From Forbes (sic!) this analysis of President Obama’s economic record as compared with Saint Ronaldus of Reagan:
Economically, President Obama’s administration has outperformed President Reagan’s in all commonly watched categories.
Simultaneously the current administration has reduced the deficit, which skyrocketed under Reagan. Additionally, Obama has reduced federal employment, which grew under Reagan (especially when including military personnel,) and truly delivered a “smaller government.” Additionally, the current administration has kept inflation low, even during extreme international upheaval, failure of foreign economies (Greece) and a dramatic slowdown in the European economy.
That’s from Forbes contributor Adam Hartung, a business development and consultant kind of guy — i.e., no raging, card-carrying taker. The whole piece is worth a look.
When you’ve lost Forbes…*
*which they haven’t, really — one drive by piece doth not an editorial campaign make.
Preston Dickinson, Factory, c. 1920
The Other Chuck
If the truth ever mattered to these people, they wouldn’t have elected Reagan in the first place, let alone the GOP that followed him.
Trollhattan
Pesky “facts” and stuff. Amazing painting; doubly so when considering it’s from 90+ years ago..
catclub
As if results mattered. General Motors should have been in favor of national healthcare, but wasn’t.
Boeing should be dropping all support for the GOP over ExIm Bank. Any wagers on when they do that?
Results don’t matter.
catclub
I bet you need to re-calibrate the misery index if the President is Black.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
Meh, it’s been clear the Conservatives don’t give a shit about the deficit. It’s all about whining about much the tender fees fees of the 1% are hurt because the government as the temerity to tax them.
Schlemazel [was Schlemizel till NotMax taught me proper yiddish!]
@catclub:
Oh but results DO matter, just not the ones you chose to focus on.
Of the two who did more to lift the 1%?
Of the two who did more to undermine safety (of every kind) rules and environmental controls?
Of the two who did more to feed worker insecurity thereby allowing the depressing of wages, benefits and worker rights (of every kind)?
St. Reagan wins hands down!
The Dangerman
{Friends} AND {Known Republicans} = {Null}
I do have a lot of suspected Republicans among Family but they are single issue voters (Abortion). Can’t do much about Family.
Cervantes
@The Other Chuck:
Right. The people who thought Reagan was a miracle-worker did so in spite of abundant evidence and analysis to the contrary. I doubt they or their intellectual descendants are paying any more attention now.
Would love to see the Forbes piece change some minds but I am not expecting it.
Certified Mutant Enemy
“Facts are stupid things.”
— Ronald Reagan
BGinCHI
Yes, but when is Obama going to lead? You know, really lead??!!
Probably on the first day of office he should have just punched Boehner in the mouth. Turns out the Presidency and prison have exactly the same rules in terms of credit from violent sociopaths.
Certified Mutant Enemy
@BGinCHI:
Yes, but when is Obama going to lead? You know, really lead??!!
Where lead = killing lots of foreigners
BGinCHI
@Certified Mutant Enemy: I thought that was obvious.
CONGRATULATIONS!
But Reagan made me feel good inside, not like Obama, whose melanin scares me.
feebog
Well, Obama isn’t even close to the number of Reagan administration officials convicted of a crime, so there’s that…
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2005/10/17/157477/-List-of-Reagan-administration-convictions#
Shakezula
Economy, shmeconomy, Obama didn’t personally gut a member of ISIL on MTP, so who cares???
Sherparick
If Corey Robin is right, and the Conservative Movement is much more about maintaining private privilege, particularly male, white, aristocratic privilege, and suppressing the lower “orders” so they show a proper deference to that privilege, then no Democrat could ever be legitimately be President and in particular Obama will never be forgiven for challenging, at least verally his betters during 2009-10 and enacting reforms such as the Affordable Care Act and Dodd-Frank which either gave rights and security to ordinary people and clipped the privileges and freedom to pillage of their betters. I note that the VSP media village, despite their so called liberal reputation, is a very reactionary group and sympathizes with the Republican reaction, hence the constant bashing of President Obama since his reelection.
Schlemazel [was Schlemizel till NotMax taught me proper yiddish!]
@Shakezula:
I’m sure St, Ronnie said the word “Syria” at least once – so thats another area he beats BHO
signed, Chuckles Todd
@Sherparick:
Yeah, that was sort of the same point I was trying to make.
WiscoJoe
Reading the comments on this piece over at Forbes goes from being hilarious to stupefying to horrifying and then all the way back to hilarious. It’s the ultimate circle of derp.
As you can probably guess, right-wingers are furiously arguing that these statistics can not be trusted because the United States government regularly manipulates the statistics which means that the only basis we can use to judge Reagan’s obvious superiority and Obama’s inherent inferiority are other statistics that we choose to believe the government is not manipulating, with a healthy side of gut-instinct truthiness.
Basically it’s “unskew the statistics” meets opportunistic Republican moral-relativism meets rampant anti-intellectualism meets “what is the true nature of reality, anyway and does anything even matter?”-style post-modern laziness meets a rigorous defense of the critical importance of optics … so basically every political debate our country has had to struggle through over the past 30-years .
slag
I love watching the slow-motion pivot the Republican Party is making toward warmer fuzziness. “OTC birth control for everyone!” “We believe in global warming, really we do; we just can’t trust Democrats to do anything about it!”
Next up: “Democrat austerity is killing our economic growth! Reagan at least knew how to spend money!”
gene108
@CONGRATULATIONS!:
About sums up the media reaction to Reagan versus Obama.
Obama also has historic lows in crime rates, teen pregnancies, and the highest high school graduation rate ever going for him.
Can you imagine how negatively he’d be perceived, if , like Reagan, crime rates and teen pregnancy reached record highs?
catclub
@Schlemazel [was Schlemizel till NotMax taught me proper yiddish!]:
“Marine barracks, Beirut”, not so much.
Rob in CT
Right, the past 4 years (we’ll say 2009-2010 was different b/c of the Stimulus), policy has been centre-right. Not crippling Austerity, but mild Austerity mitigated partially by the Fed. In short, basically what a lot of folks on the Right (and certainly lots of folks in the center) claim to want. Granted, many others on the Right want full-on Rambo Austerity…
And the results have pretty much sucked. We’ve muddled through. Things could be worse, but they’re hardly good.
I could understand and respect (but disagree with) someone who argued that this policy mix and short-term results are the best choice b/c of long-term issues (debt, basically) and honestly admitted that the short-term hit was the logical consequence of their desired policies.
A tradeoff. You know, like adults often have to make? If somebody would just f*cking OWN that, I could have a respectful conversation with them (again, whilst disagreeing). It would require, of course, acknowledging that what they want is not that far from current policy, and that it would logically lead to economic contraction (recession) in the short term.
But they never want to own it. They want to pretend that if only Their Guy had been running the show (doing basically the same things, or doing the same things… harder), there would be Unicorns for all. It’s dishonest.
piratedan
well it’s something that isn’t discussed here very often, what kind of economy would we have now if the GOP hadn’t monkey wrenched every bleeping thing that took place after 2010? What would things look like if the Blue Dogs hadn’t watered down the agressive measures that the majority of the Dem Causcus had lobbied for? What happens if the Dems aggressively implemented the ACA (per the GOP lawsuit) and shitcanned the individual state decision on Medicare expansion?
I don’t know… I simply don’t know… but it would have been interesting to see…..
Schlemazel [was Schlemizel till NotMax taught me proper yiddish!]
@catclub:
I am sure the events you reference would come as a shock to Chuckles. He would have to assume you either made them up or are simply trying to turn an American tragedy into cheap political points so shame on you!
catclub
@Rob in CT:
Nonetheless, the US has handled stimulus and recovery FAR better than the Europeans.
Smartest guy on the short bus. But still better.
It can also be argued (not much help to those still unemployed or underwater in their mortgage) that the slow recovery, plus the out of phase rest of the world economy, mean that this condition, of the US being in slow growth mode, will last a LONG time. No boom and no Bust.
Job growth (6 straight months of 200k+ jobs added was a record) is happening, just not as good as it could be.
Hal
Meh. None of this matters. I’ve resigned myself to the fact that Obama isn’t getting much credit for anything in his Presidency. That does not negate legit criticism, but I’m not judging Obama with higher standards than any President before him.
catclub
@piratedan: see my answer at #25. We get a very long recovery/slow growth period. No boom, no Bust.
Sherparick
There is a reason, and its a reason Krugman, Thoma, Stiglitz, and other liberal economists have at times despaired of the administration, is that it missed a opportunity to really jump start the economy with a second stimulus package in late 2009. The recession, which reinforced trends that go back to 2000, if not 1980, led to a sharp drop in medium income and wealth which is only now being slowed. See http://economistsview.typepad.com/economistsview/2014/09/the-great-recession-casts-a-long-shadow-on-family-finances.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+EconomistsView+%28Economist%27s+View%29
Of course once the Republicans took the House and the President’s only leverage with them was the Bush tax cuts. I would have been willing to give more grounds on tax cuts for a minimum wage increase, earned income tax credit increase, unemployment compensation extension, and infrastructure stimulus, but the one weakness the President has is a deficit obsession. Once that chip was off the table, there really was nothing the President had in his pocket that Republicans really care about (heck, they won’t even vote for funds for border security or the third Iraq (ISIL) war that they are demanding because they prefer to be seen as all against Obama all the time). And the economy has had to slowly grow back as the result of healing private balance sheets, declining real wages, and the Fed’s extraordinary QE (which was done in the teeth of Republican and Conservative criticism (if you can stomach it, for a sample watch Squawk Box on CNBC on any given week day).
gene108
@Sherparick:
Obama’s economic team greatly underestimated the severity of the job losses the recession caused in 2009.
By late 2009, Team Obama was trying to salvage what they could with regards to healthcare reform and I do not think the political will was there to do both a second stimulus and healthcare reform, given the ridiculous opposition Democrats faced from Republicans and the media after August 2009, along with Wall Street reform which was also being undertaken against stringent opposition.
jonas
Part of this reflects the nature of the “Reagan Boom”. Reagan came into office during a brief, but crippling recession that was mostly engineered by the Fed to get inflation under control. People were hurting across the board. When the Fed began easing its policy, things rebounded quickly — also across the board. Laid off factory workers were hired back on; idled assembly lines revved back up; families started spending money again. Add to that what amounted to a huge stimulus in the form of increased defense spending, times were looking pretty good for most people compared to the shitty 1979-83 years. And Reagan was happy to take credit for that even though 1. he mostly had nothing to do with it. and 2. what little was his responsibility was the result of turning on the spigots of government spending. Obama’s recovery has seen perhaps more growth in the long run, and without the deficit growth, but it’s mostly rebounded to the top income earners. The top 20% — not to mention the top 1% — have done fine. The rest, not so much.
Hence the warm, fuzzy memories for the good times under Reagan, even if the numbers don’t match Obama’s.
Sherparick
I know this will probably light a flaming match, but if I was the President this coming winter, I would just propose repealing the corporate income tax as Dean Baker proposes. http://www.cepr.net/index.php/blogs/beat-the-press/more-cheap-thoughts-on-the-corporate-income-tax Where I differ from Dean, who would replace with higher taxes on the wealthy which are current non-starters, I would ask in immediate return the following:
1. Extend long term unemployment compensation, raise the minimum wage, and increase the earned income tax credit and extend the fade out of the earned income tax credit (to decrease the marginal tax rate on the working poor and lower middle class).
2. Enact the Americans Job Act (without the pay for).
I would make it a 5-year repeal with Congress to come up, either on its own or a commission, to come up with some combination of replacement taxes (not spending cuts or reductions in Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, or the AFCA) to replace the lost revenue. It would be interesting just to see the special interests who built their business models on the current tax law scream for the President to make this proposal.
Bill Arnold
@jonas:
When the Fed began easing (in the early 80s) they eased a lot, > 10 percentage points over 1.5 years. (From a high of 19.1 % according to the chart.)
http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/FEDFUNDS/ – you can chose the window to view.
Turgidson
@gene108:
I probably qualify as a mindless Obot on most things, but I think Obama made a few critical mistakes, of priorities rather than policy, early in his presidency. He should have aimed higher on the first stimulus. It may not have changed the final outcome given GOP opposition and the need to get President Collins on board, but even getting the final number closer to $1T, and with further job creation initiatives, would have further softened the economy’s hard landing.
And I’ll go to my grave thinking the Democrats should have gone very hard at financial reform the moment the stimulus passed. There was a wider window for cracking down on the financial sector in early-mid 2009 than there has been since. They could have gotten a stronger bill, Republicans would have looked like even bigger assholes than usual in opposing and trying to filibuster it, and minimal political capital, at least compared to the health reform shitshow, would have been needed to get it through. By waiting until 2010 to do it, they lost the urgency of the moment and a shitload of political will.
I know this is all useless counterfactual wankery, but I really think if they’d done a strong Fuck Wall Street bill right out of the gates, they still could have passed something similar to Obamacare in 2010, and might have even been able to go back to the well for more stimulus once the extent of the crash became clearer.
Whether this would have been any more popular with the midterm electorate in 2010 is anybody’s guess, but that election couldn’t have gone all that much worse, save for the teabagger freaks who got nominated and lost some winnable Senate seats.
japa21
@Turgidson: Well, he did push to get 1.3 trillion with very little of that in tax cuts,. most in direct spending. He couldn’t even get most of the Dems on board for that.
Certified Mutant Enemy
@feebog:
Unpossible! The Obama administration is the most corrupt administration in the history of ever!
revrick
I shared the Forbes article on Facebook. A little quiet subversion of the conservative narratives that show up on my news feed.
schrodinger's cat
Obama blew an opportunity to throw the book at Wall Street in 2009, they got bailed out and did not pay a price for tanking the economy. He followed that by heh indeeding the austerity mongerers and trying for a “grand bargain” with the Orange man and company.
ETA: The economy has recovered for the 1% and the corporate cash flows are wonderful and the stock indices have reached the stratosphere, however it is not that wonderful for everyone else who is not a rentier.
catclub
@schrodinger’s cat: Check out Ritholtz today on this:
http://www.ritholtz.com/blog/2014/09/no-banker-crimes-dont-make-me-laugh/
Both Geithner and DOJ were ominously warning in 2009 that we cannot indict the bankers because it would bring fear and destablize (ha!) the banking system. Never mind the destabilization they did on their own in 2007-8.
Bill Arnold
@catclub:
Nice Ritholtz piece. A brief quote, just to remind those who don’t follow the link,
schrodinger's cat
@catclub: There is another economic catastrophe written in our future, it is not the matter of if but when.
ETA: That said Obama handled the aftermath of the financial crisis better than any Republican would have but that is very low bar and I think Obama could and should have done better.
gene108
@Turgidson:
His economic team grossly underestimated the severity of the recession. They were boasting the stimulus would keep unemployment from topping out at 8% or something well below what it topped out at.
There was an honest belief that they had done enough, with the first stimulus.
If you want to get into counterfactual wankery. I think Pelosi and the House Dems should have chilled the fuck out on stuff like the carbon tax.
Businesses were wondering, if they were going to survive and the Democrats seemed to keep churning out new rules, like a carbon tax.
If Democrats had chilled out on passing new regulations, businesses would not have been so hostile to them in the 2010 and 2012 cycle.
When you are having a really bad time and someone piles something else onto you, which you could normally handle in due course, but because you are having a bad time it is just too much to bear can set you off on the person not considering how bad things are for you.
If you look at HCR, the problem was not Republicans nor the House Dems, who had passed their version of the bill well ahead of the August 2009 recess. The problem was Ted Kennedy had brain cancer and his job got dumped on Max Baucus, who did not get anything done prior to the August recess for whatever reason.
So instead of taking a victory lap, in August 2009, about how awesome it’s going to be to not worry about pre-existing conditions and/or the public option, Democrats had nothing to show and the Right whipped their base up into a frenzy because it’s easy to attack an abstract concept like “socialized medicine” than something concrete people deal with on a daily basis.
If they shifted for HCR to Wall Street reform, I expect something similar, where some Senate Democrat would drag it out for their own reasons and it would not have gotten done.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
Who wants to bet the GOP will be pretending Obama was a Republican once Obama is out of office like they did with Bill Clinton?
gene108
@catclub:
From the take people had on Geithner’s recent book, it seems Geithner really believed the problem we were having, in 2008-2009, was a problem of confidence, i.e. a run on banks by the public, who want to pull out all their money at once.
In light of this view, what Geithner did made sense because his goal was restoring confidence in the banks and believing everything else would work itself out from there on its own.
There’s a ton the Obama economics team got wrong, but folks are still coming with new reasons as to why the Great Depression occurred. Bernanke and Romer, for example, have done a lot of research on why the Great Depression occurred decades after the fact, so thinking economists would have all the answers for the causes of the Great Recession in real-time maybe asking too much.
ThresherK
Love the “ashcan” school, just gotta say.
Omnes Omnibus (the first of his name)
@ThresherK: I don’t really see ashcan here. Cubism and futurism, sure.
JR in WV
Talked to my bro in TX, a GWBush supporter, not too long ago. After some chitchat, he said “I know Obama is your guy, but he’s been terrible for me financially…”
I said “If you can’t deal with the market doubling in value over 4 years, you just can’t make money under any circumstances.” Pissed him off a little bit. To think a black guy is running the country better than TX Republicans!??!? But he is.
Econ statistics show without any doubt that Democratic administrations are better for economic growth for everyone. All economic measurements grow more during all Democratic administrations than during any Republican administration. This is the case for the past 80 or 90 years with very little inconsistency.
This is (I believe) because Republican administrators are usually incompetent party hacks, while Democratic administrators are selected because they excel at whatever their area of expertise is. Republicans want to reward their big contributors, which usually doesn’t stimulate the economy as a whole. Democrats want everyone to get along a little better.
This all seems so obvious to me that I wonder how Republicans ever win any elections. Then I remember – they lie. They lie a lot, all the time. The don’t tell the truth about what they plan to do about problems (usually nothing, really) and they don’t tell the truth about their motives for what they plan to do.
Obama is one of the two or three most successful presidents in our lifetimes, and Reagan and G W Bush were both corrupt, incompetent (and perhaps deranged) boobs. The proof is out there in plain sight, if you open your eyes and read the history.
catclub
@gene108:
yeah, right. Tell me another one. 2012??, after the House was in GOP hands and nothing got passed except after shutting down the government or missing some other deadline?
catclub
@JR in WV:
or it is mostly just coincidence. During most of the measurement period Congress was controlled by the Democrats
(1932-1994 – House), so who knows.
Turgidson
@gene108:
Late reply, but you’re right in particular to point out the utter, mindblowing, stupefying stupidity the Obama economic team showed in making relatively early, specific predictions regarding the unemployment rate with and without the stimulus. I still can’t believe that smart people who I agree with on most everything (Jared Bernstein and Romer I think were the culprits) could do something so very very foolish.
Even as the stimulus did exactly what it was designed to do, and with very little fraud or waste, the GOP was able to call it a failure, and easily get the public to believe them, by citing the administration’s own predictions. Head, meet desk.
Only disagreement I have with your thoughts is that I think, just given the horrifying economic situation in 2009, and the visceral and fairly unanimous anger at Wall St. for creating the mess, the momentum for passing a financial reform bill with serious teeth was exponentially greater than getting a health care bill done. The GOP probably would have been nearly united in opposition, of course, but that would have looked exceptionally corrupt and heartless at the time, even by their lofty standards. I think putting that win on the ledger would have created additional political capital rather than exhausting so much of it. We’ll never know.
Whereas, with HCR, the GOP could say with a straight face something like “why is the president forcing a health care bill on us right now with the economy in the shape it’s in?” Of all the braindead mendacious twaddle the GOP has said in the Obama era, that was actually one of the less heinous lies or obfuscations they’ve puked out. They said that repeatedly and the Democrats never had a good response, even though it was understood that HCR was necessary to rein in macro health care spending and unlock some extra buying power among the working poor, etc., who were being bankrupted by the status quo.
To their credit, the Dems got both bills done, and they were both decent. But I’ll always think the smart money would have been to give Wall Street the rodgering it deserved as quickly as was feasible, then turn to health care. You’re right that losing Kennedy at that juncture kinda seriously fucked shit up, though.
Ruckus
@The Dangerman:
Sure you can. It’s just not fun that’s all. On the upside you don’t have to cook a 20+ lb turkey for a holiday meal.
Jamey
The answer is obvious!
US economy is soaring because of Republicans’ participation: They don’t just buy their panties one pair at a time; they always have them in bunches…
/yrwlcm