The Daggatt Dare: prove your pessimism!

I'll chime in - at the end - with my comments on the New Hampshire Primary. But first ... Seattle Venture Capitalist Russ Daggatt is big on competitive enterprise.  So why is he – along with nearly all of the tech mavens and moguls – a democrat?

Results. Outcomes that can be measured and compared, and under which Republican governance has proved an utter disaster for market economies and the United States, while most metrics improved markedly across both the Obama and Clinton Administrations.  

This plus the blatant truth that – were he alive today – the oligarchy-hating founder of modern market economics, Adam Smith, would be a democrat, too.

I go into comparison of outcomes in my own way elsewhere. 

But let’s give the floor to Russ, whose long list of statistical comparisons bears no overlap at all with my own!  And yet his scan reaches the same conclusion. If you want market economies to fail and if you are truly suicidal, for the sake of wrathful dogma, then you should vote republican. 

Now, over to Russ Daggatt’s missive:

== The Daggatt Dare ==   

What's incredible is this apparently widespread sense of dissatisfaction. I attribute it to the relentless right wing media Wurlitzer, on one side, and cowardly or cynical Democrats, on the other side.  Whatever the cause, it really is long overdue for some of to speak up and tout the extraordinary success of the Obama presidency. (The Reagan presidency was far less successful and was scandal ridden. But Republicans and their alternative media spent decades spinning it into a legendary success.)

Let me take the obverse of David Brin’s challenge to Republicans to cite any meaningful metric that improved under Bush.  Name any meaningful metric that got worse under President Obama:

When President Obama took office, the economy was declining at a 9% rate and shedding 800,000 jobs a month and we had a $1.4 trillion deficit. Since then, the U.S. has experienced the strongest recovery from the Great Recession of any major industrialized country. In fact, we are the locomotive pulling the rest of the world ahead.

The Recovery Act, in addition to boosting aggregate demand, spurred 45 states to undertake reforms to their education systems. It prompted doctors and hospitals to shift to electronic medical records and provided $90 billion in funding for green energy sources. The portion of the stimulus that lent capital to unproven clean energy firms (which came under withering assault from Republicans, who relentlessly touted the failure of Solyndra, just one firm out of scores that received loans) is projected to earn taxpayers a net $5 billion. Thanks to public investment in the U.S. and abroad, solar energy has undergone revolutionary growth, with capacity growing 130-fold since Obama took office.

Oh, and here is some great data on the revolution in renewable energy under President Obama.

President Obama saved the U.S. auto industry (and with it, millions of jobs) which just set new sales records in 2015. At the same time, new (CAFÉ) regulations that were blocked for 25 years by the GOP are making autos cleaner and more energy efficient, saving drivers billions.

After losing 463,000 private sector jobs during eight years under Bush, we have had a record 70 consecutive months of private sector job growth (beating the old record of 51 months), adding over 14 million new jobs. (And during that time, part-time jobs and minimum wage jobs have actually declined. Which means that more than 100% of the new jobs have been full-time jobs paying more than the minimum wage – despite the minimum wage going up under President Obama.) Unemployment has fallen in half, from 10.0% to 5.0%.

Inflation over the last 12 months has been 0.6%. (The core rate, excluding food and energy, has gone up 1.4%.) Under President Obama, we’ve had the lowest inflation in 50 years. The dollar is up 15% under President Obama (after declining 20% under Bush).

The federal deficit was $1.4 trillion when President Obama took office. It was $439 billion last year – a decline of more than two-thirds. -- But the more relevant metric is the deficit as a percentage of GDP, which peaked at 9.8% as President Obama took office. Last year it was 2.4% - a decline of more than three-quarters and lower than its average over the last 50 years. It is now lower than the nominal growth of GDP, which means total federal debt is declining as a share of the economy.  In other words, much the same as happened under Bill Clinton.  So who are the responsible ones?

(Brin aside: see my own simple chart revealing the Second Derivative of Deficit Spending and how blatant it is that democrats are vastly vastly and vastly more fiscally prudent than republicans. Refute my chart if you can! )

The number of Americans without health insurance has declined by 17 million or more, and since the passage of the Affordable Care Act health care costs have increased at their slowest rate since records have been kept.  Oh, and by the way, what is your gripe again, Republicans? Obamacare started out as your own… damn… plan.

The S&P 500 has more than doubled under President Obama. (It went down 37% over eight years under Bush.) Corporate profits are at record levels.

Dodd-Frank required that banks hold more capital, derivatives must be traded openly on exchanges, large institutions must separate their riskiest forms of trading, and any too-big-to-fail institution must create an advance plan for systemic failure. The law also created the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which protects customers from financial industry abuses in much the same way as the Food and Drug Administration ensures the safety of our food.  

Granted that Dodd-Frank didn’t go far enough in reducing the too-big-to-fail risk and other financial sector sins. So, replace this Congress to fix that.

Undocumented immigrants in the country have declined from 12 million to 11 million. Net migration from Mexico has actually turned negative. At the same time, in the face of Congressional inaction on comprehensive immigration reform, President Obama established enforcement priorities that would allow “Dreamers” who came to this country as young children, and who have no serious criminal record, to stay and work in the country, while focusing limited enforcement resources on criminals and recent arrivals.  Again, and your complaint is…?

(Brin aside: The immigration matter is even more skewed than this. Always (except right after 9/11), republican presidents cut the Border Patrol and dem presidents bolster it, diametrically opposite to their constituent dogmas.  Why?  Find out here.) 

Under President Obama, U.S. oil and gas production has doubled, and we have become the world's largest producer of petroleum products. That has driven down the price of oil, benefiting US consumers while crippling the economies of countries like Russia and Iran.

The cost of electricity generation using wind power fell 61 percent from 2009 to 2015, while the cost of solar power fell 82 percent. These numbers show progress at rates we normally only expect to see for information technology. And they put the cost of renewable energy into a range where it’s competitive with fossil fuels, even at low oil prices.

On the most important long-term issue facing the planet, climate change, President Obama reached a major climate agreement with China, which resulted in the first-ever international agreement by industrialized and developing countries alike to curtail their emissions (an agreement made easier by the revolutionary improvements in green energy, which could allow developing economies to leapfrog straight past the dirty energy stage). The success of this agreement will take decades to measure, but it could well go down in history as Obama’s most significant legacy. He helped jumpstart this historic agreement by enacting new Clean Power Rules that will reduce greenhouse gases and other pollutants.

Under Obama, the U.S. resumed launching climate study satellites that were canceled or sabotaged by the previous administration. You are free to proclaim that his support of scientists is wrong and the House “Science” Committee’s seething hatred of science is appropriate.  But you’d be very wrong.

President Obama took office with almost 200,000 troops on the ground in Iraq and Afghanistan, as the U.S. was bogged down in the two longest wars in its history. Multiple tours of duty of not only active duty soldiers, but also reserves and national guard troops, left our state of military readiness the worst it’s been in our lifetime. Today we have about 10,000 troops in those countries and our military readiness is nearly restored to the 100% level at the end of the Clinton administration. (Does anyone really wish we had still had hundreds of thousands of U.S. soldiers mired down in the midst of a regional Shia-Sunni intra-religious war?)

In 2008, before President Obama took office, Cheney insisted that we had to attack Iran with Iran only a few months away from a bomb. President Obama & Secretary of State Clinton got pretty much everyone in the world that mattered (including the EU, Russia, China, India, Japan, etc.) to impose crippling sanctions on Iran, which eventually brought them to the table. Not only will we have gone eight years with no Iranian nuclear weapons, but President Obama will leave office with Iran’s nuclear program out of commission for many years into the future. 

(Brin aside: Twenty five tons of enriched Uranium eliminated and Iran’s plutonium reactor filled with cement. Attacking Iran wouldn’t have come close to achieving that.  Moreover even a little rapprochement with Iran let’s us do what Nixon did, by going to China… play Iran and Saudi Arabia off each other, instead of being played.)

President Obama did what Bush only promised but failed to do in seven years: He got Bin Laden. Please repeat that sentence as many times as it takes to sink in. And we have had no major act of foreign terrorism on U.S. soil during his presidency.

He finally ended our pointless 55 year Cold War diplomatic freeze with Cuba. And the Florida Cuban-expat community is gearing up to start businesses that will undermine communism the smart way.

He added over two million acres of Wilderness Area and over 1000 river miles to the protections of the Wild and Scenic Rivers Act.

He reformed the student loan program, cutting out redundant middle men and using the billions of dollars in savings to increase Pell grants. Granted, it will take a new Congress to end the nasty provision that declares student loans to be the only kind that cannot be refinanced.

Oh, and despite 24/7 right wing media hyperventilation for weeks, not a single American died of Ebola contracted in the U.S.

The national abortion rate declined roughly 15% under President Obama. And it wasn't because of increased restrictions in some states - in those states, abortions actually went up (they are the same states that make family planning, women's health services and contraception more difficult to access). If it was just due to restrictions, then you would expect teenage pregnancies and births to increase. Instead, they went down, as well. 

And there is much, much more.

If he was a Republican they would be naming airports after him. An aircraft carrier. But listening to Republicans, you’d think he has been a disaster. It is the centerpiece of every GOP candidate’s campaign rant that President Obama has been a disaster!  Only note the lack of actual statistics. Outcomes. Comparison of results.

== A Brin remise ==

Me again, in awe of how well Russ makes this crucial point, how for your own pragmatic self interest, you should never again allow this generation/type of republicans anywhere near a burnt match, let alone a modern, entrepreneurial economy.  

(There used to be grownup republicans who liked science and facts – I even know some of these relics!  May they be seeds for a restored, mature conservatism, out of the coming ashes.)

I will only add this.  If you look at the zillionaires who are democrats… or else libertarians who avoid the GOP like the plague … you’ll see that these are the tech guys who have actually invested in new products, services, and productive capacity.

How ironic! The ones who are enhancing our economy on the supply side are the ones who despise the tax-tomfoolery-voodoo called “Supply Side Economics” – a GOP religious dogma that never had one successful prediction or positive outcome to its credit.  Ever.

It is the other type of mogul – those rich from resource extraction subsidized off public lands, or from inheritance or rent-seeking or Wall Street manipulation, who invested almost none of their Supply Side tax cut largesse in new, productive enterprise, who spend lavishly instead on cheating, bribing officials and buying elections, with the core aim of keeping Supply Side voodoo alive.

Go figure. Only know this.  Ever more of the smart ones are seeing what’s in their own self interest.  As Joe Kennedy said – (I paraphrase) - when his fellow moguls yelled at him, for supporting FDR:

“If Roosevelt’s reforms make the working class happy and healthy and prosperous, I’ll get to keep half my wealth.  That’s better than clutching it tight, then losing it all in revolution.”

===

Oh, I promised to offer my comments on the New Hampshire primary... but this posting is too long.  So I will give them below, as the first comment in this thread.  Chime in with your own!  We have a great, lively blog-cummunity (blogmunity?) down there!  Maybe a bit intellectual... ah well.