Raoul_Luke
I feel a bit lightheaded. Maybe you should drive.
"And then the reckless behavior of financial elites triggered a massive financial crisis, 10 years ago this week, a crisis that resulted in the worst recession in any of our lifetimes and caused years of hardship for the American people, for many of your parents, for many of your families. Most of you weren't old enough to fully focus on what was going on at the time, but when I came into office in 2009, we were losing 800,000 jobs a month. 800,000. Millions of people were losing their homes. Many were worried we were entering into a second Great Depression."
And with good reason!
We've seen again and again and again where the left has bleated about the massive job losses Obama "inherited." It would be wise to look under the hood of that claim. When you do so it's pretty easy to make a case that he in fact had a rather strong hand in why the decline accelerated before he entered office (and that it in fact never really "recovered" at all on his watch, but that is a subject for another thread).
Obama clearly ran on an anti-capitalist agenda (see: Joe the Plumber interchange) and one might reasonably expect businesses to anticipate the future, right? That is precisely what they do day in and day out. So how would a rational businessman react to the indications that Obama was likely going to win the election walking away? If you are thinking downsize, you are 100% correct. And what then would you think their reaction would be once he actually won? If you are thinking accelerate their downsizing, once again you are a winner! So if that, in fact, was the dynamic in place at the time, how would you expect the job loss statistics to look like for 2008? If you are thinking they would accelerate in the later months, especially in the fourth quarter, go smoke a cigar - you aced the exam.
Furthermore, job losses accelerated sharply over the course of the year, with an average of 216,000 jobs lost per month over the year but an average of 510,000 lost per month in the last three months…
https://www.epi.org/publication/job_losses_ballooned_in_final_quarter_of_2008/
So whenever you hear anyone, including Obama saying he "inherited" the massive job losses, the fact is that this is propaganda. No one (even a lefty) can argue that businesses would simply ignore the looming changes in the economic environment stemming from a Presidential election until after the inauguration. And, in looking at Obama's campaign platform, what did they see:
We will start by renewing the American Dream for a new era – with the same new hope and new ideas that propelled Franklin Delano Roosevelt towards the New Deal…
http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=78283
They would clearly be justified, based on that passage in the preface to Obama's platform, in anticipating a pretty crappy economic agenda, along the lines of FDR's interventionism on steroids that caused the Great Depression. And, indeed, they would rationally fear another economic depression stemming from a President (fundamental transformation) Obama's efforts to emulate FDR. And that is exactly what they got.
Obama didn't "inherit" 750,000 a month job losses - he CAUSED them!
And with good reason!
We've seen again and again and again where the left has bleated about the massive job losses Obama "inherited." It would be wise to look under the hood of that claim. When you do so it's pretty easy to make a case that he in fact had a rather strong hand in why the decline accelerated before he entered office (and that it in fact never really "recovered" at all on his watch, but that is a subject for another thread).
Obama clearly ran on an anti-capitalist agenda (see: Joe the Plumber interchange) and one might reasonably expect businesses to anticipate the future, right? That is precisely what they do day in and day out. So how would a rational businessman react to the indications that Obama was likely going to win the election walking away? If you are thinking downsize, you are 100% correct. And what then would you think their reaction would be once he actually won? If you are thinking accelerate their downsizing, once again you are a winner! So if that, in fact, was the dynamic in place at the time, how would you expect the job loss statistics to look like for 2008? If you are thinking they would accelerate in the later months, especially in the fourth quarter, go smoke a cigar - you aced the exam.
Furthermore, job losses accelerated sharply over the course of the year, with an average of 216,000 jobs lost per month over the year but an average of 510,000 lost per month in the last three months…
https://www.epi.org/publication/job_losses_ballooned_in_final_quarter_of_2008/
So whenever you hear anyone, including Obama saying he "inherited" the massive job losses, the fact is that this is propaganda. No one (even a lefty) can argue that businesses would simply ignore the looming changes in the economic environment stemming from a Presidential election until after the inauguration. And, in looking at Obama's campaign platform, what did they see:
We will start by renewing the American Dream for a new era – with the same new hope and new ideas that propelled Franklin Delano Roosevelt towards the New Deal…
http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=78283
They would clearly be justified, based on that passage in the preface to Obama's platform, in anticipating a pretty crappy economic agenda, along the lines of FDR's interventionism on steroids that caused the Great Depression. And, indeed, they would rationally fear another economic depression stemming from a President (fundamental transformation) Obama's efforts to emulate FDR. And that is exactly what they got.
Obama didn't "inherit" 750,000 a month job losses - he CAUSED them!