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Politics : President Barack Obama -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Road Walker who wrote (135572)	8/9/2013 10:20:00 AM
From: RetiredNow	Read Replies (5) \| Respond to of 149317

I bought a Honda Insight instead. It's a great little car and it gets around 47-52 mpg...on the higher end during summer and lower during winter. I love it! When my son graduates from college, I think I'll give it to him. I really have my eye on the Tesla Model S and my wife has ok'd me to buy one. But I'm considering waiting for the cross-over vehicle, the Model X, that they have planned. But we'll see. As far as the bigger picture, that's about all I focus on. I think we oftentimes lose sight of what's happening to the 99%. For them, this has been a horrific experience. I know some folks who have been out of a job for years. They aren't counted by the government as unemployed anymore, but they are still looking. Others are underemployed by a large margin. My view is that this administration has focused most of their energy on recapitalizing the criminal banksters, instead of using that money to shore up the middle class. They have engaged in trickle down economics, which we all agree simply does not work very well. The 1% are hoarders. I know, because I hoard my nuts for a rainy day. All this largess has gone into my bank account and my investments. Most people don't have that option, as they live paycheck to paycheck. So that's why I'm griping. The bigger picture is that the policies of this administration and the Fed have increased the rich/poor divide even further than when Bush Jr was in office. I hated Bush Jr's economic policies, which is one reason I voted for Obama, but Obama doubled down on the Bush economic policies. Very disappointing. If they had let the market clear the bad debts, punished the shareholders of the big banks instead, put the criminal banking heads in jail, begun to regulate dark derivatives listing them on traded markets, and re-established Glass-Steagel, then I think the probability is great that we would already be in a very robust recovery with no future systemic risk to worry about. Instead, Bernanke bought up $3.5 trillion of bonds with printed money and dropped interest rates to zero, punishing the hell out of savers, which is a body blow to capital investment. Now we have a low growth, stagnant economy, with Labor Participation Rate at an all time low, welfare and food stamp recipients at an all time high, consumer incomes stagnating, creeping inflation, and systemic risk from the banking sector higher than it was in 2008. All Bernanke did was buy us time. Nothing was resolved and we learned nothing. We wasted the crisis. That's the big picture. See that red line below? That's 1.8%. Economists will tell you that when GDP is growing below this line, this has almost always been within the context of an ongoing recession. The last few quarters were abysmal. The most recent 1.7% GDP reading was only the preliminary number. The last 2 quarters have been revised downwards by more than 50%. So we can expect the Final Q2'13 revision to be below 1%. When you take into account that inflation is running about 1-2% higher than reported, it is fair to conclude we are in an unacknowledged recession. Those are the stark facts, as unpopular as it may be to say so.