Obama's Trickle Down Stimulus is Failing

[Joanne98]

Less than six months in office and President Obama is already simmering in public opinion hot water, down 7% in Rasmussen Reports'--"is the country on the right track" poll released July 16, 2009 among Democrats!

The natives are beating the drums. Some angry dancing has commenced. The detritus thrown out the windows of passing Caddies, Lexi and Daimlers, on their way to pick up yet another unearned megabucks bonus, is being pitched into the fire.

If the Republicans and conservatives thought rank and file progressives were going to go easy on President Obama, stand back. Lives are at stake. Oh, and you guys with your laissez-faire free market (which isn't fair or free) opposition to any change or help for those not in the top 10% of wage earners are just plain history. Take a hike.

Earlier this year, the President delivered the same old kneejerk trickle down, through the proper political money laundering channels action: Washington to the Federal Reserve, Washington to the States, Washington to Federal Projects, Washington to Wall Street, Washington to Big Greed, with the exception of the "Obama $50 Bill" which comes in the form of a check from your state unemployment dole master every two weeks. Unemployment increases were to stop at 9%.


Trickle down still doesn't work.

The June figures from the government put unemployment at 9.5%. Shadow Government Statistics http://www.shadowstats.com and it's economist John Williams, who takes the time to adjust a number of government-issued indicators to more accurately measure the real situation, puts the June unemployment rate a 20.6%.

Spin wisdom from the establishment left: the top-down stimulus package has not had enough time to work. Only a small fraction of the money has been spent. True, but it doesn't matter. No matter who you believe, unemployment is way high and there can be no economic recovery at these depths of unemployment.

This morning, the Associated Press using data from RealtyTrac Inc reported the following:

A 15% increase in the number of U.S. households on the verge of foreclosure
Foreclosure filings rose 33% in June compared with June 2008
Foreclosures jumped 5% from May to June 2009
And, 1.5 millions homes were foreclosed in the last six month

Trickle-down fix: The $50 billion program of subsidies offered to Big Mortgage in an attempt to stem the foreclosure tsunami didn't work.

The President needs to take quick actions now to stop foreclosures and evictions, and create jobs.

First, he will need to declare and enforce a total moratorium on primary residence foreclosures and rent evictions to be lifted when the situation permits.

And, he will need to create a bottom up, government guaranteed loan program for residential energy conservation and renewable energy production.

Loan money directly to any home or commercial residential property owner to weatherize or install renewable energy systems. These bottom up projects will pay for themselves in the long-term.

These two simple actions will provide a humane housing stopgap, create only local, domestic jobs quickly, and be a long-term investment in our energy independence.

Bottom up, Mr. President, bottom up. Quick!




Take action -- click here to contact your local newspaper or congress people:
I support a foreclosure and eviction moratorium.

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www.WordsWillNever.com

http://www.opednews.com/articles/Obama-s-trickle-down-stimu-by-Chaz-Valenza-090716-898.html

[babylonsister]

1. Baloney. Patience is failing. More than half hasn't even been

used yet.

[OwnedByFerrets]

20. And when its all used up, Trickle Down will still

be a sham. Sorry to disagree with you on this one, but it didnt work for the Repugs and it wont work for this administration.

[Sinistrous]

2. Article wrongly conflates the bailout and the stimulus.

The stimulus is the antithesis of "trickle down".

That said, there are certainly changes that should be made in the mortgage and housing situation.

[leftofthedial]

5. you conflate semantics with meaning.

the propaganda smokescreen for the bailout was that it was supposed to help re-energize credit markets, stimulating lending, and thereby consumption. This was sold as pure trickle-down "stimulus"; whether we want to call it bailout or stimulus is just throat clearing. The reinvestment and recovery "stimulus" was two-thirds repuke trickle-down tax break nonsense, which more than countered the relatively small amount of actual stimulus, most of which is still just sitting there unused anyway.

[stray cat]

7. The previous poster is correct - words have meanings and arguments

should use words correctly.

[creeksneakers2]

17. I see two different programs

There's the bailouts, started under George Bush, that go to big companies. Then there's the stimulus from Obama which is spread around. I don't remember anybody promising that the bailouts would send the economy back to normal. They were enacted because of a perceived threat that a great depression might occur if there weren't bailouts.

[leftofthedial]

3. a very small percentage of the trillions Obama-Summers-Geithner have given away

was actual stimulus--about one-third of the the Recovery and Reinvestment money. The rest wasn't even trickle-down; it was just a blatant giveaway to a corrupt financial sector.

Things are not getting better, despite the propaganda to the contrary.

We need real demand-side stimulus, and we need it now. We need to end the Wall Street kleptocracy. We can't afford the handful of billionaires and the few thousand millionaires who are its only benficiaries.

[FreakinDJ]

4. "It's the Trade Policy Stupid"

We can't abandon the manufacturing sector by outsourcing it to China and India and expect to have an economy that will support life as we know it.

Besides - the "Free Trade / Globalization" crap was developed by MultiNational Corporations and Wall St. Financial Institutions. They threw the American worker under the bus and promised them "Retraining" only to ship those New Hi-Tech Jobs overseas as well. Not even the investor (Who the MultiNational Corporations and Wall St. Financial Institutions say they are working for) have benifited as $Trillions have been Raided on Wall St. and $Trillions more of Tax Payer dollars funneled in to the Hyperbole of Greed.

Its a Scam - plain and simple

[stray cat]

6. Extending food stamps, unemployment, money for education community colleges

is not trickle down. Also, tax cuts in the package went only to lower and middle class. The bank bail out is separate from the stimulus.

[leftofthedial]

8. you are wrong about the tax cuts. The bulk were one-off giveaways

to repuke constituents to buy "bipartisanship," which the repukes never delivered anyway.

You are right about the third of the R&R "stimulus" that was actual stimulus, just as I said from the start. About a third of it was for aid to unemployed, poor and actual demand-side stimulus. That was about 5% of the money Obama and his Goldman Sachs economic team have given away so far. Separate-schmeperate. It was all money Obama and his Goldman Sachs economic team have given away in the name of helping the economy. ("Helping the economy" in a recession means stimulus, whether Goldman Sachs wanted it labeled that way or not.)

[sam sarrha]

9. what caused the crash was letting less than 2% of the population loot over 80% of all the wealth..

that doesnt leave us enough to exist on.. till we quit believing their diss-information about Socialism we are screwed.

[Daveparts]

10. This question was answered 77 years ago

The Forgotten Man, April 7, 1932
Franklin D. Roosevelt
Publishing Information
Radio Address, Albany, N. Y April 7, 1932

ALTHOUGH I understand that I am talking under the auspices of the Democratic National Committee, I do not want to limit myself to politics. I do not want to feel that I am addressing an audience of Democrats or that I speak merely as a Democrat myself. The present condition of our national affairs is too serious to be viewed through partisan eyes for partisan purposes.

Fifteen years ago my public duty called me to an active part in a great national emergency, the World War. Success then was due to a leadership whose vision carried beyond the timorous and futile gesture of sending a tiny army of 150,000 trained soldiers and the regular navy to the aid of our allies. The generalship of that moment conceived of a whole Nation mobilized for war, economic, industrial, social and military resources gathered into a vast unit capable of and actually in the process of throwing into the scales ten million men equipped with physical needs and sustained by the realization that behind them were the united efforts of 110,000,000 human beings. It was a great plan because it was built from bottom to top and not from top to bottom.

In my calm judgment, the Nation faces today a more grave emergency than in 1917.

It is said that Napoleon lost the battle of Waterloo because he forgot his infantry--he staked too much upon the more spectacular but less substantial cavalry. The present administration in Washington provides a close parallel. It has either forgotten or it does not want to remember the infantry of our economic army.

These unhappy times call for the building of plans that rest upon the forgotten, the unorganized but the indispensable units of economic power, for plans like those of 1917 that build from the bottom up and not from the top down, that put their faith once more in the forgotten man at the bottom of the economic pyramid.

Obviously, these few minutes tonight permit no opportunity to lay down the ten or a dozen closely related objectives of a plan to meet our present emergency, but I can draw a few essentials, a beginning in fact, of a planned program.

It is the habit of the unthinking to turn in times like this to the illusions of economic magic. People suggest that a huge expenditure of public funds by the Federal Government and by State and local governments will completely solve the unemployment problem. But it is clear that even if we could raise many billions of dollars and find definitely useful public works to spend these billions on, even all that money would not give employment to the seven million or ten million people who are out of work. Let us admit frankly that it would be only a stopgap. A real economic cure must go to the killing of the bacteria in the system rather than to the treatment of external symptoms.

How much do the shallow thinkers realize, for example, that approximately one-half of our whole population, fifty or sixty million people, earn their living by farming or in small towns whose existence immediately depends on farms. They have today lost their purchasing power. Why? They are receiving for farm products less than the cost to them of growing these farm products. The result of this loss of purchasing power is that many other millions of people engaged in industry in the cities cannot sell industrial products to the farming half of the Nation. This brings home to every city worker that his own employment is directly tied up with the farmer's dollar. No Nation can long endure half bankrupt. Main Street, Broadway, the mills, the mines will close if half the buyers are broke.

I cannot escape the conclusion that one of the essential parts of a national program of restoration must be to restore purchasing power to the farming half of the country. Without this the wheels of railroads and of factories will not turn.

Closely associated with this first objective is the problem of keeping the home-owner and the farm-owner where he is, without being dispossessed through the foreclosure of his mortgage. His relationship to the great banks of Chicago and New York is pretty remote. The two billion dollar fund which President Hoover and the Congress have put at the disposal of the big banks, the railroads and the corporations of the Nation is not for him.

His is a relationship to his little local bank or local loan company. It is a sad fact that even though the local lender in many cases does not want to evict the farmer or home-owner by foreclosure proceedings, he is forced to do so in order to keep his bank or company solvent. Here should be an objective of Government itself, to provide at least as much assistance to the little fellow as it is now giving to the large banks and corporations. That is another example of building from the bottom up.

One other objective closely related to the problem of selling American products is to provide a tariff policy based upon economic common sense rather than upon politics, hot-air, and pull. This country during the past few years, culminating with the Hawley-Smoot Tariff in 1929, has compelled the world to build tariff fences so high that world trade is decreasing to the vanishing point. The value of goods internationally exchanged is today less than half of what it was three or four years ago.

Every man and woman who gives any thought to the subject knows that if our factories run even 80 percent of capacity, they will turn out more products than we as a Nation can possibly use ourselves. The answer is that if they run on 80 percent of capacity, we must sell some goods abroad. How can we do that if the outside Nations cannot pay us in cash? And we know by sad experience that they cannot do that. The only way they can pay us is in their own goods or raw materials, but this foolish tariff of ours makes that impossible.

What we must do is this: revise our tariff on the basis of a reciprocal exchange of goods, allowing other Nations to buy and to pay for our goods by sending us such of their goods as will not seriously throw any of our industries out of balance, and incidentally making impossible in this country the continuance of pure monopolies which cause us to pay excessive prices for many of the necessities of life.

Such objectives as these three, restoring farmers' buying power, relief to the small banks and home-owners and a reconstructed tariff policy, are only a part of ten or a dozen vital factors. But they seem to be beyond the concern of a national administration which can think in terms only of the top of the social and economic structure. It has sought temporary relief from the top down rather than permanent relief from the bottom up. It has totally failed to plan ahead in a comprehensive way. It has waited until something has cracked and then at the last moment has sought to prevent total collapse.

It is high time to get back to fundamentals. It is high time to admit with courage that we are in the midst of an emergency at least equal to that of war. Let us mobilize to meet it.

[SoFlaJet]

11. I thought this was DEMOCRATIC Underground

silly me...

[Daveparts]

14. That is why we disagree

we are Democrats, we all have our own opinions and don't wait for our opinions to be delivered to us
by the grand exalted Pooh Pa. My post quoted Roosevelt and agreed with the poster is Roosevelt no longer considered a Democrat?

[IndianaGreen]

15. The new Five Year Plan is a rousing success

We reject the lies told by Emmanuel Goldstein's followers. Big Brother is leading us to victory!

(pouring more Kool-Aid into the glass)

[natrat]

12. of course it's failing, look what crooked fuckers designed and implemented it

[shraby]

13. Trickle-UP sure does though, doesn't it? It works so

good that Bush and his buddies got it all. Now we need to reclaim some of it.

[Gman]

16. Horseshit

and it's not trickle down. There are so many misconceptions in this OP that I don't know where to begin. The misconceptions show a complete lack of understanding about the economics behind Obama's programs. I don't have a problem with some of the proposed solutions, but these solutions have nothing to do with any of the alleged problems in the OP.

You need to get an understanding of what the concept of "trickle down" is.

[Joanne98]

18. It's the model. If the money trickled though the hands of the well off

Then it will never get to bottom. He's making a prediction. Only time will tell if he's right.

[Politicalboi]

19. Yes after 7 months

How come Obama hasn't fixed EVERYTHING yet? I'm still waiting for my hybrid car to appear in my driveway, and my recovery payment.