Our Former President's supporters are fond of waxing euphoric about how President Obama saved us from a depression, lowered the deficit, and saved the American auto industry.
An Op-Ed piece in the WSJ provides some chronology, for those whose memories are inexact:
"The Troubled Asset Relief Program may have been the least of the rescue measures, but it was the highest risk, because the people’s bipartisan representatives were required to put their imprimatur on unpopular bailouts. Nonetheless, TARP was enacted Oct. 3, 2008, almost four months before President Obama took office."
"On March 16, 2008, the Federal Reserve arranged a fire sale of Bear Stearns. Between Sept. 19 and Oct. 26, numerous other institutions were bailed out; the money-fund industry and commercial paper market were propped up; bank depositors were favored with a big extension of deposit insurance."
"On Dec. 19, as a final act, the Bush administration directed $17.4 billion in TARP funds to keep General Motors and Chrysler afloat so the Obama administration wouldn’t be confronted with their liquidation on its first day in office."
"There were numerous discrete acts that constituted the bailout. All were undertaken by the Bush administration. There was one heroic, pell-mell effort at bipartisan legislative coalition-building of the sort that never took place during eight years of the Obama administration. That was TARP."
So much for him saving General Motors and the banking system. As an inert back-bencher in the Senate, he had next-to-nothing to do with any of it. His only interest way paying the UAW back for their tens of millions in cash and in kind during the 2008 presidential campaign. Which he did.
And the only way it is possible to assess that Obama and his Democrat congress reduced the deficit is to compare O's early years with Bush43's final year, when the country was facing an unprecedented crisis, requiring the spending and making available of hundreds of billions of dollars in a one-time attempt to save us from a banking meltdown.
And it might be subject of another thread to de-construct the "improved" employment picture that is indicated by the declining "Unemployment Rate," which obscures the fact that millions of people simply gave up on finding a real job, "retiring" early, or learning to live on one salary per household, while others settled for either one or a couple of part time jobs to replace the income lost when the "real" job went away. This is only partly Obama's fault, of course, but regardless, it is perverse to give him credit for "reducing unemployment."
An Op-Ed piece in the WSJ provides some chronology, for those whose memories are inexact:
"The Troubled Asset Relief Program may have been the least of the rescue measures, but it was the highest risk, because the people’s bipartisan representatives were required to put their imprimatur on unpopular bailouts. Nonetheless, TARP was enacted Oct. 3, 2008, almost four months before President Obama took office."
"On March 16, 2008, the Federal Reserve arranged a fire sale of Bear Stearns. Between Sept. 19 and Oct. 26, numerous other institutions were bailed out; the money-fund industry and commercial paper market were propped up; bank depositors were favored with a big extension of deposit insurance."
"On Dec. 19, as a final act, the Bush administration directed $17.4 billion in TARP funds to keep General Motors and Chrysler afloat so the Obama administration wouldn’t be confronted with their liquidation on its first day in office."
"There were numerous discrete acts that constituted the bailout. All were undertaken by the Bush administration. There was one heroic, pell-mell effort at bipartisan legislative coalition-building of the sort that never took place during eight years of the Obama administration. That was TARP."
So much for him saving General Motors and the banking system. As an inert back-bencher in the Senate, he had next-to-nothing to do with any of it. His only interest way paying the UAW back for their tens of millions in cash and in kind during the 2008 presidential campaign. Which he did.
And the only way it is possible to assess that Obama and his Democrat congress reduced the deficit is to compare O's early years with Bush43's final year, when the country was facing an unprecedented crisis, requiring the spending and making available of hundreds of billions of dollars in a one-time attempt to save us from a banking meltdown.
And it might be subject of another thread to de-construct the "improved" employment picture that is indicated by the declining "Unemployment Rate," which obscures the fact that millions of people simply gave up on finding a real job, "retiring" early, or learning to live on one salary per household, while others settled for either one or a couple of part time jobs to replace the income lost when the "real" job went away. This is only partly Obama's fault, of course, but regardless, it is perverse to give him credit for "reducing unemployment."
