More Obamorons waking up

[scottw]

Even the Aspen Ideas Festival, an annual gathering of the country's brightest lights, isn't Obama country anymore. Lloyd Grove on the president's waning support among the intelligentsia.

You’d think the well-heeled and enlightened eggheads at the Aspen Ideas Festival—which is running all week in this fashionable resort town with heady panel discussions and earnest disquisitions involving all manner of deep thinkers and do-gooders—would be receptive to an intellectually ambitious president with big ideas of his own.

In a way, the folks attending this cerebral conclave pairing the Aspen Institute think tank with the Atlantic Monthly magazine might even be seen as President Obama’s natural base.

Apparently not so much.

“The real problem we have,” Mort Zuckerman said, “are some of the worst economic policies in place today that, in my judgment, go directly against the long-term interests of this country.”

Obama’s top economic adviser, Larry Summers, and his departing budget director, Peter Orszag, can expect heavy weather when they land in Aspen later this week to make their case to this civic-minded clique of wealthy skeptics.

“If you’re asking if the United States is about to become a socialist state, I’d say it’s actually about to become a European state, with the expansiveness of the welfare system and the progressive tax system like what we’ve already experienced in Western Europe,” Harvard business and history professor Niall Ferguson declared during Monday’s kickoff session, offering a withering critique of Obama’s economic policies, which he claimed were encouraging laziness.

“The curse of longterm unemployment is that if you pay people to do nothing, they’ll find themselves doing nothing for very long periods of time,” Ferguson said. “Long-term unemployment is at an all-time high in the United States, and it is a direct consequence of a misconceived public policy.”

Ferguson was joined in his harsh attack by billionaire real estate mogul and New York Daily News owner Mort Zuckerman. Both lambasted Obama’s trillion-dollar deficit spending program—in the name of economic stimulus to cushion the impact of the 2008 financial meltdown—as fiscally ruinous, potentially turning America into a second-rate power.

[RIJIMMY]

polls are show WIDE swing in independants away from the dems. It may be all over for them.
What a lame ride they had!

[PaulS]

stay classy

[striperman36]

And both parties walk away from the working guy laid off, and taking no action on extending unemployment benefits.
Glad AIG got TARP.

[detbuch]

Originally Posted by striperman36

And both parties walk away from the working guy laid off, and taking no action on extending unemployment benefits.
Glad AIG got TARP.

A government solution to helping the unemployed is loaded with bad consequences. Temporary help is understandable; long term benefits can create more problems in attitude and dependency than there are with unemployment. The most useful government action is allowing free markets to create jobs. Your point re Tarp is well taken. Even more to the point is the so-called stimulus. This type of excessive Government spending/money printing tends to suppress markets, not stimulate them, consequently depressing job growth. Having stolen the money from the marketplace to put into the hands of the Government, where half of it still resides, if Government wishes to help the unemployed, especially since it retards the growth that would provide them jobs, it should use the stolen money that sits around doing nothing to pay for extended benefits.

[scottw]

Originally Posted by striperman36

And both parties walk away from the working guy laid off, and taking no action on extending unemployment benefits.
Glad AIG got TARP.

we should just extend unemployment indefinitely, and all the other social programs too, ...at least until you are dead...I mean 99 weeks is WAY TOO little time to find a job....

Labor Dept. Estimates $7.1 Billion in Overpayments to Unemployed
Overpayment Figure Increases From $4.2 Billion the Previous Year By ALICE GOMSTYN
ABC NEWS Business Unit
July 9, 2010
While many Americans are feeling the pain of expired unemployment benefits, some have gotten a good chunk more than they were legally eligible for.

Congress will not extend jobless benefits for the long-term unemployed. Preliminary estimates released by the U.S. Department of Labor find that, in 2009, states made more than $7.1 billion in overpayments in unemployment insurance, up from $4.2 billion the year before. The total amount of unemployment benefits paid in 2009 was $76.8 billion, compared to $41.6 billion in 2008