And they declined to push for new leadership on Wall Street, let alone much punishment for the recklessness that led to the crisis.Ī lot of this might be excusable it was an emergency, and Obama and his team did what they could. They offered a plan to prevent just 1.5 million foreclosures - when, ultimately, 10 million Americans lost their homes. Obama’s advisers also rejected ideas for large infrastructure projects. They were wrong the stimulus did reduce job losses, but it was far too small to hit the stated goal - unemployment was 9.8 percent in November 2010. A handful of advisers favored a very large government stimulus of $1.2 trillion some outside economists - Paul Krugman, Joseph Stiglitz, James Galbraith - also favored going to a trillion.īut Obama’s closest advisers declined to push Congress for anything more than $800 billion, which they projected would reduce unemployment to below 8 percent by the 2010 midterms.
#OBAMA FAUX PAS FULL#
By the time Obama took office, job losses had accelerated so quickly that his advisers calculated the country would need $1.7 trillion in additional spending to get back to full employment. They succeeded: The recession didn’t turn into a depression, markets were stabilized, and the United States began a period of long, slow growth.īut they could have done so much more. And rather than try for a Rooseveltian home run, he bunted: Instead of pushing for an aggressive stimulus to rapidly expand employment and long-term structural reforms in how the economy worked, Obama and his team responded to the recession with a set of smaller emergency measures designed to fix the immediate collapse of financial markets. One of the inspiring new president’s advisers even hinted that was the plan.Īnd then Obama took office. If he’d been in the mood to press the case, Obama might have found widespread public appetite for the sort of aggressive, interventionist restructuring of the American economy that Franklin D. Just as in the 1930s, the Republican Party’s economic policies were widely thought to have caused the crisis, and Obama and his fellow Democrats were swept into office on a throw-the-bums-out wave. Across the country, people were losing jobs and homes in numbers not seen since World War II. For the first six months of his presidency, Obama had an approval rating in the 60s.ĭemocrats also had a once-in-a-lifetime political opportunity presented by a careening global crisis. Democrats controlled the House and, for about five months in the second half of the year, they enjoyed a filibuster-proof, 60-vote majority in the Senate. In 2009, Barack Obama was the most powerful newly elected American president in a generation.
0 kommentar(er)
