The naysayers have been wrong so often, a brief reminder is in order

[ProSense]

Obama’s New Safety Cops

CREW AND OBAMA ADMINISTRATION REACH HISTORIC LEGAL SETTLEMENT...(will also release Bush-era records)

EPA: Pending Mountaintop Removal Permits Would Violate Clean Water Act

THE OBAMA PLAN: STABILITY & SECURITY FOR ALL AMERICANS (with a public option)



That's change.

[Uzybone]

1. YOU LIE !11!!

KnR

[AspenRose]

46. I have a feeling this is going to become the new "that's what she said"

[ProSense]

2. The cowards have been wrong often too. n/t

[FrenchieCat]

3. At this point, they are using reflexive reaction and it's only a matter of their pride.

My response to them each time; he ain't perfect, but I'm hella glad he's my President.

[Oregone]

4. Summers: Unemployment Will Remain 'Unacceptably High' for Years

As the president has said and (Treasury Secretary) Tim Geithner and I have said many times, these problems were not made in a week or a month or a year; they will not be fixed in a week or a month or a year,” Summers said. “The level of unemployment is unacceptably high and will on all forecasts remain unacceptably high for a number of, for a number of years.”

Summers said that while there has been substantial normalization in the economy, financial conditions in commercial real estate continue to struggle, and “the availability of capital to small businesses remain very tight and credit is in short supply.

http://blogs.abcnews.com/politicalpunch/2009/09/summers-unemployment-will-remain-unacceptably-high-for-years.html

-----

But, but...I thought unemployment was supposed to be 5% in 5 years:\



Fuck it, at least the banks are fine.

[TomCADem]

5. So, If Summers Always Lies, Does That Mean Unemployment Will Go Down? Yippee!!!!

[girl gone mad]

6. Umm...

How does this prove anybody wrong about anything? Except for the ones who were predicting the stimulus would have us creating net positive jobs by now?

ETA: please don't respond with a link to some other vaguely related thread. I'm begging...

[ProSense]

7. Umm...

denial.

[vaberella]

8. +1. n/t

[girl gone mad]

36. Yes, I agree that you are in denial.

Open your eyes.

[joshcryer]

39. Interesting graph, thanks. People reading this thread should check it out.

[joshcryer]

40. Source for your graph (so people can't claim it's fake, etc):

http://www.calculatedriskblog.com/2009/07/second-stimulus-plan.html

Forecasts come from here (page 5): http://otrans.3cdn.net/45593e8ecbd339d074_l3m6bt1te.pdf

Looks like Krugman was right all along.

[Zynx]

24. According to the pessimists we should have lost 3-4 million more jobs than we have by now.

[rug]

9. Hooray! We're only going to lose 100,000 jobs in September!

[ProSense]

10. Hooray! We're not going to lose 1.5 million jobs in September.

Since you're citing the trend.

[rug]

11. Hooray! We never were.

[ProSense]

12. OK, since you can't follow the negative trend, let's follow the positive

Hooray! We're losing 75,000 jobs in October.
Hooray! We're losing 50,000 jobs in November.
Hooray! We're losing 25,000 jobs in December.
Hooray! We're losing 15,000 jobs in January.
Hooray! We're losing 10,000 jobs in February.
Hooray! We're losing 5,000 jobs in March.
Hooray! We're losing 0 jobs in April.

The job losses that you saw late last year would have continued without the stimulus.

[girl gone mad]

37. Gee, and al it took was..

$34,000,000,000,000

What a bargain.

Once again, as others in this thread have told you, we are still losing jobs at a faster rate than was predicted without the stimulus.

[ProSense]

41. "we are still losing jobs at a faster rate than was predicted without the stimulus." What?

"$34,000,000,000,000"

34 trillion?

On both points, do you know what you're talking about?

[girl gone mad]

42. Absolutey.

$24 Trillion in banking backstops. Another $1T stimulus. $1T for the wars. Add in the ongoing Bush/AMT tax cuts, foreign stimulus spending designed to prop up the markets and you have many, many trillions in government spending with no net job creation. This is what happens when you listen to corporatists and Republicans.

[ProSense]

45. Absolutely disingenuous.

Approximately 50 initiatives or programs have been created by various Federal agencies since 2007 to provide potential support totaling more than $23.7 trillion.

link

What the hell does that have to do with Obama's stimulus?

And what about the bogus claim that the stimulus made things worse: "we are still losing jobs at a faster rate than was predicted without the stimulus."

[JNelson6563]

13. Slow but sure.

Most people have never turned around anything bigger than their car. Obama's turning around a giant tanker. I think he is making progress and I'm glad of it.

Julie

[dsc]

14. I will restrict myself to the stimulus

Assuming you are restricting yourself to DU, the problem most of us had with the stimulus was that we believed it wasn't going to be stimulative enough. Your graph kind of shows that. We still are losing thousands of jobs per month. To take one small example, my state has a growing population but had to lay off teachers due to the budget. Had the stimulus provided more funding for education, that wouldn't have happened.

[ProSense]

15. "problem most of us had with the stimulus was...it wasn't going to be stimulative enough" And there

lies the bogusness of that argument: believing that more money, meant faster roll out. The money is still being dispersed.

[dsc]

16. speed was part of the problem

but so was amount. And yes, spending more money total would likely have led to spending more money now. That was one of Krugman's big points.

[ProSense]

18. Krugman also predicted that the stimulus wasn't enough to turn things around

The U.S. economy is stabilizing and may have bottomed out, as the government’s stimulus plan probably saved a million jobs, Nobel Prize winner Paul Krugman said today.

September 4, 2009

The purpose of stimulus

Just a brief reminder. Industrial production is now rising; so, probably, is real GDP. Given the way the official business cycle dating committee dates recessions, this probably means that the recession — again, as officially defined — is over.

But unemployment is still very high and rising. As Calculated Risk points out, long-term unemployment — which is the most destructive in human terms — is at its highest level recorded since the Depression.

And the purpose of stimulus is, first and foremost, to mitigate unemployment. The fact that the economy may be technically in recovery is irrelevant.

First comes the reversal of job losses (happening now), and then comes the addition of jobs.

Krugman may not be able to admit that simple fact, but he knows the economy is in recovery.

[dsc]

19. unless we double dip

the fact is we are still losing a ton of jobs. In July we lost more than in June. I will conceed, as anyone would, that the stimulus made us better now than we would have been. But the fact is that the jury is decidedly still out on whether the stimulus was enough to keep us from being in huge trouble this time next year. If those of us who fear it isn't are correct, the Democratic majority will vanish.

On edit it should be we lost more in June than in May.

[ProSense]

22. "If those of us who fear it isn't are correct, the Democratic majority will vanish."

Do you really believe that given the trend in job loss reversal that's realistic?

First of all most people expected that it would be two or three years before the economy showed signs of recovery.

[dsc]

23. We have to start gainging jobs very fast if we want the economy to look good in a year

at the current rate we won't start gaining jobs for several more months (around 3 or 4 at least).

[ProSense]

27. "at the current rate we won't start gaining jobs for several more months (around 3 or 4 at least)."

Isn't that less than a year from now? And why do you believe that wouldn't be a tremendous achievement?

[dsc]

29. By the time we start gaining the Unemployment rate will be over 10%

assuming some modest gains in the other 8 months (and that is about what the model projects) it is hard to believe the unemployment rate will be less than 8% which would be a major problem come election time. Yes, getting positive job growth will be an achievement, just like it is an achievement for a student with a 0 average to get a 70 on the final exam. In both cases it is too little too late.

[ProSense]

30. As expected, and then it will go down. n/t

[dsc]

34. yes but likely too late

just like for the kid in my example. This isn't a parlimentary system where we can schedule the election when we wish to.

[Zynx]

25. I would counter that by saying that if we passed a Republican stimulus not one dollar

would have gone to education and we would be looking at far more layoffs.

[dsc]

31. actually we did pass a GOP stimulus

one approved by Snowe, Specter, and Collins. That is a big part of the problem.

[ProSense]

32. "one approved by Snowe, Specter, and Collins."

You're not interested in a real discussion.

[dsc]

35. We could have, and should have, passed with 51 votes

and been done with it. Or failing that, we should have let it go down, put the heat on the GOP, and passed a better version. The fact is for the sake of idiotic moderates we passed a half assed stimulus which will likely save his reelection but not Congress.

[Zynx]

33. You know damn well what I meant.

[HamdenRice]

17. Can you find the nutcase posts from a year ago urging, "LET IT FAIL"?

Those were the most massively wrong posts of all time.

:rofl:

[ipaint]

20. I know we were so wrong...

Newly released records of visits to the Obama White House by health care executives provide some important new details not included in the White House’s July 22 letter sent to CREW on the eve of the President’s health care press conference. The records identify the names of the individuals the visitors were meeting with, and include information about scheduled appointments that apparently never took place. The new records include information from WAVES records, which show the scheduled dates of appointments, as well as ACR records, which show when the visitor actually entered the White House complex. Details from the new records are outlined below.

Bill Tauzin (President and CEO, Pharmaceutical Research & Manufacturers of America):
• March 5 (meeting with president)
• May 19 (meeting with Sarah Fenn)
• June 2 (meeting with Sarah Fenn)
• June 24 (meeting with Clare Gallagher)
• July 7 (meeting with Jim Messina)

Karen Ignagni (President and CEO, America’s Health Insurance Plans):
• March 5 (meeting with president)
• March 6 (meetings with Elizabeth Bafford and Larry Summers)
• March 11 (meeting with Jennifer Cannistra)
• June 30 (meeting with Sarah Fenn)
• July 24 (meeting with Sarah Fenn)

Richard Umdenstock (President and CEO, American Hospital Ass’n.):
• February 4 (meeting with Tina Tchen)
• February 23 (meeting with president)
• March 5 (meeting with president)
• March 25 (meeting with Jennifer Cannistra)
• March 30 (meeting with Ezekiel Emanuel)
• April 6 (meeting with Tina Tchen)
• May 22 (meeting with Sarah Fenn)

J. James Rohack (President-elect, American Medical Ass’n.):
• March 25 (meeting with Ezekiel Emanuel)
• June 22 (meeting with president)
• June 24 (meetings with Clare Gallagher and president)

William Weldon (Chairman and CEO, Johnson & Johnson):
• May 12 (meeting with president)

Jeffrey B. Kindler (Chairman and CEO, Pfizer Inc.):
• March 5 (meeting with president)

• May 6 (meetings with Sarah Fenn and Elizabeth Bafford)
• June 2 (meeting with Sarah Fenn)

Stephen J. Hemsley (President, CEO, Director, UnitedHealth Group, Inc.):
• May 15 (meeting with Sarah Fenn)
• May 22 (meeting with Peter Orszag)
• July 14 (meeting with Aneesh Chopra)

Angela Braly (President, CEO, Director, WellPoint, Inc.):
• February 13 (meeting with president)

George Halvorson (Chairman and CEO, Kaiser Foundation Health Plan):
• March 27 (meeting with Keith Fontenot)
• June 5 (meeting with Peter Orszag)
• July 23 (meeting with Kathleen Sibelius)
• July 24 (meeting with Sarah Fenn)

Jay Gellert (President and CEO, Health Net, Inc.):
• February 10 (meeting with Tina Tchen)
• March 11 (meeting with Jennifer Cannistra)
• March 20 (meeting with Matt Flavin)
• July 24 (meeting with Sarah Fenn)

Thomas Priselac (President and CEO, Cedars-Sinai Health System):
• April 3 (meeting with Ezekiel Emanuel)

Richard Clark (Chairman, President and CEO, Merck):
• March 24 (meeting with Ezekiel Emanuel)

Wayne T. Smith (Chairman, President and CEO, Community Health Systems):
• June 4 (meeting with Sarah Fenn)

Rick Smith (Sr. Vice President, Pharmaceutical Research & Manufacturers of America):
• May 19 (meeting with Sarah Fenn)
• June 2 (meeting with Sarah Fenn)
• July 7 (meeting with Jim Messina)
• July 24 (meeting with Sarah Fenn)

http://www.citizensforethics.org/files/20090904%20-%20Summary%20of%20Health%20Care%20Visits.pdf

[ProSense]

21. Confirmed wrong.

Look at the letter (PDF). The letter captures all but one meeting in July prior to its issue date of July 22.

Tauzin: July 7 (meeting with Jim Messina)

There obviously were no secret meetings when the negotiation happened in the spring.

[ipaint]

26. Which ones were televised?

"I'm going to have all the negotiations around a big table. We'll have doctors and nurses and hospital administrators. Insurance companies, drug companies — they'll get a seat at the table, they just won't be able to buy every chair. But what we will do is, we'll have the negotiations televised on C-SPAN, so that people can see who is making arguments on behalf of their constituents, and who are making arguments on behalf of the drug companies or the insurance companies."

The kick-off infomercial doesn't count and certainly isn't "all" meetings. So how many 2, 5, 8, none.

Regardless, it's obvious from the proposals and the white house records who was making the arguments on behalf of whom.

[ProSense]

28. What? You posted what you thought was new information. You were wrong, face it. n/t

[Parker CA]

38. K&R for a great visual of the situation. Thank you!

[Cha]

43. Yeah, President Obama and his

Team are just what this country needed to pull us back from the friggin abyss.

[georgian style]

44. Obama is open to ideas other than the public option

Just for the record. He supports the public option, but is open to co-pos and triggers. See speech.