about all.

Ferguson's position is not much different than Paul Krugman's when opining on politics - an academic not exactly within his field - but Ferguson's field is much closer than Krugman's.  Anyone who has ever cited Krugman on politics approvingly is abjectly hypocritical to simply pooh-pooh Ferguson as an academic outside of his lane.  Numerous paragraphs of ad hominem drivel should simply be struck from the articles to make them shorter, easier to read, and more efficiently informative.

The point about employment, missed or deliberately overlooked by Fallows and O'Brien, is that it hasn't recovered.  Pro-Obama fact-and-figures citers want to talk about degrees of improvement since the office holder took office, because they know most measurements were deep in a trough at that point; it is easy to show improvement when you start from rock bottom.  But the benchmark for recovery is the way things were before the trough.  That places the top of the yardstick sometime before everything started unravelling in mid-2008.  Employment hasn't recovered to its pre-recession peak.  Period.  Either Obama supporters should decline his responsibility for employment, or stop talking about it as if Obama is responsible and has done a good job.  That he was not responsible for the job losses (or any other shortfall) at the onset of economic contraction is beside the point.  He is the president.  Has he executed policy to effect recovery well, or not?

The argument that low income households make insufficient income to pay income tax is valid as a matter of calculation, given the rates and structure.  Ferguson is incorrect that those who do not pay income tax, pay no taxes at all.  However, the extended argument they should not pay income tax doesn't pass muster with me.  As a student, I had to pay income tax on what I earned during summers, and it was well short of a full year's income for a single person living in poverty.  (I did not take out any loans).  Nor is an overly progressive income tax structure a wise policy.  It divides people too sharply into perceived groups of "takers" and "makers", and leaves a government vulnerable to excessively sharp revenue drops during downturns.  It is politically and socially unhealthy when too many people see government as a source of entitlements rather than a sink of obligations, and the US federal income tax structure is already dangerously progressive (as demonstrated by the amount of shortfall in its income tax revenues).

Debt-to-revenue is important because debt servicing costs squeeze out other spending or necessitate additional borrowing.  For those needing clarification, see summaries of Canada's federal finances during the 1980s.  The US enjoys an artificial borrower's holiday because financial pressures elsewhere drive so much money to US federal securities.  There is no reason to assume change will be gradual when it comes.  Regardless, policies of the current administration have not raised US GDP growth anywhere near the administration's own targets.

Whether or not Ferguson was a critic of "stimulus" before is irrelevant to assessing whether the "stimulus" achieved what it was sold to do, or whether the revenue/expense gap has been closed.  The US federal deficit is still remarkably large, and there is no fiscal room to manoeuvre at the state and municipal levels.

I see people still cling desperately to the CBO scoring of PPACA.  The CBO didn't think all of the assumptions it was required to use were valid, so I am mystified that any informed person aware of those assumptions and the CBO's comments regards the CBO scoring as anything more than emperor's clothes.  Entitlement programs historically not only tend to cost more than the means found to pay for them, but also have a habit of costing much more than initially projected.  A prudent person should assume that PPACA will generate vastly more expenses than revenue, but it doesn't take more than removal of the politically absurd assumptions and the accounting tricks to show it.

"Now, Obama did not push Congress to adopt Simpson-Bowles..." and that is all that needs to be said.

 

[Edward Campbell]

...
"Now, Obama did not push Congress to adopt Simpson-Bowles..." and that is all that needs to be said.

Anyone standing for national elected office in the USA who does not promise to push the congress to pass or, if running for congress, promise to vote for Simpson-Bowles, as a start point, is an irresponsible fool. And that characterization applies to Barack Obama, Mitt Romney and most candidates for the House and Senate.

 

[Haletown]

Ferguson speaks.

Fires broadsides back his critics


"The first tactic is to ignore completely the arguments of the piece. The second is then to engage in nitpicking and claim to be fact checking when in fact all you’re offering is a series of alternative opinions. And then you round it off by making hysterical calls for the office resignation. This is such a tried and tested method and I was fully expecting it. The usual suspects, led of course by Paul Krugman, have obliged. But they have not addressed any of the arguments I have made in the piece so I will dismiss them pretty briskly today."



http://www.mediaite.com/tv/niall-fergusson-takes-on-paul-krugman-andrew-sullivan-who-called-his-newsweek-story-inaccurate/

 

[cupper]

There seems to be an echo in here.

Either that or I'm experiencing deja vu all over again.

op:

 

[cupper]

On a lighter note:

Perhaps Romney should strike a deal, if Obama releases the home brew recipe, he'll release 5 yeara of tax returns.

Transparency advocates want White House beer recipe

http://www.politico.com/politico44/2012/08/transparency-advocates-want-white-house-beer-recipe-132683.html?hp=l16

A group of home-brewing enthusiasts and transparency advocates want the government to hand over the recipe for the home brewed beers created at the White House.

As reported by Government Executive, a Reddit user has submitted a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) for the recipe, arguing that "disclosure of the requested information is in the public interest because it is likely to contribute significantly to public understanding of the operations of activities of the government."

The FOIA request added: "If you could send me a copy autographed by the president, you'd be the coolest FOIA officer in the whole federal government."

Another group of internet users has created a 'We the People" petition, requesting the recipe. That petition needs more than 24,000 more signatures to generate a response.

News of the White House home brews leaked, so to speak, when it was served at two White House parties last year. More recently, Obama brought a number of White House ales on trail to hand out  to voters as gifts.

The White House declined to release the recipe to POLITICO, but an official said: "Every petition that crosses the signature threshold will be directed to the appropriate staff and receive a response."

On the other hand, it is refreshing to see that vote buying with alcohol is still alive and well. ;D

 

[a_majoor]

C'mon Cupper, you know;



"He didn't brew that...." 



;D ;D ;D

 

[tomahawk6]

I would love to see Obama's college transcripts and birth certificate. You know his Kenyan one. ;D

 

[cupper]

C'mon Cupper, you know;



"He didn't brew that...." 



;D ;D ;D

Of course not. THat's what college interns are for. (Unless your Bill Clinton) ;D

I would love to see Obama's college transcripts and birth certificate. You know his Kenyan one. ;D

The beer consumption does go to disprove the secret muslim thingy though. :nod:

 

[aesop081]

The beer consumption does go to disprove the secret muslim thingy though. :nod:

Taqiyya

 

[Redeye]

Ferguson speaks.

Fires broadsides back his critics


"The first tactic is to ignore completely the arguments of the piece. The second is then to engage in nitpicking and claim to be fact checking when in fact all you’re offering is a series of alternative opinions. And then you round it off by making hysterical calls for the office resignation. This is such a tried and tested method and I was fully expecting it. The usual suspects, led of course by Paul Krugman, have obliged. But they have not addressed any of the arguments I have made in the piece so I will dismiss them pretty briskly today."

http://www.mediaite.com/tv/niall-fergusson-takes-on-paul-krugman-andrew-sullivan-who-called-his-newsweek-story-inaccurate/

Actually, the whole point of the rebuttals of his piece was to establish that his arguments are constructed on false assumptions. They don't need to actually address the arguments if they can destroy the foundation upon which such arguments rest. Moreover, when I read it originally, and have reread it since, I fail to see how he's actually constructed any logical support for Romney/Ryan, other than that they're not Obama/Biden.

I find it interesting that some people want to equate Ferguson (a history professor) with Krugman (a Nobel laureate). Krugman's writings are generally related strongly to economic issues, and his opinions and leanings are fairly clear, but he writes to a certain extent from his field of expertise. I'll further concede that Krugman's specialty is international trade and international finance/currency modeling - his books featured prominently in my undergrad for that reason. The two don't really get along, either - Krugman thrashed him in a 2009 debate and it seems they've never really been friendly since.

Are there legitimate critiques of President Obama's first term? Yes, of course. But I don't see them really argued well in the context of "here's what we should have done" in Ferguson's article. Instead, there's just a whole bunch of fallacies, which is why Ferguson's being ripped from all over the spectrum. I did particularly like it being highlighted in one rebuttal that Ferguson has a penchant for making predictions which generally turn out to be wrong.



I'm more interested right now in the impact of Todd Akin's ludicrous statement about how "legitimate rape" victims don't get pregnant as it pertains to the ongoing ludicrous debate over abortion rights in the USA. As the GOP scrambles (well, some of them, others are doubling down on his remarks) to distance themselves from this, it's opening up yet another avenue for the Democrats to attack them on women's issues. I don't see how this one is a winner for them either.

 

[Edward Campbell]

Actually, the whole point of the rebuttals of his piece was to establish that his arguments are constructed on false assumptions. They don't need to actually address the arguments if they can destroy the foundation upon which such arguments rest. Moreover, when I read it originally, and have reread it since, I fail to see how he's actually constructed any logical support for Romney/Ryan, other than that they're not Obama/Biden.

I find it interesting that some people want to equate Ferguson (a history professor) with Krugman (a Nobel laureate). Krugman's writings are generally related strongly to economic issues, and his opinions and leanings are fairly clear, but he writes to a certain extent from his field of expertise. I'll further concede that Krugman's specialty is international trade and international finance/currency modeling - his books featured prominently in my undergrad for that reason. The two don't really get along, either - Krugman thrashed him in a 2009 debate and it seems they've never really been friendly since.

Are there legitimate critiques of President Obama's first term? Yes, of course. But I don't see them really argued well in the context of "here's what we should have done" in Ferguson's article. Instead, there's just a whole bunch of fallacies, which is why Ferguson's being ripped from all over the spectrum. I did particularly like it being highlighted in one rebuttal that Ferguson has a penchant for making predictions which generally turn out to be wrong ...

Maybe because Ferguson became a noteworthy historian for writing about economic history ... his body of work gives his opinions some weight.

 

 

One can, I often do, disagree with Ferguson's conclusions but, speaking broadly, they are neither "a bunch of fallacies" nor "generally wrong," no more, at least, than are Krugman's conclusions on same topics.

 

[Redeye]

One can, I often do, disagree with Ferguson's conclusions but, speaking broadly, they are neither "a bunch of fallacies" nor "generally wrong," no more, at least, than are Krugman's conclusions on same topics.

His arguments in this particular piece work heavily on fallacy and using ridiculous statistics (like making comparisons which include time before President Obama took office!), however, which is why he's getting thrashed from myriad sources. He talks about how China's GDP growth is going to take it above the US, without highlighting that it has four times the population, and that it's only reasonable that will happen in due course, regardless of who's in office. Per capita GDP is a the more relevant number. The "generally wrong" was what one author describe his predictions (like rampant inflation a couple of years ago) as being.

My conclusion, though, is that even if one accepts his position about President Obama, he has not in any way built a case to support Romney beyond him being the other candidate. And Romney-Ryan in particular may be a tough sell to some Republicans, especially as we get closer to November, because Romney will likely have to distance himself from Ryan's ideas about Medicare. Some GOP pundits were suggesting that Ryan being chosen as VP candidate would have made President Obama's campaign team nervous, there is however a good chance they're actually quite happy about it.

The interesting follow-on discussion I had with my wife over my leave was about who will replace President Obama to run in 2016. I don't know who in the Democratic Party will be most suited to follow him - but looking at his rise, whoever it is will have to start making a name for themselves pretty soon.

 

[Edward Campbell]

His arguments in this particular piece work heavily on fallacy and using ridiculous statistics (like making comparisons which include time before President Obama took office!), however, which is why he's getting thrashed from myriad sources. He talks about how China's GDP growth is going to take it above the US, without highlighting that it has four times the population, and that it's only reasonable that will happen in due course, regardless of who's in office. Per capita GDP is a the more relevant number. The "generally wrong" was what one author describe his predictions (like rampant inflation a couple of years ago) as being.

My conclusion, though, is that even if one accepts his position about President Obama, he has not in any way built a case to support Romney beyond him being the other candidate. And Romney-Ryan in particular may be a tough sell to some Republicans, especially as we get closer to November, because Romney will likely have to distance himself from Ryan's ideas about Medicare. Some GOP pundits were suggesting that Ryan being chosen as VP candidate would have made President Obama's campaign team nervous, there is however a good chance they're actually quite happy about it.

The interesting follow-on discussion I had with my wife over my leave was about who will replace President Obama to run in 2016. I don't know who in the Democratic Party will be most suited to follow him - but looking at his rise, whoever it is will have to start making a name for themselves pretty soon.

Thank you for your opinion, but the reason he is being "thrashed from myriad sources" is because he has dared to challenge the Obama narrative ... it's all about partisan politics and Ferguson is against Obama and his critics are for Obama. Neither logic nor statistics matter even one iota.

 

[Redeye]

Thank you for your opinion, but the reason he is being "thrashed from myriad sources" is because he has dared to challenge the Obama narrative ... it's all about partisan politics and Ferguson is against Obama and his critics are for Obama. Neither logic nor statistics matter even one iota.

The whole thing is that it doesn't challenge the actual narrative. It challenges a fantasy that Ferguson has constructed - a fiction.

 

[Haletown]

The whole thing is that it doesn't challenge the actual narrative. It challenges a fantasy that Ferguson has constructed - a fiction.

Do you mean like Obama's books, his so called life story, the ones  with all the invented characters?

 

[Haletown]

From the "Obama has a gift for economics" file. . . .

"On the campaign trail, Barack Obama’s signature definition of “success” is the government bailout of General Motors. “I said I believe in American workers, I believe in this American industry, and now the American auto industry has come roaring back,” he told an audience in Pueblo, CO last week. “Now I want to do the same thing with manufacturing jobs, not just in the auto industry, but in every industry.” That pronouncement should send a shiver up the spine of every American, due to an inconvenient reality: according to Forbes Magazine, GM is likely headed for bankruptcy all over again.

The numbers are stark. The 500,000 shares of GM stock, comprising 26 percent of the company owned by the government–or more accurately the American taxpayer–sold for $20.21 on Tuesday. This left the government holding $10.1 billion worth of stock representing an unrealized loss of $16.4 billion. Even worse, in order to reach the break-even point, the stock would have to sell for around $53 per share."

The really, really scary part is that Obama believes he should do to all sectors of the American economy what he did to GM.

http://frontpagemag.com/2012/arnold-ahlert/obamas-gm-success-story-headed-for-bankruptcy/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+FrontpageMag+%28FrontPage+Magazine+»+FrontPage%29

 

[Edward Campbell]

The whole thing is that it doesn't challenge the actual narrative. It challenges a fantasy that Ferguson has constructed - a fiction.

I'm so glad that you can comment with such (uninformed) certainty without (evidently) bothering to read the Ferguson article; I think these bits "challenge the narrative" pretty bloody effectively:

http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2012/08/19/niall-ferguson-on-why-barack-obama-needs-to-go.html

"In his [Obama's] fiscal year 2010 budget—the first he presented—the president envisaged growth of 3.2 percent in 2010, 4.0 percent in 2011, 4.6 percent in 2012. The actual numbers were 2.4 percent in 2010 and 1.8 percent in 2011; few forecasters now expect it to be much above 2.3 percent this year.

Unemployment was supposed to be 6 percent by now. It has averaged 8.2 percent this year so far. Meanwhile real median annual household income has dropped more than 5 percent since June 2009. Nearly 110 million individuals received a welfare benefit in 2011, mostly Medicaid or food stamps.

Welcome to Obama’s America: nearly half the population is not represented on a taxable return—almost exactly the same proportion that lives in a household where at least one member receives some type of government benefit. We are becoming the 50–50 nation—half of us paying the taxes, the other half receiving the benefits."


"The president’s supporters will, of course, say that the poor performance of the economy can’t be blamed on him. They would rather finger his predecessor, or the economists he picked to advise him, or Wall Street, or Europe—anyone but the man in the White House.

There’s some truth in this. It was pretty hard to foresee what was going to happen to the economy in the years after 2008. Yet surely we can legitimately blame the president for the political mistakes of the past four years. After all, it’s the president’s job to run the executive branch effectively—to lead the nation. And here is where his failure has been greatest.

On paper it looked like an economics dream team: Larry Summers, Christina Romer, and Austan Goolsbee, not to mention Peter Orszag, Tim Geithner, and Paul Volcker. The inside story, however, is that the president was wholly unable to manage the mighty brains—and egos—he had assembled to advise him.

According to Ron Suskind’s book Confidence Men, Summers told Orszag over dinner in May 2009: “You know, Peter, we’re really home alone ... I mean it. We’re home alone. There’s no adult in charge. Clinton would never have made these mistakes [of indecisiveness on key economic issues].” On issue after issue, according to Suskind, Summers overruled the president. “You can’t just march in and make that argument and then have him make a decision,” Summers told Orszag, “because he doesn’t know what he’s deciding.” (I have heard similar things said off the record by key participants in the president’s interminable “seminar” on Afghanistan policy.)"


"And then there was health care. No one seriously doubts that the U.S. system needed to be reformed. But the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA) of 2010 did nothing to address the core defects of the system: the long-run explosion of Medicare costs as the baby boomers retire, the “fee for service” model that drives health-care inflation, the link from employment to insurance that explains why so many Americans lack coverage, and the excessive costs of the liability insurance that our doctors need to protect them from our lawyers.

Ironically, the core Obamacare concept of the “individual mandate” (requiring all Americans to buy insurance or face a fine) was something the president himself had opposed when vying with Hillary Clinton for the Democratic nomination. A much more accurate term would be “Pelosicare,” since it was she who really forced the bill through Congress.

Pelosicare was not only a political disaster. Polls consistently showed that only a minority of the public liked the ACA, and it was the main reason why Republicans regained control of the House in 2010. It was also another fiscal snafu. The president pledged that health-care reform would not add a cent to the deficit. But the CBO and the Joint Committee on Taxation now estimate that the insurance-coverage provisions of the ACA will have a net cost of close to $1.2 trillion over the 2012–22 period."


"Believing it was his role to repudiate neoconservatism, Obama completely missed the revolutionary wave of Middle Eastern democracy—precisely the wave the neocons had hoped to trigger with the overthrow of Saddam Hussein in Iraq. When revolution broke out—first in Iran, then in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, and Syria—the president faced stark alternatives. He could try to catch the wave by lending his support to the youthful revolutionaries and trying to ride it in a direction advantageous to American interests. Or he could do nothing and let the forces of reaction prevail.

In the case of Iran he did nothing, and the thugs of the Islamic Republic ruthlessly crushed the demonstrations. Ditto Syria. In Libya he was cajoled into intervening. In Egypt he tried to have it both ways, exhorting Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak to leave, then drawing back and recommending an “orderly transition.” The result was a foreign-policy debacle. Not only were Egypt’s elites appalled by what seemed to them a betrayal, but the victors—the Muslim Brotherhood—had nothing to be grateful for. America’s closest Middle Eastern allies—Israel and the Saudis—looked on in amazement.

“This is what happens when you get caught by surprise,” an anonymous American official told The New York Times in February 2011. “We’ve had endless strategy sessions for the past two years on Mideast peace, on containing Iran. And how many of them factored in the possibility that Egypt moves from stability to turmoil? None.”"


"It is a sign of just how completely Barack Obama has “lost his narrative” since getting elected that the best case he has yet made for reelection is that Mitt Romney should not be president. In his notorious “you didn’t build that” speech, Obama listed what he considers the greatest achievements of big government: the Internet, the GI Bill, the Golden Gate Bridge, the Hoover Dam, the Apollo moon landing, and even (bizarrely) the creation of the middle class. Sadly, he couldn’t mention anything comparable that his administration has achieved."

You're welcome.

 

[Infanteer]

Cognitive dissonance is a beautiful thing....