Poll Numbers Tell The Tale
by Blake on Aug 10, 2009 at 20:36 Political
The Pretender King’s numbers are coming in- I mean the polls are taken hourly, like a critical patient’s pulse, and the pulse is getting weaker all the time. Good. This is why the Resident wants to push bills through fast, constantly breaking his pledge of “transparency” with all the recidivism of a serial child- molester unable to control his urges.
Not that I can blame him, as distasteful as his bills are, not to mention deceitful to the American people. I mean, if he wanted to (and he should have), he could have settled the economy much sooner, and indeed, it can, and should be argued that he should not have done anything else until that little niggling problem was fixed.
After all, as the Ford Motor Company used to say, That was Job One. And it has become a job he has failed at- I say that with complete confidence that I am right, because only in a Hussein- World could you lose 247,000 jobs in a month and claim a victory because the “unemployment” figures falsely show a .1% “improvement”. This is because of all the people who have quit looking for jobs, and thus are not counted in the numbers.
Mr. Walker, who as president of the nonpartisan Peter G. Peterson Foundation since 2008 has spearheaded an effort to raise public awareness about the country’s long-term fiscal problems, said that the American people are “ahead of their elected officials” in understanding the need to rein in spending before expanding health care coverage.
“They get it,” he said. “Costs are out of control, and they threaten the future of this country. And you cannot reduce cost by expanding coverage. That’s an oxymoron.”
washingtontimes.com
Oh yeah, we get it. The American people are not as dumb as the Liberal Left would like to hope. They were counting on the Silent Majority staying compliant and focused on their flat- screen TVs. Sadly for the socialist left, this is not to be.
A majority, 57 percent, said health care reform should be abandoned if it will “significantly” add to the deficit. Mr. Obama has promised that any reform will not add to the budget imbalance, but 72 percent of the registered voters surveyed by Quinnipiac said they did not think Mr. Obama would be able to deliver on that vow.
A National Public Radio poll of 850 likely voters in late July showed that 48 percent thought the president’s policies have increased the federal deficit and done little to slow job loss, while 45 percent said Mr. Obama has blunted the recession and set a foundation for recovery. The poll also showed 47 percent opposition to the Obama health care reforms in Congress, with 42 percent support
washingtontimes.com
The polls are growing against the Resident and his power- grab policies. While I think a solid majority of people can say that there could be improvement in the Healthcare industry, there is no need to dismantle the whole show, especially if it adds to the debt without fixing the economy first. Many people do not know that there is a provision in HR 3200, in which the government is authorized to reach into your bank account electronically to pay for the  “Healthcare”. That sounds overly intrusive to me, but I am just that way, I guess.
A Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll of 1,011 adults on July 30 showed that 42 percent thought the current health care reforms were a bad idea, while 36 percent thought them a good idea. More surprisingly, Republicans in Congress were more trusted to fix the budget deficit by a 31 percent to 25 percent margin, a drastic turnaround from January, when Democrats held the edge by a margin of 42 percent to 20 percent.
washingtontimes.com
How strange- Republicans are more trusted when it comes to money- duh! Perhaps because the Liberals in government have shown that they neither know the value of the money they have been entrusted with, nor value the trust they had from the American people. Ignorant on both counts, and snobbish to boot. Not a good attitude.
So they call the people in the Town Halls “Unpatriotic”, and “Nazis”- way to go, Botox Betty. Think you can alienate some more people? Quite possibly, as it is my opinion that the Botox is affecting her brain. How else to explain her behavior?
“What’s going on is there is increasing concern, which in some cases has turned to outrage, with how far out of touch and out of control Washington has become,” Mr. Walker said.
Grover Norquist, president of Americans for Tax Reform, also noted that polling was a problem for the Democrats’ attempts to delegitimize their opposition.
“If the polls were showing 80 percent support for Obama’s health care plan, if the polls were showing increasing support for Obama personally, then you could say, ‘Hey where are these people coming from?’ ” Mr. Norquist said. “But every poll shows that support for his plan or what they’re talking about doing on health care is plummeting, personal support for Obama is plummeting.”
washingtontimes.com
Yes, the polls are sliding down, but will this , combined with the town hall meetings be enough to begin to turn the tide, or will the liberal left cram this bill through Congress despite the will of the American people? This problem remains on the cusp at this moment.
A lot will depend on how the town halls go. Even in dissent, we must get the message across that this smells to high heaven, and must be changed. We must do this respectfully, however, and leave the thuggery to the union goons that Pelosi has called on to man the chairs in the halls, to minimize the criticism. Give these goons a chance, and they will show their true colors.
That alone can and should turn the tide irrevocably in the proper direction.
And that direction is towards Freedom of Choice.
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Tags: deficit, disapproval, polls, wrong way
“I mean, if he wanted to (and he should have), he could have settled the economy much sooner, and indeed, it can, and should be argued that he should not have done anything else until that little niggling problem was fixed.”
Maybe you can expand on this? What do you mean by settled the economy? What should Obama have done differently in your opinion?
I think you are being dishonest about Obama and job numbers. Obama did not paint it as some victory as you’ve scoffed at twice now but instead just Oa step in the right direction:
Notice the word “though” and the phrase “a lot further to go.” This is not some victory speech as you present it. You’re being dishonest.
But still there is hope for the start of recovery. Unemployment has declined ever so slightly for two straight months now.
I thought Blake said the media celebrated the drop in jobless numbers, not Obama. Maybe I missed it.
We should never have spent the nearly one trillion dollars. He cut have cut the corporate tax rate in half and eliminated the capital gains tax for a year and then bump it up to half and the economy would have rebounded faster.
Inflation will come next year. I know liberals with whom I work who have mentioned a number of times that they fear the inflation that they know is coming. When it does Obama will be in a big mess and if it is before the next election Democrats could take a big hit.
That is dishonest, though, as they do not add into the mix the people who have quit looking for jobs, so THOSE people are not counted, and some economists say the actual number could be more than double the touted number.
Obama’s numbers aren’t great but he promised a lot and it’s hard to deliver on so much at once even with Democratic control of Congress. His numbers will continue to decline if unemployment stays high and if inflation does come like Big Dog predicts then the misery index won’t help matters. When the recession is officially over and market confidence builds I think you’ll find Obama’s numbers starting to rise again. I doubt very highly we’ll ever see the Bush era 70% disapproval ratings while Obama is at the helm.
The electorate is fickle and he might get high bad numbers if things go south. He has a little problem with Afghanistan right now with predictions of double the number of troops needed, increased spending and increased combat deaths. His base will not be happy and if he does not settle it he could become very unpopular. Time will tell. He tried to remake America against what Americans want and the stimulus added to the problems. Bush should have never started with the bail outs and Obama should never have pushed the stimulus.
I don’t know Adam- If he pushes the healthcare through, and the true cost of cap and trade comes due, we might see the 70% disapproval ratings, as we would be paying over 65% more for all of that.
Do you think we will get a 65% increase in pay? I rather doubt it.
So we will be poorer, and we will know who is to blame.
If Obama blows it after promising so much he may reach 10% approval. Who knows? We’re not talking about the Bush team though who didn’t care much for public opinion until maybe the very end. Obama’s team is going to be very good at winning the message war and keeping their agenda positive in the minds of many Americans even if there are folks like you who disagree every step of the way. I’m not saying that makes his agenda more right or less wrong or whatever, but just that Obama’s team is very good at that sort of thing as you saw in the general election.
I agree that his team is good at bending facts to suit their agenda- there may be none better- that doesn’t make them right, but we’ll see how things shake out.
I’ll agree with you there. You just never know how the public is going to react to anything these days given the 24/7 news cycle and the blogs and twitter and all that garbage.
Of course I still doubt that inflation will get as high as you think, even if your token liberals at work think it will be that way. The Fed has ways of controlling inflation that it didn’t have last time we had high inflation including a new tool Congress gave the Fed which has something to do with banks holding onto money instead of loaning it out into the economy. This stuff is over my head of course but I think it is worth mentioning that what was true in the past is not necessarily so anymore when it comes to monetary policy and high inflation is not viewed as inevitable by man prominent economists right now and that includes Bernanke.
Bernanke was and is part of the problem, as is Geithner.
I just find it hypocritical of the media that when Bush’s employment numbers went to 6.4%, they were described by them as “tepid”, abysmal, and other negative descriptors, but now, with Hussein, a .1% is touted as great news, when in truth, it’s just premature to say one way or another.
First of all Bush’s record on job growth was tepid. Second, Obama himself has said unemployment is going to keep going up despite this small drop. He’s not touting the 0.1% you keep mocking as some major victory and I’m not really seeing the media do it either. Instead Obama is more excited that the number of jobs shed per month is down from where it was last month and way down from few months ago. But the truth is still that unemployment has declined 2 months in a row for whatever reason. Would you rather it be going up still, whatever the cause?
That “unemployment has declined 2 months in a row” is deceptive, as it doesn’t take into account the number of people who have dropped off the unemployment payment numbers, and those who have flat out given up trying to find jobs, so the numbers become iffy.
Is it by design that you keep ignoring the decline in jobs lost since the beginning of the recession?
Whether or not a decline in unemployment rate is deceptive at this point you cannot deny that job loss is way down. Nobody is saying 247,000 is good, just that 247,000 is much better than the AVG 645,000 it was a few months back. It’s not a complete turnaround or victory, but more of a positive sign that the worst is over.
But, the number is reduced by those who have quit looking and many businesses have cut as far as they can at this point. This number will even out or go up again but when inflation hits the unemployed will be part of an ever growing problem.
There comes a point where the numbers have to get smaller. That does not indicate recovery and the stimulus is not responsible. As Obama and Biden are NOW saying, it was not meant to work until next year.
Adam, If you have a bunch of basketballs, and you throw them into a hole, soon you might find yourself tiring, and say, well, I am not throwing as many balls into the hole, or maybe there are not as many balls left, but you tend to forget all the balls that DID go down the hole.
When people quit looking for work, or their jobless benefits run out, they are dropped from the count- it does not mean they are no longer out of work, it just means they are no longer being part of the “unemployed” numbers. This becomes deceiving, as it “appears” that the numbers are getting better- they are, in actuality, not becoming better. A negative is never good in this application.
You say that Bush’s job growth numbers were tepid, but 6.4 aint bad, and if you were to take into account the illegals we had working at the time, and figure their numbers in, they were right about 6.2 percent of the workforce, which, if we had no illegals, we might conceivably have only .2% unemployment.
But then those are probably people who wouldn’t work anyway, for one reason or another.
It would be hard to get 100% employment.
The bottom line is simply that unemployment is a lagging indicator. You’re going to see only small improvements going forward even as we see better than expected improvements in investor confidence and manufacturing numbers.
While you sit here beating a dead horse about how the stimulus has failed and the worst is yet to come, more and more economists are starting to point to the stimulus as the cause behind many of the better than expected values when measuring the state of the economy each month.
I’d say you two might end up with egg on your faces but you know how I feel about people messing with a chicken’s eggs.
Here’s one man’s interesting correlation between Nominal Price and Unemployment using his graph to predict a rally in employment numbers.
But don’t get me wrong, I’m not going to pretend I know for sure things are going to be peachy. I just find it disingenuous on your parts to be so glum in the face of so many positive indicators. I guess that’s what happens when the only thing you measure to determine if you think the economy is on track is what Party controls the White House.
Yes, the nominal price goes down as the unemployment rises, because people do not spend as much on anything- stocks, funds, or cars.
And I wouldn’t care which party is in the WH, but I absolutely believe that his policies are detrimental to our well- being and contrary to the essential tenets of this country. This is unfortunately true for a large number of Dems, but then they DO vote as one, brain- dead automaton.
That is why, if this hellcare bill passes, it will be Dems alone who push this, because they have rejected ALL of the Rep. amendments- now THAT’S partisanship.
The point was simply that nominal prices are spiking so expect a reasonable decline in unemployment to follow if the trends over the last century hold.
That would be in normal times- with the mis- application of the stimulus, who knows.
Perhaps you are right, but I cold also be right in that if we did nothing, as evidenced by your graph, the situation would resolve itself, and we would have saved trillions of dollars not needed.