{"id":388,"date":"2009-04-27T07:26:04","date_gmt":"2009-04-27T12:26:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/hushbeck.com\/blog\/?p=388"},"modified":"2009-04-27T07:26:04","modified_gmt":"2009-04-27T12:26:04","slug":"fairness-vs-reality","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/hushbeck.com\/blog\/2009\/04\/fairness-vs-reality\/","title":{"rendered":"Fairness vs Reality"},"content":{"rendered":"

In a post on the day of his Inauguration<\/a> I said, “As for my expectation, what will the Obama presidency bring?\u00a0 The best I can say at the moment is: uncertain.\u00a0 I, like many others, am not at all sure what President Obama will actually do.” In a post a few days later<\/a>, I said “So the sun is rising on the Obama presidency.\u00a0 As the literary detective Hercule Poirot often said ‘all will be made clear’ and clarity is a good thing.”<\/p>\n

Clarity is a good thing, and 100 days into his presidency, things are now a lot clearer.\u00a0 But clarity is not always pleasant.\u00a0 Obama has filled in the details of “Hope and Change” with massive increases in government, massive increases in debt, increased government control over industry, in many areas bordering on nationalization, apologies to those abroad, offending some of our allies, reductions in our abilities to detect and defend against threats, and the use of government to attack political opponents, including the criminalization of policy differences, and most recently witch hunts.\u00a0 This is certainly change, but I don’t see a lot of hope here.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Now supporters of the President will undoubtedly take offense at this description (and that they take offense, as opposed to simply disagreeing, says a lot about them).\u00a0 Concerning spending and the deficit, during the Bush administration, the Democrats vociferously complained about Bush’s spending and his deficits.\u00a0 I agreed with a lot of their criticism, even if I did doubt their sincerity.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Though it is not a surprise, it is now at least clear that I was correct to doubt their sincerity.\u00a0 According to both CBO and White House data<\/a> Obama will not only increase the budget deficit compared to Bush, he will increase it several times over the deficits the Democrats complained so strongly about .\u00a0 Problem: Bush increased the deficit; Obama’s Solution: vastly increase it even more.\u00a0 And he does this while claiming he will cut the deficit in half.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Obama’s claimed cuts\u00a0are like a man with a $100 deficit promising that if he increases it an additional $200, in the future he will cut his deficit in half, leaving him only $150 in debt.\u00a0 Most would see this as increasing the problem.\u00a0 Yet Obama claims this as progress.\u00a0 Either he does not understand what he is actually doing, or he is being dishonest about it.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Now Obama and his supporters are quick to claim that this, like everything else, is Bush’s fault.\u00a0 It is true that Bush does share some responsibility, particularly for TARP in the closing days of his administration.\u00a0 Obama, like Bush before him, inherited a recession.\u00a0 Bush cut taxes, which got us out of the recession, and most of the years of the Bush administration were a period of economic growth, declining unemployment, with the stock market topping out at over 14,000.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Then in 2006 the Democrats won back the Congress, promising to fix things.\u00a0 While Bush was still president, he was also a lame duck with very little actual impact on the domestic front particularly with the Democrats in control of Congress.\u00a0<\/p>\n

What really caused the current problems was that the housing bubble burst.\u00a0 While the details are complex, the roots go back to housing policies enacted under Carter and Clinton and pushed by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.\u00a0 While you would never know it from the media, it is just a fact that Bush and the Republicans repeatedly tried to fix these growing problems<\/a>, but they were block<\/a>ed<\/a> by Democrats<\/a>, who instead attacked those trying to point out the problems<\/a>.\u00a0 The last major effort to avoid this crisis was in 2005<\/a>.\u00a0 Once the Democrats won control of the Congress in 2006, any hope of averting it was gone.\u00a0 So while the claims that this was all Bush’s fault may play well to Obama’s media supporters, they don’t quite line up with the facts of what actually happened.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Now somewhat in their defense, most of the policies put forward by Obama and the Democrats have not had enough time to kick in yet.\u00a0 The Democrats must be included here as Obama’s management style is now also much clearer as well.\u00a0 He wants to make all the big decisions, and leave it to others to work out the details.\u00a0 This allows him to take credit for solving problems, without having to be responsible for any problem of implementation.\u00a0<\/p>\n

As for their policies, it takes time for the effect to show up in the economy.\u00a0 In fact it can take 12 to 18 month.\u00a0 So the fact that we do not yet see any effects of their changes in the economic data is to be expected, though the reactions of the market, which is always looking to the future, is not encouraging.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The disturbing thing is that, at least in an economic sense, there really is no mystery about what their policies will do.\u00a0 Massive increases in government spending will have some positive effect, but the net effect will be negative.<\/a> In addition, when money is pushed into the economy in this fashion inflation follows, and the negative effects of inflation will far outstrip any positive effects of increased government spending.\u00a0 There is nothing magical about this.\u00a0 It is basic economics 101.\u00a0 Increase the money supply faster than the supply of goods, and you get inflation.\u00a0 Suppress the economy at the same time and you get Stagflation.\u00a0 In the last few months we have nearly tripled the money supply<\/a>, and the economy is still struggling.\u00a0<\/p>\n

But this is one of the problems with Liberals.\u00a0 They seem to think their notions of fairness and equality trump economic reality.\u00a0 They are sort of like a person who believes that it is unfair that only birds can fly.\u00a0 For a short time such a person can ignore reality and indulge their notions of fairness, but before long the reality of the ground approaches.\u00a0 Obama and the Democrats are now indulging their notions of equality and fairness.\u00a0 Economic reality is not here yet, but it is rapidly approaching.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In a post on the day of his Inauguration I said, “As for my expectation, what will the Obama presidency bring?\u00a0 The best I can say at the moment is: uncertain.\u00a0 I, like many others, am not at all sure what President Obama will actually do.” In a post a few days later, I said […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,13,24,30],"tags":[48,208,238,319,499,529,647,676,934],"class_list":["post-388","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-domestic-policy","category-economy","category-liberal","category-preserving-democracy","tag-100-days","tag-bush","tag-cbo","tag-congress","tag-fannie-mae","tag-freddie-mac","tag-housing-bubble","tag-inflation","tag-obama"],"yoast_head":"\nFairness vs Reality - Politics and Religion<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/hushbeck.com\/blog\/2009\/04\/fairness-vs-reality\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Fairness vs Reality - 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