Bubbles’ Troubles
By John Batchelor on December 10, 2009 at 10:40 AM in Current Affairs
The Obama administration is both fraught and fickle about the economy’s dreadfulness.
POTUS asserts that Larry Summers warned him a year ago that joblessness would grow at a rate not seen since the 1930s, however POTUS does not explain how, if this scene is reported accurately (dubious: Summers says a lot in all directions, like a roulette wheel with many numbers), then why did the Obama administration devote the year to healthcare reform and cap and trade on the Hill and to a stimulus package that only served to fill state budget gaps and a few stand-alone construction projects?
The answer is likely that the White House did not see the 10% and higher, nor the long-term grinding of 8%, nor the certain damage that the jobless rate would do to POTUS ratings and the the Democratic agenda.
The stimulus package is mocked, which is why POTUS has to reflexively defends it.
Cap and trade is shelved or put in a drawer or just generally off track (choose metaphor) at the Senate level just because it is preposterously expensive, has no popular support, is a direct tax on a jobless public, and is now part of the legend of crooked science and global warmist doomsaying by an elite of newspaper reading ninnies.
And the healthcare reform bill, freighted with the panacea of the public option, is not going to get out of the Senate before Christmas, before SOTU, and may not get out at all until and if it invents a 60th vote that doesn’t exist except in string theory.
This is high compared to where he is headed into the Springtime, though it is unlikely he can break 40% before the 2010 elections. The jobless rate can go to 11% when and if people start looking for work in the Spring (which drives up the rate). POTUS knows he cannot have a second stimulus package, and might not be able to appear to spend anymore of an already $12 trillion estimate deficit.
The novelty is to use unspent TARP. This is witty of them, because TARP was part of the debt already. Nonetheless, this is the latest fade from the Obama team.
What they aim to do with the unspent (unclaimed) TARP (perhaps $75 billion) is unclear. POTUS refers to something like a jobs program, which is labeled a “jobs creation” program that includes tax cuts and so forth.
More big thinking for little folk. Nothing substantive about moving banks to loan to small businesses — and the credit drought continues because the banks do not aim to risk their leverage again for fear of another down-turn and another cycle of blowing up.
In all, the administration’s jobs thinking is not profound — nor designed to do more than talk the game.
POTUS looks to have settled into a winter of discontent. The polls will sag; the House Democrats will sweat; the Senate will bluster; and the banks will continued to borrow at 0% and buy T-Bills (and some equities), which is a guaranteed way to make money for their bonus babies.
Much to do about VPOTUS in the room, the man with the Rolodex, the attitude and the energy. Puzzle, is this suggestive of my brother’s keeper? It seems significant that POTUS went to Biden territory, the unemployed of Allentown, to make his visit to the lonely — and to include in his dry speech to the Brookings brains.
POTUS borrowing real people from VPOTUS?
POTUS seems most comfortable in the bubble he complains of? POTUS is the bubble? The economy is a bubble? Has POTUS ever remarked on a bubble before?
Is this a Biden metaphor? Biden has been inside the Senate bubble since 1972. Neither POTUS nor VPOTUS have not worked outside of government or government fed enterprises. Does POTUS mean bubble or palace?
Home Depot and Lowe’s live in the hearts of the White House team, true bourgeoisie heroes, enthralled to those access of plywood and gadgets for the do-it-yourself.
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