| Economy: Spend a lot of money via
TARP I and TARP II and otherwise let
Bernanke handle it. There is one view that the US went from
The Great Depression to a hot economy,
with 2-3 jobs for everyone who could work,
in just 90 days after people started
shooting at us. We spent huge bucks,
and nearly everything that the bucks
bought was junk on a battlefield in
a few weeks or sold for war surplus.
Still, the spending, even on stuff that
was just junk, got us out of The Great
Depression. My view is that mostly the extra spending
was just wasted, but, as for the WWII
example, have to believe that even wasted
such spending can get us out of a great
depression. So, I'm not totally against
the spending. But the waste was still
a black mark. We didn't have just to
waste so much of the money. OBL? Fine. But bringing in Hollywood
to make a movie and letting out
secret information on Navy Seal tactics
was not good. I credit the Navy
Seals and the DoD. Even if a president
doesn't do anything, there still is the
rest of the government, and sometimes
it does things. So, can credit Obama
for not messing up a good effort
across the Potomac River in that five
sided funny farm. US out of Iraq? Another post in this
thread says that that was just the
schedule anyway. I can't claim that Obama never does
anything. Still, I see a difference:
It appears to me that he has the strategy
I tried to describe, on a lot of headline
issues, pass out a lot of
platitudes but actually do something
on only a small fraction of those.
Otherwise do relatively little and, thus,
don't get blamed for failures. It's all on a continuum and not
0 or 1. It just looks to me like
he talks the talk without walking the
walk, or some such, more than other
presidents since, say, FDR. Maybe it's good pragmatic leadership,
and if so most of the blame is on the
mainstream media and the voters. US
voters are awash in power, can shake DC
just by pulling some levers behind a
curtain, and with the Internet are awash
in information. If Obama gets away with
what the OP described, then the voters
get what they deserve. |
The U.S. was the only major country with cities and factories left standing, that weren't hit by wave after wave of bombers, so rebuilding your country necessitated buying U.S. goods.
The U.S. also suffered relatively fewer casualties than the other major players. The Nazi scientists didn't hurt either.
You are correct in that spending money on otherwise useless military items / people, is indeed useless[0], though those receiving military contracts argue the opposite, called "Military Keynesianism".
[0]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window#Th...