Is that a trick question? The party in complete power is the Democrat Party. It was their policies that have caused further damage to the economy. The only power the Republicans had to try and stop them was to say "no" but their voices, like our voices, were ignored.

Now after two years in power you ask who is doing more to salvage what is left, after the Democrats destructive out of control spending policies? It is only the party in the majority that has the power to ruin or salvage anything. That would be the Democrats.

Could this be some sort of desperate attempt by the Democrats to win over voters right before the elections? Sorry RNN it's too late.

Critics Still Wrong on What’s Driving Deficits in Coming Years
Economic Downturn, Financial Rescues, and Bush-Era Policies Drive the Numbers / June 28, 2010 / http://tinyurl.com/ygazdtr
Some critics continue to assert that President George W. Bush’s policies bear little responsibility for the deficits the nation faces over the coming decade — that, instead, the new policies of President Barack Obama and the 111th Congress are to blame. Most recently, a Heritage Foundation paper downplayed the role of Bush-era policies (for more on that paper, see p. 4). Nevertheless, the fact remains: Together with the economic downturn, the Bush tax cuts and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq explain virtually the entire deficit over the next ten years (see Figure 1).
The deficit for fiscal year 2009 was $1.4 trillion and, at nearly 10 percent of Gross Domestic Product (GDP), was the largest deficit relative to the size of the economy since the end of World War II. If current policies are continued without changes, deficits will likely approach those figures in 2010 and remain near $1 trillion a year for the next decade. / http://www.cbpp.org/cms/index.cfm?fa=view&id=3036

In response to which political party is doing a better job, neither of them are. They are more concerned with the rich or the lobbyists or how much of a raise that they can vote for themselves. I don't believe either side really cares what happens to the middle and lower class. It's just a game to most of them. As long as they have an expense acct. so they can spend tax dollars on their vacation. they really do not care.

Some debate from people much smarter than I on this subject regarding the stimulis and its affects.

Marching Off the Cliff:

The Obamacrats misunderstand the economy

September 13, 2010 Issue

President Obama sure did cover a lot of ground last week in his address to the nation announcing the end of combat operations in Iraq. At times the speech resembled one of those late-night, beer-fueled freshman dorm bull sessions, where you start off discussing Led Zeppelin and end up ten hours later debating the ontological principle.

In between appropriate references to the Iraqi people, the Afghan surge, al Qaeda, George W. Bush, and the sacrifice and heroism of the American soldier, the president mentioned such unrelated topics as the deficit, economic turmoil, energy policy, unemployment, innovation, education, and the “billions of young people” across the globe who “want to move beyond the shackles of poverty and conflict.” By the time Obama started talking about “our manufacturing base,” we were scratching our heads, wondering why the commander in chief was devoting so much time in an 18-minute war speech to the financial crisis. And as with those college-era drunken colloquies, the major aftereffect of Obama’s talk was a bad headache.

Look closer at Obama’s text, however, and the rhetorical thread intended to connect geopolitics and the U.S. economy becomes clear. The president did not argue that foreign policy is a function of domestic politics. Nor did he exactly make the case that a booming economy is a necessary condition for American primacy. What Obama said was that the nation ought to approach the recession the same way it approaches a war. “As we wind down the war in Iraq,” the president said, “we must tackle those challenges at home with as much energy, and grit, and sense of common purpose as our men and women in uniform who have served abroad.” Indeed, the president continued, the American people share a collective responsibility to honor our veterans by “coming together” to restore economic growth.

Now, the president’s attempt to invoke a patriotic sense of national community is well within the boundaries of American political discourse. But it’s also a pretty lousy way to understand the economy. Fighting a recession is not the same thing as fighting a war. The U.S. military is a hierarchical organization in which orders are dispersed through a top-down command structure. Every soldier has an assignment, with every assignment comes orders, and if a soldier does not follow his orders, he’s in a lot of trouble.

The economy is different. It is not a closed system like an armored cavalry regiment, where everything (and everyone) has a place. The economy is open and dynamic, the agglomeration of billions of individual consumers and producers and investors. An army belongs to a particular nation, but today’s economy is global: The high price of Japanese money lowers the cost of German exports, which depresses American manufacturing, which increases demand for Chinese imports, and so on. An army has officers who process and analyze the available information, then plot strategy accordingly. It is impossible to do this in an economy. There is too much information for a single mind, or a group of minds, to comprehend. And there is no way to know for sure which strategies work and which do not—or whether a strategy had any effect in the first place. An army fights and destroys an enemy. But who is the economic enemy and how does one “defeat” them? When Obama said “our troops are the steel in our ship of state,” he rightly implied that he, as commander in chief, is the ship’s pilot. But the economy is not a ship. The economy has no captain.

The equivalence between recession and war is what’s gotten Obama and the Democrats into so much trouble. Liberals like the president and the congressional leadership honestly believe that they can command the economy to recover. By pushing and pulling the correct monetary and fiscal policy levers, the Democrats say, government can manipulate aggregate demand and bring back jobs. By redistributing wealth and regulating the insurance market, the Democrats promise, Americans can achieve universal health care while reducing health spending. By delegating authority to unelected bodies and issuing hundreds of new rules, the Democrats believe, regulators can eliminate credit bubbles and financial crises.

But it’s not that simple. The economy and society are too complex. Expert knowledge is too limited. The science of economics is too primitive. Ordinary human beings do not respond like soldiers to government’s commands. Nor should they respond to government this way.

The real puzzle is that, despite all of the political and economic setbacks they have encountered over the last year and a half, for some reason the president and his party cling to their mistaken belief that the economy is an army. There is still time to embrace a different course, and last week’s report that the administration is considering a payroll tax holiday is an encouraging sign. For now, though, the Democrats just keep on marching. Right off the cliff.

The Stimulus Kicks In: Higher Unemployment:

We have left the recession that started in 2007 and entered a new recession caused by Obama's policies

September 3, 2010


"The prospect we now face is not the intermittent up-and-down fluctuations of unemployment we have had since the Great Depression. Thanks to Barack Obama's policies, we're confronting the possibility of an unemployment rate that never comes down, just as they have in Europe. If we stay on Obama's course, lower joblessness in the United States will be a thing of the past."

The recent rise in unemployment back up to 9.6 percent and the loss of 54,000 jobs in August suggest that our prediction is — dismally — coming true.

The Obama stimulus plan has finally kicked in: The higher spending he brought to our nation and the debt levels that are accompanying it are the result.

Why is unemployment remaining so high? Because the totality of Obama's policies are dragging us into a depression.

— The prospect of dramatically higher taxes next year is freezing consumer spending, particularly in the upper-income ranges, which spend a third of America's consumption.

— The huge changes that are looming in medical care brought about by Obama's health care legislation are freezing new employment and expansion in the medical sector, which accounts for 16 percent of gross domestic product.

— The financial reform legislation has so raised the prospect of a federal takeover of any bank that makes "imprudent" loans that financial institutions are afraid to lend, freezing new job creation.

— The looming possibility of cap-and-tax legislation in the name of halting climate change is freezing any expansion in the manufacturing and energy sectors, since these policies will force jobs to move overseas to locations that do not impose such a tax (e.g.

India and China).

— The massive expansion in the deficit and in the resulting debt has so eroded confidence in our nation's future that Americans are now saving 6 percent of their income, up from 1 percent in the past, sapping consumer spending.

— The threat of new rules for union elections that will spread private sector unionization is freezing business expansion plans.

Obama's rush to spend, regulate, re-engineer, redistribute and tax have stopped any recovery and are sending us back into recession.

In her wonderful book, "The Forgotten Man," Amity Shlaes notes how FDR's policies in the late 1930s did the same thing. She notes how the imposition of the Social Security tax in 1937 (benefits did not start until 1941) and the rapid wage hikes that accompanied the passage of the Wagner Act (steel worker wages rose 40 percent in 1937) sent a recovering nation back into a new depression that lasted until the war started in 1939.

In his haste to remake America and bring us the "fundamental change" he promised as he campaigned for president in 2008, Obama has torpedoed the recovery and sent us back into a double-dip recession.

The answer is to cut spending back to pre-Obama levels, reduce taxes and eliminate the threat of tax increases, zero fund the changes Obama has legislated in health care (and repeal them in 2013), eliminate the threat of cap-and-tax and lay the basis for solid economic growth.

We have left the recession that started in 2007 and entered a new recession caused by Obama's policies.

I am going to take the liberty of posting some insight from another blog which I vist, and share a contributors post with you all.

"The sin of liberal thinking is to overlook socialism’s nation-building strengths, thereby allowing its energies to go in anti-national directions. The sin of Marxism is to degrade socialism into a question of wages and the stomach, putting it in conflict with the state and its national existence. An understanding of both these facts leads us to a new sense of socialism, which sees its nature as state-building, liberating and constructive.”

Which is fine provided that state being built is our own. Self-determination is not just a core American value, it may be the core American value considering that self-determination and escaping the control of the British monarchy was the impetus for the Revolutionary war.

But you get a little wobbly here: “We must therefore break the rich politically. The people must be against the political rich, and for genuine affection for America and her true values! They must be against the rich, and for true progressive policies!”

There is a distinction between the rich and “the political rich” in the realm of democratic socialism. There is no issue with people who make money off of enterprise, even to excess provided they pay their fair share of taxes proportionate to the benefits they reap. The issue is when their wealth is based on some sector that either endangers national security or puts lives at risk that no private citizen should have the right to put at risk. The perfect examples of these two no no’s would be energy and health care. Energy because having a stable (note the word stable as in “not up to the whims of a foreign cartel like OPEC to set the prices”) energy is key to national security and the private actors in the industry have proven themselves willing to go to war to maximize their profits no matter the international political damage or the lives lost in the process. This is what happened when Bush and Cheney decided to invade a third country that had not attacked us: they showed they are more interested in their personal profits than national security or indeed preserving America’s once strong leadership for human rights and the rule of law internationally. Those who got wealthy off of health care have concurrently proven themselves to be parasites drawing off excess profits that could be used to treat the ill and injured – a violation of trust as great as that of the Bush and Cheney families in servicing their business partner’s needs in Saudi Arabia over the needs of the American people.

But that’s why democratic socialism has free markets in general and command economies only where required to ensure the greatest good and greatest stability for society as a whole. If the market in question doesn’t relate to national security and social stability, there is no need for it to be nationalized. To whit, the majority of manufacturing businesses and service companies could continue on with profit as their primary goal. But those sectors critical to stability must loose the individual profit motive for their operations because history is proving that the greed of the individuals that run these sectors is running a very real risk of ripping the social fabric of our country. Free markets are a tool, Byron. They have a place in the tool box, just not for every job. There will still be rich people under a socialist economy. Just ask Canada’s Conrad Black (billionaire publisher) or Sweden’s Ingvar Kamprad (founder of IKEA and one of the wealthiest men in the world). That’s right – Ingvar’s Bill Gates rich and he developed his business under a domestic economy that was partially socialized – democratic socialism in action.

So the shift is not going to end rich people. Just certain rich people who have put themselves and their private interests ahead of the good of the nation, the general welfare of their fellow citizens, the common defense and domestic tranquility.

To this end we must first end corporate participation in campaign funding. It is the graft machine that keeps the evil people like Cheney making the rules and above the law. The nationalized health care and energy can come afterwards – in fact – must come afterwards to their corrupting influence being destroyed.

Because if they aren’t?

We’re not going to have democratic socialism or democratic anything, Byron. We’re going to have fascism and more than likely a police state. And that path leads to trouble. Blood in the streets trouble. People being pulled from their offices, both public and private (who through graft enable the public evils), and them being burned in the streets and hung from trees. At an enormous cost of life from both sides. But that’s what fascism has historically wrought, Byron. The price of laissez-faire capitalism and its ultimate expression in the political schools of fascism is paid in blood. I know this because history tells me so. Ask Mussolini. Ask Hitler. Ask Franco. Ask Pinochet. And all those people – many of them wanting no more than a decent life and to be mostly left alone – died for what? So some individual asshole could have gold plated toilet seats and hot and cold running champagne because he went to war for oil? Some half-wit could have a billion dollar yacht with on call hookers because they skimmed money away from health care that could have saved somebody’s life?

Civilized society requires justice. Justice requires equity. Equity requires that the needs of the many be more important than the needs of the few or the one. That is why laissez-faire markets ruin governments and societies – no rules in the market means no rules in the other parts of the system we call civilization that is supposed to provide checks and balances against abuses by bad acting individuals."

Inherited from Whom?

September 7, 2010

Setting the record straight on “the policies that created this mess in the first place.”



Pres. Barack Obama boldly proclaims, “The buck stops here!” But whenever his policies are criticized, he acts as if the buck stopped with George W. Bush.

The party line that we are likely to be hearing from now until the November elections is that Obama “inherited” the big federal budget deficits and that he has to “clean up the mess” left in the economy by the Republicans. This may convince those who want to be convinced, but it will not stand up under scrutiny.

No president of the United States can create either a budget deficit or a budget surplus. All spending bills originate in the House of Representatives and all taxes are voted into law by Congress.

Democrats controlled both houses of Congress before Barack Obama became president. The deficit he inherited was created by the congressional Democrats, including Sen. Barack Obama, who did absolutely nothing to oppose the runaway spending. He was one of the biggest of the big spenders.

The last time the federal government had a budget surplus, Bill Clinton was president, so it was called “the Clinton surplus.” But Republicans controlled the House of Representatives, where all spending bills originate, for the first time in 40 years. It was also the first budget surplus in more than a quarter of a century.

The only direct power that any president has that can affect deficits and surpluses is the power to veto spending bills. President Bush did not veto enough spending bills, but Senator Obama and his fellow Democrats in control of Congress were the ones who passed the spending bills.

Today, with Barack Obama in the White House, allied with Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi in charge in Congress, the national debt is a bigger fraction of the annual national output than it has been in more than half a century. And that fraction is projected to continue going up for years to come, becoming larger than national output in 2012.

Having created this scary situation, President Obama now says, “Don’t give in to fear. Let’s reach for hope.” The voters reached for hope when they elected Obama. The fear comes from what he has done since taking office.

“The worst thing we could do is to go back to the very same policies that created this mess in the first place,” he said recently. “In November, you’re going to have that choice.”

Another political fable is that the current economic downturn is due to not enough government regulation of the housing and financial markets. But it was precisely the government regulators, under pressure from politicians, who forced banks and other lending institutions to lower their standards for making mortgage loans.

These risky loans, and the defaults that followed, were what set off a chain reaction of massive financial losses that brought down the whole economy.

Was this due to George W. Bush and the Republicans? Only partly. Most of those who pushed the lowering of mortgage-lending standards were Democrats — notably Rep. Barney Frank and Sen. Christopher Dodd — though too many Republicans went along.

At the heart of these policies were Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which bought huge amounts of risky mortgages, passing the risk on from the banks that lent the money (and made the profits) to the taxpayers that were not even aware that they would end up paying in the end.

When President Bush said in 2004 that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac should be reined in, 76 members of the House of Representatives issued a statement to the contrary. These included Barney Frank, Nancy Pelosi, Maxine Waters, and Charles Rangel.

If we are going to talk about “the policies that created this mess in the first place,” let’s at least get the facts straight and the names right.

The current policies of the Obama administration are a continuation of the same reckless policies that brought on the current economic problems — all in the name of “change.” Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are still sacred cows in Washington, even though they have already required the biggest bailouts of all.

Why? Because they allow politicians to direct vast sums of money where it will do politicians the most good, either personally or in terms of buying votes in the next election.

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