With the onset of the Obama administration, I've stopped listening to he howls of the loony left......having grown proficient at successfully predicting failure of Bush administration policies (that was a big challenge----interestingly a lot of crackpot Libertarians can make the same claim), they now are operating under the assumption that they have the right answers.....in actual reality, they are as much, delusional snake handlers as are the various factions of rightwingnuts, only irrationally praying to a different set of totems.

V V

Thanks for the non-substantive, fact-free post. That's just what we need to have a useful discussion around here.

that the standard you want to set is that our guy sounds less lunatic and deluded than your guys.

That seems to be setting the bar a little too low, in my opinion.

Although the meme that the Republicans are precisely the ones who put us in this mess to begin with and that, therefore, their criticisms lack foundation and their grasp of economics is highly suspect, is one idea that bears endless repetition.

Just a bit closer than Nancy Pelosi saying five hundred million people are losing their jobs every month, and she said that twice.

The difference is that Pelosi's statement is a mistake this is obvious to everyone. Steele's numbers were an obvious misreprentation of the facts since it was a planned defense of the Bush administration.

I think they made some really big mistakes, but to say they're the cause of this current economic mess is non-sense.

This economic bubble was created by the easing of credit standards, in all industries. Anybody could get a credit card and ring up an outrageous amount of debt. Anybody could get a home loan for practically any amount of money.

So, we as Americans bought. We bought everything we could, using money that hadn't been earned yet. This boom in demand led to a boom in industry. Retail, manufacturers, finance all needed to create jobs to meet up with the demand of the general public's spending spree all financed via debt.

Now, the gov't wants to do the exact same thing. The gov't credit bubble will burst too, its just a question of when, and what are the effects. The world's currency is hinged to the dollar to some degree, and any devaluation of the Dollar will have repercussion effects throughout the world.

The economy doesn't need a jolt. Its re-correcting itself to meet up with REAL demand, not debt financed Demand.

Sure, Bush's job record is a record low but let's face objective facts: many of the 26 million jobs that Clinton saw (with aid of Summers and his job killing ways) were CRAPPY JOBS. That was the beginning of the era of families not just HAVING to have a minimum of two bread winners, but the start of the period when the jobs they had were in the service industry (ALWAYS crappy, low paying, low-to-no-benefit jobs) and required that each breadwinner actually have TWO jobs each!

Bush simply continued that crappy jobs shindig and went it one better: FEWER crappy jobs, but the ONLY jobs available.

Now, we have the remaining good jobs being outsourced and the corporations that are outsourcing them also seeking to "help" their domestic employees by offering for them to keep their jobs...if they will move to a 3rd world nation and accept 3rd world pay!

The Clinton job record, on simply numbers of jobs is great. A closer look at the reality of those jobs, however, shows that the 26 million job number is still no great shakes. The Clinton/Summers job: "Would you like fries with that?"

They piloted the Ship of State and the Good Ship Economy right onto the Great Barrier Reef of Reality on purpose. What do you mean you are tired of hearing the Republicans blamed?

They did it. No matter how much they try to blame Captain Clinton, the fact is that all the officers and navigators were Republicans. We are just the crew, trapped below deck while seawater and sharks gush in through the gaping holes in the hull.

SUMMERS: Those who presided over the last eight years, the eight years that brought us to the point where we inherit trillions of dollars of deficit, an economy that's collapsing more rapidly than at any time in the last 50 years don't seem to me in a strong position to lecture about the lessons of history.

I would like to remind Dr. Summers that considering his own serious mistakes in the 90's concerning the Brooksley Born warnings on derivative regulation, he is in no better position to lecture on economic history than anyone else.

If Summers were half the economic historian/reformer he's now claiming himself to be, he wouldn't be trying so hard to limit the influence of the President's Economic Recovery Advisory Board.

the GOP and the lenders that helped consumers tap their real estate equity so they'd have money to continue to fuel an economy that clearly produced too much STUFF actually presided over nearly 6 years of negative GDP, if the Mortgage Equity Withdrawals are subtracted.

That is the only salient question. I've proffered one idea. Link in my name.

We gotta get moving. Smartly. This ad nauseum retrospective political finger-pointing isn't gonna pay anyone's bills.

Clinton gave permenant Most Favored Nation trading status to China. He got us into the WTO. And we've all gotten to listen, for a decade now, to that great sucking sound that Ross Perot predicted. Of course that was only the beginning. 8 years of half trillion dollar or better a year deficit spending and two wars that poured all that money down a hole made it much worse. But the thing that kept the last administration from having to deal with all that US manufacturing going over seas was the home loans debacle. We used the equity in our homes to mask the plain fact that we weren't earning enough to pay for our collective lifestyle. Now the money has dried up, the party's over and the bill is due. No matter what happens next, the post WWII life style is over for America. The only question now is how bad it's going to get. I happen to think that redistributing wealth as far down the economic scale as possible by whatever means are necessary is the best way. Tax cuts aren't going to do that. Taxes on the middle and particularly the upper classes need to increase. Deficit spending, no matter how necessary, is only going to make matters worse. And if the federal jobs programs that we all know are coming are just make work then they won't be one bit better for the economy in the long run than another war. On the other hand, if those programs can be targeted toward educating the next generation of innovators, creating new, renewable, domestic energy sources, and developing new products that can be manufactured here and sold elsewhere, then maybe we can all get out of this without missing too many meals.