I think Obama's biggest mistake was saying the stimulus would keep unemployment under 8% before even

[LeftyAndProud60]

knowing how the bill would look.

[Cali_Democrat]

1. When all is said and done....

Obama's biggest mistakes will have been embracing Republican policies like tax cuts for the wealthy, imperialist wars, gitmo toruture and deregulation.

The stimulus won't even register.

[DJ13]

6. +1

[boppers]

11. Oh, you mean "Democratic policies".

Obama can sign up, or down, on Congress, which had a democratic majority, and voted for all of that anyways,

[karynnj]

14. He did not "embrace" any of those

He absolutely did NOT want to extend the cuts to the wealthy - and he is on record not wanting to do so again in 2012. It was entirely clear that his choice was to let ALL the cuts expire (and not extend unemployment) or extend them all temporarily. The pain and consequence to the economy of the first led to him not doing that. The problem was neither the House or Senate was willing to vote on Obama's preference before the election - even though Obama and some Democrats strongly wanted that.

He inherited the wars and is winding down Iraq pretty much as he said he was. As to Gitmo - he and his administration DID try to close it, but Congress made it impossible to put those held in the US and other countries did not want them either. Rahm, in answering a question from my daughter, who was living in Chicago, said they made a mistake not working on that faster.

As to "deregulation", they have so far had a net INCREASE in regulation. The truth is that there are always regulations that are outdated, contradictory or ill thought out. Reviewing all regulations periodically is not a bad idea. The new regulations in the Banking bill and the hCR bill are designed to prevent abuse, but it is entirely possible that they too - as they are implemented - will be tweaked to make them work better.

[Dawgs]

27. You would have a better argument on tax cuts for the rich if he actually fought to end them.

And, he did embrace the Afganistan war. He even said so while campaigning. And if that isn't good enough for you, he increased the troop strength and escalation, which therefore, gave him full ownership.

[MissDeeds]

26. +1

[MannyGoldstein]

2. They should have listened to Krugman

He did some simple calculations that showed it would cause unemployment to go above 10%.

[pnwmom]

4. It didn't "cause" unemployment to go above 10%.

Employment was rising because of the collapse of the economy and would have gone even higher without it.

But it didn't reduce unemployment as much as the Obama administration predicted.

[MannyGoldstein]

5. How about "the lack of a sufficient stimulus ensured it"

Bottom line is that Obama embraced serial bunglers like Summers and shunned competent economists like Krugman.

And here we are.

[AngryAmish]

25. Unfalsifiable.

There is no way to know if Krugman was right or if Krugman was wrong. The evidence relied upon, both pro and con, hardly rises to evidence but is speculation and anecdote itself.

Until the state of economics as a useful discipline for large economies gets much better then what we have now then blanket statements like "Obama was right" or "Krugman was right" or even "Palin was right" all fail.

[golfguru]

30. +1,000,000

[Major Hogwash]

3. I think that only 7 people even remembered him saying that.

Until tonight.

Thanks, LeftyAndProud60.
Thanks a lot.

:sarcasm:

[CreekDog]

23. Michelle Bachmann just said it, I'm sure that's where the OP heard it

because Tuesday night she said Obama said it.

the OP believed it without hesitation.

[The_Casual_Observer]

7. His mistake was ignoring the stimulus & not promoting it after it passed.

[stevenleser]

8. Except that he didnt say it. Here is a link to politifacts fact-checking on that

http://politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2011/jan/26/michele-bachmann/rep-michele-bachmann-says-white-house-promised-sti/

We need to push back against this lie

[pnwmom]

9. Thanks for the reality check, Steven. n/t

[polmaven]

17. What has reality got to do with anything?

:shrug:

[LAGC]

10. It's true that the meager stimulus as it was prevented a Great Depression.

But what we needed was a far bigger stimulus to really get unemployment back down under 5%. I'm disappointed in Obama not pushing for it hard enough.

[JoePhilly]

12. That article also leaves out a key point ...

The projected unemployment rate for January 2009 was something like 6.5%. When the numbers actually came it, unemployment in January 2009 was already something like 7.5%, and the actual unemployment rate was 8.2% by February 09, and 8.7% by end of March 2009. The stimulus only passed in late February, and the report in question based its projections on unemployment estimates that were far lower than the actual values.

Bottom line, it was impossible to keep unemployment under 8% because in reality, it had already passed that number when the stimulus was enacted.

[karynnj]

13. Did he ever REALLY say that or was it a RW frame?

The quotes that I have heard of administration people is that they were saying that WITHOUT the stimulus unemployment would rise above (I remember 9%.) After the fact, that was, I think, turned around to mean that passing the stimulus would prevent the rate going that high. Once that spin took hold - it was further pushed that the unemployment rate staying under 8% was the benchmark of whether it worked. One cause was that Obama, his administration and leading Democrats did not want to scare the nation to death with the type of projections that could have been made in early 2009.

There is not a serious economist I can think of that does not admit that the stimulus did create jobs that otherwise would not have been there. However, President Obama lost the PR war here. In retrospect, at each of those steps, there should have been pushback. This is complete hindsight though and I saw NO ONE post that it should be done back in mid 2009 when it started - and when it would have had to be done. Instead, you had Christine Rohmer apologizing that her estimate had been too low and Biden saying that they misjudged how bad it was. Both implicitly ACCEPTED the RW frame.

In addition, while it historically has been the left that argues that the official rate under counts the true problem, now the right is using the broader (more accurate) rates.

[CreekDog]

15. Are you quoting Michelle Bachmann?

jeez, you're not even subtle anymore:

http://politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2011/jan/26/michele-bachmann/rep-michele-bachmann-says-white-house-promised-sti/

"Rep. Michele Bachmann says White House promised stimulus would keep unemployment below 8 percent

In her Tea Party Express-sponsored rebuttal to President Barack Obama's State of the Union address, Rep. Michele Bachmann, R-Minn., repeated an oft-used attack on the economic stimulus -- that the White House promised it would keep unemployment under 8 percent (and failed)."

[Name removed]

16. Deleted message

Message removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.

[BklnDem75]

18. A bigger mistake is repeating an uninformed RW lie

Please do some research before agreeing with the likes of Bachman and Beck.

[Hansel]

21. +1

[AtomicKitten]

28. +1

Economist Christina Romer regrets saying jobless rate would stay below 8 percent. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/08/06/AR2010080606271.html

[jenmito]

19. Obama never said that. Christina Roehmer did, and she shouldn't have. Obama always said it

would get worse before it gets better.

[edsmeal]

20. Agreed but he did not say it.

One of his people did on national TV.

[JoePhilly]

22. The actual unemployment rate was already 8.2% when the Stimulus passed.

This is a critical fact that everyone seems to ignore.

Obama never made the promise you claim he made. The report that estimated 8% was based on other estimates of unemployment, estimates that were way off. For instance, that report used an estimate of ~6.5% for Jan 2009. As the link down below shows, unemployment was already 7.4% in Jan 2009, NOT 6.5%. By February, its at 8.2%.

The stimulus didn't pass until the end of February 2009.

So, when the administration now says that "things were far worse than anyone knew" ... THIS IS WHAT THEY ARE TALKING ABOUT!!!!

There was no way to keep unemployment under 8% when we had ALREADY PASSED THAT POINT. By the end of March 2009, its at 8.6% ... does anyone think that the stimulus would work in less than one month????

The 8% projection in that report was WAY OFF because the estimates it was based on were WAY OFF.

If we take 8.6%, as the starting point (March 2009, first month where the stimulus is in place) ... unemployment went up another 1.6% (to 10.2%) and has now come down to 9.4%, which is only .8% above where it was when the stimulus started.

http://www.tradingeconomics.com/Economics/Unemployment-Rate.aspx?Symbol=USD

[uponit7771]

24. ******OBAMA NEVER SAID THAT******

[Skittles]

29. he promised lots of bullshit

why zero in on that?

[golfguru]

31. Another Obama's big mistake was...

to oppose Hillary's mandates for health insurance during the 2008 campaign.
Now the Florida based federal judge has used Obama's exact words in declaring
the mandates illegal.

[MadMaddie]

32. No his biggest mistake was thinking that Corporations in

America would do the right thing once their profits increased. Instead they are sitting on billiions trying to destroy President Obama.

[CreekDog]

33. The OP Left this thread before it started.

attributing to Obama what Bachmann just claimed he said.


i mean come on.

[stevenleser]

34. Yes, I alerted on this OP. One of the other commenters said the OP had expressed odd opinions

for a DU poster in the past and had a lot of hit and run threads.