Obama Talks About Rebuilding The Economy
By Justin Gardner | Related entries in Barack, Economic recovery, Health Care, Obama
He’s repeating a lot of what he said earlier in the year, but I still think selling idea of passing health care reform as essential to our long term economic strength is a tough pill to swallow for Independents.
What’s more, if this editorial would have dropped a few weeks ago it would have held a lot more weight because it wouldn’t be seen as a response to criticism. But now it feels defensive, and that’s not where Obama wants to be in this fight.
Nearly six months ago, my administration took office amid the most severe economic downturn since the Great Depression. At the time, we were losing, on average, 700,000 jobs a month. And many feared that our financial system was on the verge of collapse.The swift and aggressive action we took in those first few months has helped pull our financial system and our economy back from the brink. We took steps to restart lending to families and businesses, stabilize our major financial institutions, and help homeowners stay in their homes and pay their mortgages. We also passed the most sweeping economic recovery plan in our nation’s history.
The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act was not expected to restore the economy to full health on its own but to provide the boost necessary to stop the free fall. So far, it has done that. It was, from the start, a two-year program, and it will steadily save and create jobs as it ramps up over this summer and fall. We must let it work the way it’s supposed to, with the understanding that in any recession, unemployment tends to recover more slowly than other measures of economic activity.
As to his overarching point of rebuilding the economy on more solid footing, he’s right. We’ve built an unsustainable path and it nearly took us down last year. And let’s be clear, it wasn’t just the banks. Soaring health care costs was a big part of why the car companies failed and why numerous big businesses will continue to fail in the coming years if something isn’t done about it. We all know that’s true, but some prefer to kick the can down the road.
Still, do I think he’s taking on too much too soon? Yes. It’s overwhelming and seems too rushed to be reasonable. And my guess is this is why he’s seeing Independent support continue to slip.
More as it develops…
This entry was posted on Sunday, July 12th, 2009 and is filed under Barack, Economic recovery, Health Care, Obama. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
July 13th, 2009 at 6:44 am
How does the Obama Administration plan on rebuilding the economy while proposing new health, environmental, energy, transpiration, financial, and education regulations that are designed to discourage private investment?
Any investor in the U.S. would have to take a long, hard look at any new investment in the U.S. due to the potential to be regulated out of business or paying such high taxes and the investment is unwise.
As long as the government is running such high deficits, the long term prospect is for much higher taxes. Why would anyone want to make new investment in such as an environment?
July 13th, 2009 at 10:32 pm
The answer, of course, is that they wouldn’t. But hey, never let a crisis go to waste, right?
Financial institutions were essentially re-stabilized before Obama was sworn in. Almost no one has been able to take advantage of the “mortgage rescue” program. The “economic recovery plan” is mostly life-support funding for strapped local/state governments and pent-up pork spending. Long-term lending? Not much happening there until the spending outlook stabilizes. With a couple of trillion or more in new proposals floating around Congress, that’s not gonna be anytime soon. Investment? Superdestroyer nails it. We already have higher business taxes than most of Europe, and the outlook is for higher and deeper. Capital flows to friendly climes, and we’re looking increasingly unfriendly.
BTW, the terms of ARRA require that the $800B appropriated for the so-called “stimulus” plan be committed for spending (not actually spent, but committed for spending by the recipients) by September 31st…of 2010, the run-up to the fall elections. The real target it’s designed to stimulate is the electoral chances of Congressional Democrats.
I still think selling idea of passing health care reform as essential to our long term economic strength is a tough pill to swallow for Independents.
Once again, define “health care reform.” It’s a tough sell because one has to be willfully blind to believe that piling more costs onto our economy at this point is conducive to an improved economic outlook.