No point even mentioning the other three...It's Romney going into the fall.
And what will Willard, Reversible Mittens, Romney run on? Like you said, he's running away from the good things he did in Massachusetts; a popular health care law and gay marriage so what is there left for Mittens? His time at Bain as a vulture capitalist, destroying companies and shipping jobs overseas?Good luck with that.
On the other hand we have the President...who has made some mistakes and, according to his base, has gone too far in trying to appease Republicans. However, to say he doesn't have a record to run on is disingenuous. The Stimulus kept us from a depression, you can ask the economists, they'll tell you the same. He saved GM, an American icon. The auto industry, with Chevrolet at the lead, is helping drive our current recovery AND they are the number one automaker in the WORLD again. (why the RW can't celebrate that, I don't know). When he took office, we were losing 700,000 jobs a MONTH but now have had almost two years of straight job gains. He got bin Laden, signed the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, overturned DADT, allowed Federal Funding of stem cell research, signed a bill that would allow us queers to visit our life partners in the hospital and increased VA funding just to name a few...and don't get me started on Health Care reforms that were badly needed...(and popular)
If George Bush had done a quarter of what President Obama has accomplished, the RW would be creaming it's collective jeans on a daily basis. Hannity would be walking around with a permanent stiffy...and not from Rush Limbaugh's off market Viagra.
First of all...the Stimulus didn't keep us from a depression...TARP kept us from a depression. The Stimulus just wasted a trillion of our dollars on a really badly conceived plan that didn't do what it was supposed to do. Obama didn't save GM...GM would have been saved by filing bankruptcy. What Obama "saved" were the benefits for UAW workers that supported him with so much money in his Presidential campaign. Our two years of job gains have been miniscule gains that only look good compared to how things were at the height of the recession. Barack Obama's policies have in fact retarded job growth...not enhanced it. As for ObamaCare? If it was so great and so popular, Wytch...then why is Obama running away from it? He mentioned his "signature" piece of legislation one time in his last State of the Union address and that was briefly. The truth is...ObamaCare doesn't lower the average American's health care costs...it raises them! Not to mention puts the country on a direct path to fiscal insolvency by adding another massive entitlement at a time when we can't pay for what we have.
USA Today: Economists agree: Stimulus created nearly 3 million jobs
Economic Stimulus
The latest Chicago Booth poll of economists focuses on the 2009 stimulus. The first question asked whether the stimulus increased employment by the end of 2010. Eighty percent of the polled economists agreed. Four percent disagreed. Two percent were uncertain.
How the Great Recession Was Brought to an End
The U.S. government's response to the financial crisis and ensuing Great Recession included some of the most aggressive fiscal and monetary policies in history. The response was multifaceted and bipartisan, involving the Federal Reserve, Congress, and two administrations. Yet almost every one of these policy initiatives remain controversial to this day, with critics calling them misguided, ineffective or both. The debate over these policies is crucial because, with the economy still weak, more government support may be needed, as seen recently in both the extension of unemployment benefits and the Fed's consideration of further easing.
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.
[...]
The U.S. economy has made enormous progress since the dark days of early 2009. Eighteen months ago, the global financial system was on the brink of collapse and the U.S. was suffering its worst economic down*turn since the 1930s. Real GDP was falling at about a 6% annual rate, and monthly job losses averaged close to 750,000. Today, the financial system is operating much more normally, real GDP is advancing at a nearly 3% pace, and job growth has resumed, albeit at an insufficient pace.
From the perspective of early 2009, this rapid snap back was a surprise. Maybe the country and the world were just lucky. But we take another view: The Great Recession gave way to recovery as quickly as it did largely because of the unprecedented responses by monetary and fiscal policymakers.
A stunning range of initiatives was un*dertaken by the Federal Reserve, the Bush and Obama administrations, and Congress (see Table 1). While the effectiveness of any individual element certainly can be debated, there is little doubt that in total, the policy response was highly effective. If policymak*ers had not reacted as aggressively or as quickly as they did, the financial system might still be unsettled, the economy might still be shrinking, and the costs to U.S. tax*payers would have been vastly greater.
I'll be waiting for your evidence that President Obama is slowing our recovery. While you're looking, you can read this...
How Congress is killing the recovery
I'm curious, Wytch...do you even read this stuff before you cite it? I'm guessing the answer to that question is no because BOTH of the articles you provided specifically pointed out that TARP and Fed fiscal policy were the most responsible for the "recovery".
To quote your USA Today article...
"Eighteen months later, the consensus among economists is that the stimulus worked in staving off a rerun of the 1930s. But the spending's impact was dwarfed by other crisis-fighting tools deployed by the Bush and Obama administrations, including costly efforts to stabilize crippled banks and the Fed's unconventional monetary policy.
"I think it was important for confidence. ... But fiscal stimulus was the least important of the three planks of the government's strategy," said Harvard University's Kenneth Rogoff, former chief economist of the International Monetary Fund."
Least important? That's from a news source that's been a long time Obama cheerleader. Even the main stream media has a hard time painting the Obama Stimulus as successful, Wytch because it's obvious that it didn't do what it was designed to do...create jobs. How do I know that? Because you don't have to create a new statistic "jobs saved" if the plan you've invested a trillion dollars in CREATED jobs.
