(08-25-2013, 01:21 PM)kandrathe Wrote: Only if you want to be really, really fair. The bottom line is that unless the congress repeatedly must over ride the presidential veto, the president ends up getting his way with compromises. A popular president will help to carry the political tide in their favor, so in many ways, there again, the success of the president can be also measured by the size of his coat tails.
I would turn this on its head. Congress gets its way, because the President can't actually legislate. The veto is powerful, popularity is powerful, and the executive can hardly just be ignored. But the President can't just say what he wants, then expect to get it. The congressional meat grinder is far, far too strong for that. Indeed, with this president, what he even proposes tends to be pre-compromised for congressional Republican approval, because the filibuster is, effectively, a veto for the minority party.
Quote:Obama, and Reagan took the presidency at desperate financial times, and did drastically different things. We still have not seen the full impacts of Obama's first acts (especially since the begin dates were set for after 2012, or 2016). So to be fair to Obama, his administration will be responsible for our economy, possibly until 2020.
Except that at no point is the US president responsible for the global economy, and a quick peek out the window suggests the economic problems are global. The US is a big player, and the President has a lot of clout, but the world is way bigger than that.
It is also worth emphasizing that the crises faced by Reagan and Obama are of entirely different, indeed opposite, nature. The 1970s was a time of runaway inflation, not a banking crisis. The solution, obvious to Paul Volcker, was to "draw gold from the moon" by raising interest rates. Reagan suffered the pain of that in his first years, and reaped the benefits later. (Carter, OTOH, got slaughtered.) 2008 was a banking crisis caused by the collapse of an asset bubble. Inflation was, and still is, practically zero - it's output that's gone down. So, the solution, as seen by Bernanke, should be obvious and opposite: lower interest rates. But we hit the zero lower bound, and thus, need either extreme monetary policy (massive QE for as long as it takes), or fiscal stimulus.
Quote:Monetarily, I firmly am in the "no free lunch" crowd of fiscal karma, so I believe every Fed action done to pump up the economy has a red letter pay day in our future. Some one must pay for every stimulus dollar, and it is either an investor who risks and loses, or long term investors/savers/pensioners who's valuations are drastically depreciated.
No. "Dollars" are not resources. They are made of paper, or even more ephemeral bank deposits. They are not in limited supply.
You are right to foreground inflation as the right consequence. If there is no inflation, then there is no problem. How else do we "pay" for these "dollars"? There isn't any other channel, unless you want to suggest that somehow, adding to the monetary base decreases output directly?
-Jester