{"id":3057,"date":"2009-10-24T13:41:22","date_gmt":"2009-10-24T21:41:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/secularright.org\/wordpress\/?p=3057"},"modified":"2009-10-24T13:41:22","modified_gmt":"2009-10-24T21:41:22","slug":"economic-hot-potato","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/economic-hot-potato\/","title":{"rendered":"Economic hot potato"},"content":{"rendered":"

Barack Obama should stop blaming his Republican predecessor for the problems facing his presidency, writes Peggy Noonan<\/a>:<\/p>\n

The president said last week, at a San Francisco fund-raiser, that he’s busy with a “mop,” “cleaning up somebody else’s mess,” and he doesn’t enjoy “somebody sitting back and saying, ‘You’re not holding the mop the right way.'” Later, in New Orleans, he groused that reporters are always asking “Why haven’t you solved world hunger yet?” His surrogates and aides, in appearances and talk shows, have taken to remembering, sometimes at great length, the dire straits we were in when the presidency began.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

On manliness grounds, Noonan is right.\u00a0 It would be admirable if Obama simply addressed the problems at hand, rather than assigning blame.\u00a0 But whether or not Obama should continue mentioning it, it is <\/em>true that the Republicans handed Obama a massive financial mess.\u00a0 They did <\/em>preside over the reckless leveraging of debt that led to the financial sector collapse.\u00a0 Would the world economy have already perked up had McCain won in 2008?\u00a0 Perhaps.\u00a0 Perhaps if the Republicans had responded to the economic downturn with huge tax cuts, business formation and hiring would be much more vibrant today.\u00a0 I certainly would have preferred such a strategy to the Ponzi scheme of stimulus spending and the anxiety-producing promise of \u201chealth care reform.\u201d\u00a0 But the tried and true Republican tactic of tax cuts unmatched by spending cuts is fiscally irresponsible, too.\u00a0\u00a0 And it just might be that the complexity of the market situation at the moment is beyond any government policy to right in the short term.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The almost daily flagellation of hapless businessmen by triumphant Democrat politicians is certainly nauseating.\u00a0 Here are people who have never dared to start a business, who have never tried to master supply chains and fluctuating consumer preferences, who have not put their capital at risk of likely failure, lording it over individuals whose entrepreneurial energy brings us the creature comforts we take for granted.\u00a0 The sight several weeks ago on CSPAN of John Conyers torturing a group of health insurance execs for their failure to have read some left-wing study of insurance compensation was unbearable.\u00a0 But almost as unbearable is the glee with which conservative pundits cheer on the bad economy as Obama\u2019s unique creation.\u00a0 If we want Obama to stop blaming Republicans, perhaps a little humility from the right would also be in order.\u00a0 It\u00a0 was not for no reason at all that the Republicans lost the White House in 2008.\u00a0 But the venom that they now direct at Obama suggests a wounded innocence.\u00a0 On October 13, Mark Levin advised his audience that \u201cObama\u2019s enemies are your friends, and his friends are your enemies.\u201d\u00a0 Sounds like Moveon.org to me.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Barack Obama should stop blaming his Republican predecessor for the problems facing his presidency, writes Peggy Noonan: The president said last week, at a San Francisco fund-raiser, that he’s busy with a “mop,” “cleaning up somebody else’s mess,” and he … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":50,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[93,187,368],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3057"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/50"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3057"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3057\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3061,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3057\/revisions\/3061"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3057"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3057"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3057"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}