The media is in a froth over BHO’s inauguration and high pre-approval ratings but Obama may find it difficult to fill the shoes given him by the people for whom he is…was…the people we…or they…were waiting for…or something like that. Sorry.
Public expectations for his performance in office far exceed those for any president in a generation.
On the eve of his inauguration Tuesday, the poll found that 65 percent of those surveyed believe Obama will be an “above average” president or better, including 28 percent who think he will be “outstanding.”
Which is all fine and good. In comparison…
According to previous pre-inauguration polls, just 47 percent believed George W. Bush would be an “above average” or “outstanding” president when he entered his first term, 56 percent thought Bill Clinton would be “above average” or better and 38 percent thought George H.W. Bush would be. The earlier pre-inaugural numbers all came from the Gallup Poll, except for Clinton’s, which came from the ABC News/Washington Post poll.
But check out these amazing predictions for Obama’s Presidency; breathtaking.
Seventy-one percent of those polled said the economy will likely improve during the first year of his presidency; 65 percent said unemployment will go down; 72 percent said the stock market would be on the rise; and 63 percent said their personal economic situation would improve.
From where we stand, a dog with a note in his mouth could accomplish that.
Some conservative economists say that additional stimulus may only prolong the grief at best, triggering runaway inflation down the road and resulting in an even more bloated federal bureaucracy.
“I think the economy will recover regardless of what Washington does. But the long-term effect here will be to reduce the standard of living of the next generation because they will be saddled with all this debt,” said Chris Edwards of the libertarian-leaning Cato Institute.
Even without the new spending proposed by Obama, the U.S. has a $1.2 trillion budget deficit this year, he noted. “If that isn’t already enough of a Keynesian stimulus, what is?”
Given some of the ideas put forth so far by the Obama administration, we may soon find ourselves wanting for that pooch.
Some conservative economists say that additional stimulus may only prolong the grief at best, triggering runaway inflation down the road and resulting in an even more bloated federal bureaucracy.
That’s already in the cards. By the time they know inflation has taken hold it will be too late to do anything other than a recession to cure it, but then they’ll have to “have a stimulus to fix the recession” which will result in inflation — rinse and repeat.
How did we stop the cycle before? Reagan let there be a massive recession to kill inflation, then cut government involvement in the economy so that it could more efficiently allocate resources. All the “stimulus” does is take money from people who use it for productive use to give to favored and/or failing enterprises.
That’s not to say that government intervention in times of crisis can’t be appropriate, but how we’re doing it now is insane. Shoveling money at banks and not getting anything in return is nuts.
If the government had bought the toxic assets even at a discount they would have cleared the bank’s balance sheets and allowed some recovery to occur. Now the banks have to keep those funds shoveled at them as reserves to service their toxic assets rather than lending, and the bank stock’s are hammered by uncertainty as to the actual state of their assets!
Can you imagine a worse economic plan? Even Obama’s idea of an “infrastructure build” has at least some marginal payback. Of course Paulson is sitting pretty for a nice job from his friends on Wall Street when he leaves government service.
Wallace Stevens