Economic Recovery

Ivan Seeking

Obama's recovery continues:

Housing Prices Up!
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124878477560186517.html

Significantly Improved GDP - Growth Expected Next Quarter
http://www.businessweek.com/investor...731_118205.htm

The Stock Market - Up 40% From Low
The DJIA is over 9100; up from its low of about 6500 around March 15th - a 40% increase since the low water mark.

russ_watters

The GDP was down 1% in Q2 and Obama says the improvement is at least partly due to the stimulus: http://www.usatoday.com/money/econom...-economy_N.htm

So how much stimulus money was spent in Q2? Exactly how much of that can we really attribute to it?
[edit] Answer: http://voices.washingtonpost.com/fed...ly_8_2009.html Lets say 2/3 of that was in q2 or about $10 billion (sorry, I don't have monthly numbers). Our GDP is about $14 trillion, so that's 0.07% of our GDP. In Q2, the GDP was down 6.5%, so the stimulus was almost exactly 1% of the improvement. The other 99% must then either have happened on its own or been the result of the actions of those in power last year. Either way, it wasn't Obama and the Democratic congress.

russ_watters

The best thing about Obama, to his supporters, is that he's a great talker. He says things they want to hear. When he made his unemployment prediction a few months ago, complete with that pretty graph, the effect of the stimulus sounded great. It didn't matter that nothing on that graph had anything to do with reality. But here we are 6 months later and Democrats are still talking the same way! It doesn't matter to the True Believers that Obama simply has no clue what the economy is doing or how to fix it (or even if it needs him to fix it).

But to everyone else, in 2012, it just might.

Office_Shredder

It should be obvious the argument is that the stimulus, y'know, stimulated the economy. I.e. got people not receiving economic stimulus funds to spend more money, or even just encouraging the people who did get those funds to spend more than just that money. Your argument that the stimulus package can only contribute to the economy its face value is wrong.

mheslep

Yes Help Us Obi Wan Obama, You're Our Only Hope

mheslep

Why? Because Obama signed a piece of paper with 'stimulus' written on it and announced it with fan fair on the news? Because some guy two states away got some money, I'll go out and spend more? This essentially argues that the government can just announce "I stimulate you, I stimulate you, I stimulate you" three times and we'll all go out and spend more. This was the second recent stimulus by the way. The first one, the Bush 2008 stimulus, was ~$150B back Feb 2008 (as Russ notes more than three times the amount spent so far in the 2009 stimulus.) The entire amount went out by April-May 2008 and we now know it stimulated spending nearly ... none at all. One could go argue, as we hear now, that the 2008 money kept things from getting worse, it 'saved X jobs', but Im not buying it.

A reasonable assumption based on cause and effect, is that the sometimes stumbling actions of Bernanke, Paulson, Geitner[1] and the TARP guarantee money from 2008 through now eventually stabilized the banks and credit markets. So though the free fall has stopped, it is quite possible credit won't get much better, as lenders now have a valid fear that their loans will inflated away given the run away spending.

[1] Geitner I'm less sure of, as he calculated the best way to sell his own long sitting house was to raise the price.

Ivan Seeking

Obama's recovery continues:

The cash for clunkers program a raging success!
http://www.physicsforums.com/showthread.php?t=328229

russ_watters

So....then what is the point of the $700 billion? Are you saying that the point of the stimulus wasn't to spend money to stimulate the economy but was to cause people to stimulate it themselves via cheerleading?

Should I point out that that's not what Obama or his supporters (see poster above me) claimed was going on?

rootX

I don't see them rejecting that argument either. The only point of the government injections is to
(1) create confidence and
(2) give economy a tiny push

1 and 2 are not mutually exclusive.

russ_watters

Indeed, they are not mutually exclusive, but republicans are contributors to the economy too - bigger contributors than democrats, I would suspect. And his plan to spend $700 billion doesn't give them confidence, it scares them. So if this was all a trick, he at least half succeeded: he was able to trick democrats and republicans like into thinking that he really intended to spend $700 billion, instead of this "tiny" amount. But as a result of that trick, democrats got confidence and republicans got convinced he didn't know the first thing about economics.

So that doesn't even make Obama a good cheerleader.

And could we clarify this, please: do you and Office Shredder believe that Obama never intended to spend that money?

russ_watters

I suppose with that stance, you would also give Bush credit for turning the biggest crash in the stock market since 1929 into the softest recession we've ever had? You believe Bush prevented another great depression in 2001, right?

OmCheeto

All of my stocks, bonds, and funds are in the black.
Of course, without the market collapse, I'd have never been interested in the first place, and would probably have gone to my grave without having ever directly invested a penny.

Has anyone else noticed that stock prices seemed unreasonably deflated over the last 8 months, and decided to pump money in?

Skyhunter

Republicans follow economic indicators just like Democrats.

It is not the stimulus that is scaring the Republicans... it's the noise machine.

kasse

Will somebody answer my questions in the liberalism thread more thoroughly?

Ivan Seeking

Jobs, infrastructure, energy conservation, expansion of programs like wind power, future growth to help reduce the ratio of debt to GDP.

Why is it that Republicans always seem willing to do nation-building everywhere but here in the US?

For a nice review of the progress and who gets the credit,
http://abcnews.go.com/thisweek

Their main veiwer isn't working yet for me, but you can select the individual segments at the top of the page, beginning with Geitner.

Ivan Seeking

It is also interesting to note that when Bush took over, our debt to GDP ratio was at about 60%. Under Bush it rose to about 78% with a nearly vertical ascent during the last part of his Presidency, and now the Republicans are complaining that it will go above 80% under Obama - the guy who was handed an economy spiralling out of control and about to collapse.

The hypocrisy is beyond belief!

Office_Shredder

Democrats and Republicans have nothing to do with it. We're talking about generic people here. If Obama spends more government money, more money is being spent. This is fact. This is undeniable. If more money is being spent, more people are being paid. Fact. If more people are being paid, more people can then spend their own money. And the cycle continues.

Somehow you seem to have confused Obama's confidence boosting for the economy with political maneuvering