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Dubbya screwed up big-time, and it is going to take more than two years to clean up the mess he left behind. Obama and his crew are competent, but they aren't miracle workers.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

His "crew" is rapidly bailing. But they never showed signs of operational competence; they let Congress do their thinking for them, and Congress lets its staff do its thinking, and the staff lets lobbyists do their thinking.

Obama is a very strange guy.

John

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Which is your take on the fact that Obama and his crew have gotten quite a lot of interesting legislation through Congress. You don't want to admit that they exhibited competence in doing this, and thus claim that the critical compromises were made by "letting Congress do their thinking for them". If you didn't have a history of posting fatuous claims about stuff you don't understand, this would make you liar, but the odds are you sincerely believe what you have posted, so you are merely an ill-informed idiot.

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Obama is the president, and reporters do fantasise about him.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

Well, I, for one, know that all my failures (which is a lot) were the result of my own stupidity, negligence, or stubbornness.

Not that said knowledge has done me a lot of good, but my "philosophizer" homunculus says Armageddon is in process as we speak, and I shouldn't worry about it. The only thing in the Universe that I have any control over are my own actions, after all.

Most of me wants to blame "luck", but part of me says, "Relax, All is happening as it should..." and another part says, "Luck? Y'know, it seems that the harder/smarter I work, the luckier I get!"

I guess my primary attribute in that respect would be laziness. ;-)

Thanks! Rich

As if that isn't business as usual for the past 100 years.

O's only function was to not veto it. And what's interesting is what a mess was actually passed; practically nobody, maybe literally nobody, read it before it was enacted into law. With luck, the next Congress will undo what can be undone.

You don't

Hell no!

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Np, I'm an engineer who understands how systems work, and whose judgement is corrected by experiment. What are you?

John

100 years ago, government spending was about 8% of GDP. Now it's about 45% and headed nowhere but up. At 8%, any amount of stupidity and corruption is tolerable; at 45%, it's not.

The inefficiency of government taxation and spending, and its increasing hostility to business, are a long-term, ever-increasing load on the population. The current "recession" is deceptive, because the damage to the US economy is actually long-term and steadily accumulating. The fake housing bubble, due mostly to stupid government policies, disguised the long-term trend of exporting business and jobs.

"Stimulus" will just let more people buy more Chinese stuff. Which will let China buy more businesses, resources, and influence. Which will kill more US jobs.

John

Not in any way is legislation by lobbyists any better when Government spending is 8% of GDP than at 45% or 99% of GDP. The biggest difference between early 19th century is that enough of the best could know what is what across much of commercial and government activities, now corporations and governments have grown so large that no one can disentangle even moderate size portions (1% to 5%) of either one.

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That's like saying there's no difference between losing 8% of your blood and losing 99%.

John

The health care bill was published for the very first time--previously unseen by any Republican and only by a precious few Democrats--4 days before being voted on. It was 2,700-odd pages of legalese, which no one could possibly read much less debug in that short time. Believe me, I had it, and I tried.

And then they added hundreds and hundreds of pages changing all sorts of critical stuff in the last hour or so before the vote (Reid's "Manager's Amendment").

So I'd venture to guarantee that no one read the whole bill before the vote, not a single human being, not even the authors of its various parts.

But then the thing's a mess literally beyond human comprehension-- thousands of pages of spaghetti code--so vague, and so wrong, that it's simply impossible to understand.

Or better, it's impossible to understand because it's nonsense: we're going to add 10% more people, and require everyone to buy more insurance, for more things, with fewer limitations, subsidize everyone, and that's going to cost less?[*] The CBO's recent estimates are that it'll double the government's outlays on health care, from 5% to 10% of GDP over time.

[*] The President, called on this, recently said "Well we never said it was going to be free" (paraphrased).

It's all quite amazing--the spending, the absurd claims, ramming of bills through a puppet Congress, representation by sham representation.

-- Cheers, James Arthur

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||||The omitted part of the quote:

The biggest difference between early 19th century is that enough of the best could know what is what across much of commercial and government activities, now corporations and governments have grown so large that no one can disentangle even moderate size portions (1% to 5%) of either one. ====================

Depending on where and how you lose your blood, losing 0.03% will kill you just as dead.

-1 * (The obvious solution is to grow government as much and as quickly as possible. The more things the government controls, the less interest lobbyists will have in lobbying it for relief.)

That's hope and change: Barack Obama increased government spending 18% in his first year.

-- Cheers, James Arthur