Some Kossacks are getting pretty upset that more and more of us are coming to the realization that President Obama is a corporatist shill who has done very little to help improve the economic situation for working Americans. There is a recommended diary as I write that asserts "Obama SAVED the US Economy" and argues that it was Obama's "massive stimulus and jobs package that rescued this country from Soviet-style collapse."
In a word: bullshit.
It was Social Security -- an "automatic stabilizer" that was created to help remedy the First Great Depression -- that saved the U.S. economy. Along with a few other "automatic stabilizers" that were created in the same era, such as unemployment insurance and food stamps.
Even before Obama took the oath of office in January 2009, there were a few economists who warned that we needed a stimulus package that was over $1 trillion. And the thing about those economists is that they were the very few and very rare economists who had been correct about the Wall Street bubble economy of the 1990s and 2000s and who explicitly identified the housing mortgage securities market as being the probable fuse for a coming financial collapse, such as Tom Palley, Joe Stiglitz, James Galbraith, and Michael Hudson.
The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 was estimated to be $787 billion at the time of passage, later revised to $831 billion between 2009 and 2019, according to Wikipedia. Of that $831 billion, $288 billion, or a full third, went to "tax relief" which even conservative economists like Mark Zandy admitted provides the least amount of stimulus bang for the buck. Only $144 billion went to assist state and local governments, $111 billion to infrastructure and science, and $43 billion to energy. A mere ten percent, $81 billion, went to programs that directly assisted the most needy and most destitute of our fellow citizens.
But, let's be generous and say that Obama's vaunted stimulus provided $543 billion to actually stimulate the economy (that's $831 billion, minus the $288 billion wasted for useless "tax relief."
By contrast, Social Security paid out $557.2 billion in benefits in 2009; $577.4 billion in 2010; and $596.2 billion in 2011. (See 2012 Annual Report of the Board of Trustees of The Federal Old-Age and Survivors Insurance and Disability Insurance Trust Funds." United States Social Security Administration, April 25, 2012, page 241.)
That's $1.73 trillion in Social Security benefits in three years.
That's what saved the economy, not Obama's relatively paltry $543 billion. Say another $600 billion for 2012, and you're looking at over $2 trillion in Social Security benefits over four years. What do you think would have happened without that $2 trillion in Social Security benefits? What if there had not been the New Deal legacy of Social Security -- that no conservative ideologue could stop, obstruct, or derail -- to act as an automatic stabilizer for the economy?
Then we'd be looking at a "Soviet-style collapse."
And now the economic dolt we have as a President wants to impose a cut in the one automatic stabilizer program that was most responsible for saving his sorry excuse for a Presidential administration?
At this point, anyone who believes it was Obama's stimulus program that saved the U.S. economy is such an imbecile and simpleton on real economics that it borders on moral turpitude.
There were some other claims in that recommended diary that defy belief. The U.S. a leader in "clean energy technologies"? Really? I want to see what moron put together a report laying out that fanciful claim. As the MIT Technology Review article on the April 2012 report by the Pew Charitable Trusts, “Who’s Winning the Clean Energy Race?”, the U.S. is leading the world in the amount of money invested in clean energy technologies. So what? The U.S. is the world's biggest economy. As the MIT Technology Review article noted, the U.S. is lagging in getting new technologies into production and to market.
Saving the auto industry, is one thing Obama can take credit for. But read the inside account of the debate between Obama's advisers (such as that provided by Ron Suskind in Confidence Men: Wall Street, Washington, and the Education of a President), and it was a very close thing. Had one particular adviser not interjected a crucial argument -- "How will it look if we let hundreds of thousands of auto workers lose their jobs, while we hand hundreds of billions of dollars over to save Wall Street bankers?" -- it could easily have gone the other way. In the end, the decision was made because of the damn optics, not because Obama and his economics team had any real sense of the economic struggles and everyday life of working Americans.
People who defend Obama at this point, I dismiss as people who are comfortably ensconced in nice, middle class professional jobs. The professional class. They are complete and I am coming to believe, nearly irredeemable idiots on questions of economics.
You want a good litmus test to judge someone on economics? Ask them what they think of free trade. And if they say they are opposed to it, ask them what specifically are they going to do to put that opposition into effect.
I was part of a radical splinter group that tried to confront the UAW leadership on its support for Bill Clinton's NAFTA. (I write "Bill Clinton's" because though it was formulated and negotiated under Papa Bush, Bill Clinton took full ownership of it.) So if you want to know what went wrong with organized labor in the 1980s and 1990s, I think I can tell you.
They forgot what it was like being poor.
And that's exactly the problem with Obama and those who don't see what a disaster his economic policies have created out here in flyover country. From what I can sense, anyone who fails to distance themselves from Obama's economic record is going to get creamed in 2014.
That does not mean that people are going to embrace the Republicans. Most people know that the Republicans have been obstructionist dickheads. They laugh bitterly about how comical is the Republicans knee-jerk opposition to anything Obama. But they also laugh bitterly when they see Wall Street banks and oil companies making record busting profits, while they search desperately for a job that pays more than nine or ten dollars an hour.
I think the political answer lies in a full-throated attack on the money power and a remorseless repudiation of all Democrats beholden to that power. The first candidate that declares war on Wall Street, with a viable plan for restoring the primacy of Main Street, wins.