The New Bailout

Originally Posted by classicman

...
What I do remember about polling from college is how extremely difficult it is to get accurate information and how skewed the data therefore can be. They attempt to weigh/modify/alter the data to make it credible and make a prediction. Sometimes they are right and sometimes they are wrong.

Yep..I agree it is hard for you and me (with my one course 20+ years ago) or even self-proclaimed experts like Merc.

Its not that hard for those with the proper educational training and the knowledge and experience of applying widely accepted statistical procedures and anti-bias protocols.

And that's why they can report with a 95% confidence level within maximum margin of sampling error of ±3 percentage points.....far greater than "sometimes right and sometimes wrong."

I dont need 100% confidence with zero margin of error to find polls useful to understand public opinion on an issue.

In slightly different polling, one only need look at the 08 election results and final pre-election polls (by state and nationally) to see how close the pollsters were to the final results. Aggregating the major national polls predicted Obama -52.0%, McCain - 44.4 and the final results Obama- 52.9%, McCain -45.6

[classicman]

Can you prove them right or wrong? That is my point. With respect to polls, particularly those about opinions, is is virtually impossible to prove them right or wrong.
As far as trusting the professionals - lets see how well did the bankers or wall street guru's do last year?

Polls are fine and have, in my opinion, a very limited purpose when it comes to opinions. Most of those peoples opinions are probably based upon the local news soundbites anyway and there is so much more to what is going on with this specific situation to say that a poll can really have any credibility.

I guess we're done

At least until I post another poll in another discussion.

[classicman]

...or I find one I like and do the same.

[TheMercenary]

Robinson: The inequality of equality
GEVERYL ROBINSON | Sunday, December 14, 2008 at 12:30 am

Contextual linking provided by Topix Egalitarianism: 1. A belief in human equality especially with respect to social, political, and economic rights and privileges 2. A social philosophy advocating the removal of inequalities among people.


During the presidential election, I kept hearing people bemoan the fact that electing Barack Obama would mean the end of our democracy because Obama and all his Obamacans were socialists who believed in the redistribution of wealth.

I have news for you. We've been dabbling in socialism for quite some time. Democrats, Republicans and all of us are to blame.

I can give you a long drawn out definition of socialism, but in a nutshell, socialists advocate the creation of an egalitarian society in which wealth and power are distributed more evenly. Know some of you are wondering what's wrong with that, and I'll tell you.

It's not the government's responsibility to make sure wealth and power are distributed more evenly. Egalitarianism is a myth. No matter how you slice it, there will always be inequalities among people, and the government's and our delusion about this fact is the primary reason our country is in its current state.

For example, everyone is shocked by the high foreclosure rates and the millionswho have lost their homes due to the "evil lenders." I agree that some of the lenders were predatory. However, there were many who were under extreme pressure from the government to give loans to any and everyone just to make things "fair."

If Mr. CEO with a steady job history, great credit and large income could get a home, then in the spirit of fairness, in the spirit of egalitarianism, Mr. No Job, no money, no credit, 12 kids by 12 different women, and dentures on layaway could get a home, too.

And his home should be just as nice as Mr. CEO's because after all, giving Mr. No Job a home with lesser value wouldn't be fair.

See the problem?

True, there have been practices by lending institutions and companies that were discriminatory. Laws have been put in place to alleviate these practices. But discrimination is defined as "making a difference in treatment or favor on a basis other than individual merit." If that's the case, then isn't giving people homes, credit cards, cars, jobs or anything else because they are poor, and not because they earned these things due to their own merit, discriminatory against those who earned the things they've acquired?

And what about the millions of people who knowingly accepted the "free" credit cards they received in the mail and then used the cards to their limit, all the while knowing they would never be able to make their monthly payments?

I've heard some elderly people say, "Pigs get fat; hogs get slaughtered," and our greed has led us straight to the slaughterhouse.

Instead of suffering from optical rectumitis (the crossing of the anal nerve with the optic nerve causing one to have a crappy outlook on life), we need to take responsibility for our actions, for our part in this mess we find ourselves in as a country.

We all played a part in our economic downfall. So instead of redistributing wealth, let's try redistributing responsibility and then collectively find solutions to reverse our downward spiral and restore our economy.

http://www.savannahnow.com/node/635671

[TheMercenary]

Stimulus: Hiring jolt doubtful
A multibillion-dollar provision of the new federal stimulus package, billed as a huge jobs boost for the Northwest, might not translate into lots of new jobs for years. Even without the new stimulus package, BPA was expected to start construction on new transmission lines this year, and construction of additional job-creating projects might not start for years.

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/htm...22_bpa14m.html

[TheMercenary]

Promises, Promises
Soaring expectations collide with harsh political realities. How Barack Obama looks from Chicagoland.

Joseph Epstein
NEWSWEEK
From the magazine issue dated Feb 23, 2009
On Tuesday, this past Nov. 4, I voted for John McCain for President of The United States. On Wednesday morning, I woke feeling glad that he lost. Had McCain won, a spirit of gloom would have spread over the land, a deadening feeling of "Oh, God, business as usual," part of that business being that a man tied to failed economic policies was once again at the helm and a nonwhite candidate for president still hadn't a chance. But Barack Obama was our new president. Great day in the morning; a new age in American politics is upon us.

Or is it? Like Augie March, I am an American, Chicago-born, but unlike Augie—a follower of Leon Trotsky—I have never been able to take politics with an entirely straight face. So often, I find my antipathies divided; faced with two equally outrageous candidates, a plague, I usually pronounce, on both their condominiums. The source of this is genealogical. When I was a boy, my father remarked that the aldermen of the City of Chicago, who were then paid an annual salary of $20,000, were spending as much as $250,000 to win election. "The arithmetic doesn't quite work out," he said, pausing, as if to say (though the phrase hadn't yet been invented), "You do the math."

Politicians, my rich Chicago heritage tells me, are all guilty until proven innocent. When the great Rod Blagojevich scandal broke a few months ago, I, like most Chicagoans, wasn't in the least scandalized. All I found remarkable in it was the now former governor's efficiency, in the realm of corruption, in eliminating the middleman and asking for the money himself.

http://www.newsweek.com/id/184774/output/print

I think the fact that the three leading business organizations in the country support the bill as a good first step (while not perfect) is very promising.

US Chamber of Commerce (95% of its members are small businesses)

National Association of Manufacturers

Business Roundtable

Many, including Obama and Congressional Democrats, agree its not a perfect bill but that the "whole is more important than the individual parts."

Republicans, on the other hand, chose to focus on the negative rather than the positive by misrepresenting a very small number of programs (pelosi's mouse project, funding for acorn, etc) they falsely suggest are contained in the bill.

[classicman]

Yep - something's better than nothing - thats a heck of a vote of confidence.

Originally Posted by classicman

Yep - something's better than nothing - thats a heck of a vote of confidence.

And its not even a poll.

[TheMercenary]

An insightful commentary:

By Gerald F. Seib

A giant political gamble begins when President Barack Obama signs the economic stimulus plan into law Tuesday — and the fate of that gamble rests heavily on the shoulders of the man doing the signing.

Much as the success of the Reagan Revolution a generation ago depended on the resilience and credibility of the president who authored it, so too will the Obama Offensive rise or fall in voters’ eyes on the resilience and credibility of the president now putting his stamp on it.

In the 1980s, the real economy was so awful that Ronald Reagan’s supporters for almost two years looked in vain for proof that his gamble of a giant tax cut and a big increase in defense spending would work. Mr. Reagan signed his economic plan into law in August 1981, and unemployment promptly began to rise, and continued to do so for a year and a half. Three years later, it still was higher than when the Reagan plan was enacted. So nervous was his party in Congress that it decided to take back some of that Reagan tax cut a year after it was passed.

Only the personal popularity and sheer optimistic resolve of Mr. Reagan — the fabled Great Communicator — saw his party through the economic darkness and political turbulence and into the light that followed.

And thus it is today. Because the economy is so bad, gauging the success or failure of the stimulus will be hard to do for a long time. It’s likely that much of the argument on behalf of the stimulus in coming months won’t be that it has made things better, but that it has stopped things from getting even worse — a tough political argument to make.

Under those conditions, the public’s faith in the great experiment — and its political impact — will turn almost entirely on how much Mr. Obama is trusted. We are about to see whether we have the Great Communicator II.

It didn’t have to turn out this way. The politics of the economy would look vastly different if Republicans had bought into the Democrats’ economic stimulus plan, making it a joint undertaking, with political blame or credit spread more broadly and thinly as the months ahead unfold.

Instead, Republicans have stood in nearly unanimous opposition to the stimulus plan, and say they have rediscovered their voice and philosophical bearings by doing so.

White House aides, meanwhile, say Republicans have made a political mistake of historic proportions by opposing an economic rescue effort and appearing partisan in the process.

Obviously, both sides can’t be right. Just as obviously, neither side can know for sure right now. All that is certain is this: As a result of those diametrically opposed partisan calculations, the economic stimulus package now represents one of the biggest rolls of the dice of recent times.

Part of the outcome depends on whether there are glimmers of evidence that $787 billion in stimulus spending is having a real effect. The danger for the president and his party is that any such glimmers could be obscured by larger waves of bad news that Mr. Obama himself warns are still coming. In that sense, Republicans will have the easier case to make.

Part of the political equation will be determined by how effectively the two sides go about convincing the country of the virtue of their position. Already liberal groups have been pounding Republicans for standing in the way of recovery, and the Republican message machine has been in full attack mode against the stimulus package as an example of liberal ideology run amok.

Part of the political equation will be determined not by the stimulus plan at all, but by the effectiveness of that other big Obama initiative — the effort to spend more than $300 billion in remaining financial-rescue funds to stabilize the banking system and get credit flowing again.

And part of the outcome of this gamble depends on whether voters perceive Republican opposition as a principled stand against pointless spending, or an example of simple obstructionism. On that front the evidence is mixed, and Americans’ verdict may depend as much on how the two parties behave going forward as on anything in the past. For its part, the White House insists that it intends to reach out to Republicans so it isn’t seen as the cause of a breakdown in comity. “We are going to kill them with kindness,” says one senior Obama aide.

But ultimately, the partisan nature of the stimulus debate means Mr. Obama himself will do more than any statistic or maneuver to shape views of the great experiment. He starts with some significant assets. His job approval rating, despite recent rough sledding, continues in the mid-60% range, slightly above where Mr. Reagan’s was when he signed his economic package into law. The president has more credibility with voters than does Congress or either party.

But the sledding won’t be smooth. Mr. Reagan’s popularity dropped steadily through the year after his program was enacted, and his party lost 26 House seats in the next election. Have faith, Mr. Reagan asked his party and his country. Mr. Obama is about to try to make the same request, under conditions that are even more trying.

http://blogs.wsj.com/capitaljournal/...g?mod=washwire

[xoxoxoBruce]

No matter what the government does the recession/depression will drag on until the public decides to turn it around. The biggest effect the stimulus package can have is to restore public confidence. But half the stories on the news broadcasts and in the papers contain the words, in these economic times, or in this recession.
Plus the people playing politics, whiners, and harbingers of doom like Merc, have diminished that effect.

Sure there's a lot of people out of work, but there's a fuck of a lot more people still working. Those people are scared, worried about the future, and will remain so because of the whiners, so they are holding on to their cash. Saving rates have more than doubled and spending is way down, exacerbating the pinch.

You don't have to stick your head in the sand but at least pull it out of your ass.

[TheMercenary]

Originally Posted by xoxoxoBruce

Plus the people playing politics, whiners, and harbingers of doom like Merc,

And Obama:


Worst is yet to come, says Obama

http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2...03/2480767.htm

Originally Posted by TheMercenary

And Obama:


Worst is yet to come, says Obama

http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2...03/2480767.htm

Wow...a president being honest with the American people.

Shades of "saddam poses a direct and immediate threat to the US" (bush/cheney/rice/rumsfeld) or "mission accomplished" (bush) or "we cant wait for the mushroom cloud" (condi rice) or "saddam had ties to al queda" (cheney)

[TheMercenary]

The comment was a quote in response to Bruce. Take it up with him.

Or maybe it was shades of "I NEVER HAD SEX WITH THAT WOMAN!" /angrylittlewillie.