4-5% unemployment is full employment. It’s now up to about 8.6%. Serious but hardly catastrophic. How much would it have cost to extend benefits to the genuinely unemployed until the economy recovers? Obama is not ambitious. He is foolishly reckless. Or perhaps someone who wants to desroy the economy?

Basilsbest on February 26, 2009 at 10:11 PM

Never underestimate the magic of liberal static analysis to cause *real* economic catastrophe. Do you suppose Obama’s deficit projections assume 8.6% unemployment, or worse? Of course not. They assume American businesses will go about cheerfully hiring people left and right, getting us back to those 4% Bush numbers, and investing in new products and industrial capital, even as their tax burdens soar, and five trillion dollars of magically-conjured stimulus cash pushes down the value of every existing dollar. And even with these ridiculous assumptions, Obama openly states he’ll roll into his re-election campaign with a $15 trillion national debt. Imagine what 2010 will be like, with a baffled administration full of liberal ideologues and Clinton retreads, scratching their heads and wondering why the deficits are so much *bigger* than they anticipated…

The perfect storm. Now all we need is a major terrorist strike and we can all be ruled through military law under the new Commander Comrade in Chief.

Badbrucskie on February 26, 2009 at 10:42 PM

… and that’s assuming we don’t get rocked by another major terror attack. I see your reasoning about a national security crisis being used for a major power grab, and the thought of all those liberals who spent 2001 – 2008 having seizures about Bush reading their library cards, turning on a dime and happily injecting themselves with electronic tracking chips so Papa Doc Obama can track their position to within 100 yards, is an amusing thought. However, I find myself doubting Obama expects, or hopes for, a military crisis. In fact, I don’t think he can even conceive of one. I think he’s internalized the Left’s bleating about the “manufactured” War on Terror, and accepts the prevailing liberal consensus that 9/11 was either a kind of natural disaster, or a one-time act of jet-fueled vandalism that America pretty much deserved. He also has a boundless faith in his own ability to charm anyone into doing anything, and will be as profoundly surprised as any other liberal when his “partners in peace” hang up the phone with him and hand a list of bombing targets to their subordinates.

With the heat Obama is already taking from the wilder precincts of the Left for his quiet embrace of the hated Bushitler’s policies in the WOT, he can’t relish the thought of having to commit his budget-slashed, overextended military to battle against Iran or Syria. And how would the teetering, beyond-bankrupt economy of Fascist America 2010 absorb the economic damage of another 9/11? The very reason I most fear another attack is probable is that it would be so incredibly effective. A guy who’s maxed out all his credit cards and taken four mortgages on his house is not going to have the resources to deal with a home invasion. How, exactly, would the bloated pork factory of contemporary America go onto a war footing? Sell war bonds? Who’s going to give up their plate of stimulus pork to fund a major military operation? An exhausted nation is a vulnerable nation.

Doctor Zero on February 26, 2009 at 11:10 PM