[rowech]

Originally Posted by SteveBollea

OK, you can attack Obama for a lot of things, but being fradulent? He's done exactly what he campaigned on. Large stimulus to stop even further job losses? Promised and done. Health care reform? Promised and done. More focus on Afghanistan? Promised and done. Financial reform? Promised and done. Now, you can talk about the details or the positive/negatives to those decisions, but it's not like he didn't say he was going to do these things.

On the blaming Bush part, yes, it's perfectly acceptable to blame Bush. However, if I was Obama, I would say thirty years of economic policy that have destroyed large chunks of the middle class, but that's why I'm to the left of Obama.

I mean, Obama's actual contribution to the debt and deficit is much smaller than Bush's. (To keep things simple, we won't try to apportion blame for falling income tax revenue based on the recession rather than tax cuts.)

Given that the CBO grades health care reform as deficit-reducing and it's actual budgetary impact is still near zero since most of it hasn't been implemented anyway, Obama's actual contribution to the deficit is effectively the stimulus ($800 billion over three years) and a bunch of little things like extending unemployment benefits that aren't large on this scale.* The Bush tax cuts through 2010 cost about $2.5 trillion dollars. The CBO estimate of the costs of Iraq through completion is $2 trillion dollars. The budget cost of Medicare Part D is approximately $1 trillion every ten years. In other words, Obama would need to pass seven stimulus bills to equal the impact of just those three budget busters.

And unlike Bush's policies, a stimulus wasn't really an option. I don't think anyone in their right mind thinks that McCain would not have developed a very large stimulus of his own, though it may have been, say, tax cuts for the top ten percent instead of jobs for construction workers.

* The actual increase in discretionary spending between Bush's last year and Obama's first is essentially 100% stimulus. The increase looks much bigger than the $250B appropriated for stimulus that year, but the remainder is Obama bringing onto the books things Bush did through separate bills to make the budget look smaller, like the war authorization and the AMT patch.

I didn't hold Afghanistan against either party, as its hard to disentangle who is responsible for what there.

You throw around this stimulus like it's the greatest thing ever. When the economy dips again in a couple of years and the piper must finally be paid, where will you be? The stimulus did nothing but prolong the inevitable. Of course, it's the attempt to buy more years at the expense of future generations. Well done.