Obama Will Be Inheriting A GREAT Economy, From Lil' Dumbya!!

$580 Billion is largely the congressional emergency appropriations.

There are other costs expended directly from the defense budget. There is the cost of lost military equipment and munitions, and the interest on the borrowed money. Finally there are disabled veterans costs and military life insurance. Including these "non-emergency" costs will bring the total cost of the war to 1.6 trillion. Indirect cost estimates that affect the economy add up to roughly an additional trillion in the next few years.

A lot of anti-war cites even put it around the $580 billion mark, but indeed there are other costs associated with the war, but even if it puts the war price tag at 1.6 trillion, which I would dispute, that is still over $5,000,000,000,000 short of the money we have spent on bailouts and government guarantees so far.
 
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Unite, have you done a simple course in mathematics?

The amount of money spent on the war would be enough to solve the problems of the credit crunch.

Der

Dawkins... show the figures spent on the war up to this point versus the prospective bailout money to be spent in 2009 and the money already spent in 2008... you will find sir a gigantic differnce...

Otherwise... stop spouting off garbage... we will shape you into a proper poster even if it kills yeah :D
 
A lot of anti-war cites even put it around the $580 billion mark, but indeed there are other costs associated with the war, but even if it puts the war price tag at 1.6 trillion, which I would dispute, that is still over $5,000,000,000,000 short of the money we have spent on bailouts and government guarantees so far.

First of all, please don't assume that I am saying the costs of war are above the potential bailout debt. I never said that and I never meant to imply that. Let me remind you again that $580 Billion is largely the congressional emergency appropriations. The government is trying to fool you. Don't fall for it. My source for the $1.6 Trillion was very conservative. Why would you dispute that? Is it a gut feeling or what?

The following is an estimate by, Joseph Stiglitz, the former Senior Vice President and Chief Economist of the World Bank, and Nobel prize winner,
April, 2008, Joseph Stiglitz
But even the $600 billion number is disingenuous—which is to say false. The true cost of the war in Iraq, according to our calculations, will, by the time America has extricated itself, exceed $3 trillion. And this is a deliberately conservative estimate. The ultimate cost may well be much higher.

In The Washington Post, Joseph Stiglitz reports the war will cost $3 Trillion
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/03/07/AR2008030702846.html

Here is a partial breakdown from a different source:
http://rawstory.com/news/2008/Price_of_Iraq_war_now_outpaces_0318.html
$ 526 billion: Cost of combat operations to date. (March 18 2008)
$ 590 billion: Future costs of disability benefits and health care for Iraq war veterans.
$ 615 billion: Cost of interest on money borrowed to pay for the war.
$ 280 billion: Cost of replacing equipment and restoring U.S. military to prewar strength.
$2011 billion: Total
 
If Bush hadn't trumped up charges against Iraq and embarked on two unwinnable wars the credit crunch would have been a blip.

There has been more than enough spent on these illegal wars to cover credit crunch notwithstanding the huge loss of life.

But I suppose lying about WMD was done by Clinton too.

I get what you're saying about the war somewhat. However, the war didn't cause the markets to crash and put us in the situation that we're in right now...
 
I get what you're saying about the war somewhat. However, the war didn't cause the markets to crash and put us in the situation that we're in right now...
That's odd. It seems-to-me, every hard-core "conservative" started blaming our financial-woes on 9/11, initially.

Isn't that when your War started??!!! :rolleyes:
 
That's odd. It seems-to-me, every hard-core "conservative" started blaming our financial-woes on 9/11, initially.

Isn't that when your War started??!!! :rolleyes:

No they didn't. They partially blamed the brief 2001 slowdown on 9/11, not the current situation with bank failures.
 
No, sorry, the worst of the current woes are due to the demand destruction caused by the runup in the price of oil:

http://futures.tradingcharts.com/chart/CO/M

When RCO (Regular Conventional Oil) peaked in late 2005, world demand kept rising right up to the point of hitting its head against an all-liquids production ceiling. It's said that the price of oil is about where we want it when the spare capacity is about 5%. This summer's catastrophic price rise was because the non-OPEC producers couldn't get another drop pumped and OPEC basked in the money. They (OPEC) finally began to increase production because too many projects were being started in other places and they were actually getting scared that the price runup might start causing demand destruction.

It was too late. Many businesses weren't able to pass the energy costs along and either went or are in the process of going bankrupt. For example, take a company that produces a $4.00 widget with 1/8th of the cost being the total energy required to make and transport the item. This includes all costs like producing the raw materials, transportation of same, etc. Now, say that the market analysis indicates that enough consumers stop buying that particular item when the prices rises above $4.07 so that profit is optimized at the $4.00. If the energy cost ($0.50) triples ($1.50), then the retail cost would need to rise to $5.00 in order to maintain the, say, 8% net margin that the manufacturer's getting in the first place. However, if Joe Consumer stops buying said widget altogether at $4.53 then the manufacturer has to sell the item at a loss. The big questions for the manufacturer are how long it can take the beating and how it can cut production costs if the energy picture is going to remain bad for an extended period.
 
I'm not a Bush fan, but next time somebody puts all the blame for this mess on him they should go back and look at this video from 4 years ago

Yes! 4 years ago. John McCain and the republicans tried to regulate all the financing companies and were told that everything is fine by democrats....

Can we really blame Bush for this dumb ass decisions.....

:mad:

It's always so-much-fun reminding Republicans about Phil Gramm!!!!
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See: 4:45 thru 12:00
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Obama Didn’t End the Great Recession That Bush Didn’t Cause
By James Pethokoukis



If you think George W. Bush’s economic policies caused the Great Recession and Barack Obama’s ended it, then your Election Day decision is likely an easy one. But placing politics aside, I don’t think the economic evidence supports that thesis. I’ve stated my reasons, in bits and pieces, across several blog posts. Maybe now would be a good time for a unified, though brief, rebuttal.

Let’s take the two strands of the argument and examine each. First, did Bushonomics cause the worst economic downturn and financial crisis since the Great Depression? To make that case, you need to specify a policy causality (or two or three) and a transmission channel. But when you go down the list of usual suspects, none of them pans out:

— It was the Bush tax cuts. Except lowering taxes increases demand and improves supply-side incentives. The only way this theory might be true is if bond markets feared tax cuts would be inflationary or would hurt the ability of the US to pay back its debts. But interest stayed low during the 2000s. Also note that Obama says he wants to again extend most of these cuts.

— It was Bush’s income inequality. Except that a 2012 study, Does Inequality Lead to a Financial Crisis by economists Michael Bordo and Christopher Meissner, seems to dismiss that linkage. Using data from a panel of 14 countries for over 120 years, they found “strong evidence linking credit booms to banking crises, but no evidence that rising income concentration was a significant determinant of credit booms. Narrative evidence on the US experience in the 1920s, and that of other countries in more recent decades, casts further doubt on the role of rising inequality.”

— It was the Bush budget deficits. Except both inflation and interest rates were low during the 2000s. This is really another version of the tax cut argument, but adds in deficits from Medicare expansion and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Besides, annual budget deficits averaged just $220 billion from 2001-2007. During the 2010-2012 recovery, they’ve averaged roughly $1.3 trillion. So deficits caused the Great Recession even though they are six times higher now?

— It was Bush’s financial deregulation. Except the law that ended Glass-Steagall was signed by President Bill Clinton. And few analysts think the end of Glass-Steagall directly contributed to the financial crisis. Another candidate was a 2004 rule change by the Securities and Exchange Commission that supposedly allowed broker dealers to greatly increase their leverage, contributing to the financial crisis. But as Prof. Andrew Lo of MIT explains in a 2011 paper, ”… it turns out that the 2004 SEC amendment to Rule 15c3–1 did nothing to change the leverage restrictions of these financial institutions.”

So what did cause the Great Recession? Politicians love to blame big downturns on “market failures.” Doing so then allows them to expand government and their own power. That’s what happened during the Great Depression. But it wasn’t the free market that failed back then, it was the Federal Reserve.

And the same goes for the Great Recession. In The Great Recession: Market Failure or Policy Failure, Robert Hetzel, a senior economist at the Richmond Fed, pins the blame squarely on the US central bank. The downturn first started with “correction of an excess in the housing stock and a sharp increase in energy prices” — the housing bust and the oil shock. Those two things were enough, in Hetzel’s view, to cause a “moderate recession” beginning in December 2007.

But it was the Fed’s monetary policy miscues after the downturn began that turned a run-of-the-mill recession into a once-in-a-century disaster. Not only did the Fed leave rates alone between April 2008 and October 2008 as the economy deteriorated, but the FOMC “effectively tightened monetary policy in June by pushing up the expected path of the federal funds rate through the hawkish statements of its members.

In May 2008, federal funds futures had been predicting the rate to remain at 2% through November. By mid-June, that forecast had risen to 2.5%. As Hetzel writes in a Fed paper that inspired the book, “Restrictive monetary policy rather than the deleveraging in financial markets that had begun in August 2007 offers a more direct explanation of the intensification of the recession that began in the summer of 2008. Irony abounds.’

And what ended the Great Recession? Was it the $800 billion Obama stimulus? As I have often pointed out, White House economists thought the stimulus would help lead to roughly 5% unemployment and 4% GDP growth in 2012.

Instead, the US economy is growing at half that pace and unemployment is sharply higher — even before you account for the massive drop in labor force participation.

But what do left-of-center or pro-Obama economists say? Here are Alan Blinder and Mark Zandi in a 2010 paper:

In this paper, we use the Moody’s Analytics model of the U.S. economy—adjusted to accommodate some recent financial-market policies—to simulate the macroeconomic effects of the government’s total policy response. We find that its effects on real GDP, jobs, and inflation are huge, and probably averted what could have been called Great Depression 2.0.

For example, we estimate that, without the government’s response, GDP in 2010 would be about 11.5% lower, payroll employment would be less by some 8½ million jobs, and the nation would now be experiencing deflation.

When we divide these effects into two components—one attributable to the fiscal stimulus and the other attributable to financial-market policies such as the TARP, the bank stress tests and the Fed’s quantitative easing—we estimate that the latter was substantially more powerful than the former.

So Blinder and Zandi credit the Fed and TARP, Bernanke and Bush, mostly for breaking the back of the downturn. Indeed, the steepest drops in GDP ended before Obama took office and before the stimulus kicked into gear. And eventually, of course, the economy would recover on its own as long as government didn’t interfere with anti-growth policies such as tax hikes or massive new regulations.
 
Obama Didn’t End the Great Recession That Bush Didn’t Cause
By James Pethokoukis


If you think George W. Bush’s economic policies caused the Great Recession and Barack Obama’s ended it, then your Election Day decision is likely an easy one.
 
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