Has Obama Adjusted his Poker Game?

by: tremayne

Thu Feb 26, 2009 at 20:06


During the designing of the stimulus bill Barack Obama's team bet against itself: they threw in a bunch of stuff, mostly huge tax cuts, in anticipation of Republican objection to their spending plan: "Look how bipartisan we are, we're giving you stuff before you even ask for it."

When every single Republican in the House voted against the bill the White House seemed to realize their mistake. Sure, Rahm Emanuel talked about what was necessary to get a bill passed but it was pretty clear a different approach would have yielded the same number of Senate Republican votes and a better bill. Now, with the budget bill the Obama administration has proposed, it seems they have learned a lesson. Even moderates are unhappy. Here's Andrew Sullivan, heretofore an Obama cheerleader:

If you believe, as I do, that withdrawing from Iraq won't happen as promised, then there is close to no actual spending restraint anywhere in sight. We are being presented with what can only be described as a massive increase in government spending and power with the only fiscal balance being wringing much more money from the successful. The president predicted a tight budget and spending control in his non-SOTU, and he appealed to fiscal conservatives by promising a long-term attack on entitlement spending. I see nothing here yet that fulfills that promise.

It is, indeed, a big bill. There will be a lot of squawking and the final bill will almost certainly be smaller. But I think a lesson has been learned: make them fight you for every little concession before you give anything away for free.
tremayne :: Has Obama Adjusted his Poker Game?

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Has Obama Adjusted his Poker Game? | 15 comments
Please, please, please, please (4.00 / 1)
...be right about this.

:-)

Karl in Drexel Hill, PA

About that poker metaphor... (2.67 / 3)
Obama blew $9.7 trillion on the first hand, and unless China decides to buy a humongous amount of US debt, the next time Obama writes a check for more chips, that puppy will bounce.

I know he's only been President for a month, but nobody said he had to go all in on the first hand, and lose.

So it's fair to say that if Obama were playing for the house, he would already be out of a job, but since he's playing for the suckers instead, le parti continue, as they say in Monte Carlo.

It's frustrating, isn't it? (4.00 / 4)
It's counterpoints like this that prevent me from reading too much into Obama's alleged game plan and keep the skepticism raging.

It's like his little "fiscal discipline" dog and pony show the other day. Are the GOoPers going to believe that? Of course not. Are Dems on the Hill, who have a clue about budgets and whatnot, going to believe it? Of course not. So it was all for "our" (read: low-information voters) consumption. He's going to cut the deficit in half in four years? Sheesh. The only way to do that is to raid SS and destroy Medicare/aid, which is undoubtedly the point.

If ever there was a time to not play games with the very same people who are losing their livelihoods, homes and any possibility of a retirement, this would be it, no?

So while I hope tremayne is right, I just can't shake this nagging feeling we're being punked. Which is not to say all the news that comes out of Obamaville is bad, it's just that what sounds good initially thus far has turned out to be less than meets the eye:

"Closing Gitmo" means moving it to the Bagram Torture Center; "We don't torture," but Panetta still reserves the right to exceed the Army Manual at will and they will also continue the rendition program; We'll get the "combat troops out by Aug 2010", except we won't move anything until after the elections which will likely happen in March of that year and so on and on an on, leaving one to doubt if any of this rhetoric has any truth to it at all.

And while we can blow 10% of GDP on throwing money down the banking black hole all because "it's not within our culture" to seize these feculent pieces of garbage, we can only spend 1.3% of GDP on getting the real economy functioning?

The doubletalk gets old in a hurry. I hope Obama gets a clue and realizes that government is not a faith-based operation.

Simply using words like "change," "honesty" and "openness" in a sentence is not a substitute for actually DOING those things.



When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men living together in society, they create for themselves in the course of time a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that glorifies it.

-- Frederic Bastiat, "The Law", 1850

[ Parent ]
Still lying and trolling, I see (2.00 / 2)
That $9.7 billion includes Fed outlays and bailout bills under Bush. Obama so far is responsible for only a fraction of this. But hey, if you're going to lie, lie big...

All I want to know is who do you work for, and how much do they overpay you for this?

"Those who stand for nothing fall for anything...Mankind are forever destined to be the dupes of bold & cunning imposture" -- Alexander Hamilton

[ Parent ]
Obama was totally blameless about the first bailout! (0.00 / 1)
After all, he was only the Presidential nominee of the majority party in the House and Senate and then President-Elect when it happened.

He obviously had no power!

He obviously had to support the humongous give-away to bank speculators!

But...

Why?

(And I don't expect any kind of answer from the pseudonym "kovie.")

 

[ Parent ]
Here's your answer, troll (0.00 / 0)
There is reality-based criticism, and then there's lying-based trolling. You are a troll. You don't deserve any more of an answer, Mr. "Freeze".

"Those who stand for nothing fall for anything...Mankind are forever destined to be the dupes of bold & cunning imposture" -- Alexander Hamilton
[ Parent ]
Is there some gamesmanship (4.00 / 1)
in the FY2009 Social Security projections?

Page 119 shows a projected collection of 654 billion, and an expected outlay of 662 billion.

Unless I'm wrong that's a 8 billion dollar short fall.

The ten year projection shows a shortfall of 204 billion.

I remember this Krugman clip from 2007:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v...

Is Obama serious?

Well, there are a lot less payroll taxes being paid... (0.00 / 0)
...at the moment with all the job losses... don't know if that figures into the thing...

REID: Voting against us was never part of our arrangement!
SPECTER: I am altering the deal! Pray I don't alter it any further!
REID: This deal keeps getting worse all the time!
[ Parent ]
Good catch! (0.00 / 0)
...although it's probably fair to say that this budget outline is just a stalking-horse for whatever comes next, or strategic over-reaching, as tremayne reads it, or some other unfathomable move that only Lakoff and Obama will ever understand, but in and of itself...

It means absolutely nothing.

 

[ Parent ]
A budget means nothing (0.00 / 0)
Uhuh.

"Those who stand for nothing fall for anything...Mankind are forever destined to be the dupes of bold & cunning imposture" -- Alexander Hamilton
[ Parent ]
2008 Trustees Report (4.00 / 2)
shows that for OASDI (combined components of SS program):
Total income for 2007 was 784.9 billion
Total expenditures for 2007 was 594.5 billion

and that the total assets on hand at the end of 2007 were 2,238.5 billion.

http://www.ssa.gov/OACT/TR/TR0...

So I don't understand those numbers in the budget report.  The unemployment projections aren't that high to lose that much revenue are they?  Maybe they aren't counting the interest income on the IOU treasuries for next year?  

Also, from everything I've read over the last several years, we don't hit a shortfall until sometime around 2042.  I don't know if this takes into account downturns in the economy, but one would think it does.

[ Parent ]
I'm guessing that it's due to a projected severe rise in unemployment (0.00 / 0)
and decreased capital gains and business taxes. In case you haven't noticed we're in the worst recession since the Great Depression and it's expected to get worse over the next year or two, so comparisons to '07, which was the last boom year, aren't really useful. ;-)

Plus, boomers are now retiring, and fewer workers, combined with a severe recession, could certainly account for this shortfall.

Also, that 2042 figure isn't very useful, as it's based on very pessimistic economic projections--which do, of course, take all projected economic developments, but you really can't do that with any accuracy beyond 5-10 years. The economy would have to grow at an anemic pace for the next 30 years for the trust fund to run out in '42, and that's not likely.

People need to just relax. Lots of things to be concerned over with Obama, but this budget isn't one of them. We're going to need to spend our asses off for the next 5-10 years, raise taxes on the rich and greedy corporations, and decrease defense spending. With even Krugman now onboard on the trolls and Repubs are going to complain.

"Those who stand for nothing fall for anything...Mankind are forever destined to be the dupes of bold & cunning imposture" -- Alexander Hamilton

[ Parent ]
Boomers have started to retire (0.00 / 0)
And fewer workers are entering the workforce, which has been projected for decades, and the net yearly addition to the surplus was supposed to start declining this year. Outlays are actually not supposed to exceed revenuues for another 8-10 years, but perhaps this is a short-term shortfall due to a projected rise in unemployment and matching decrease in payroll taxes due to the recession. I seriously doubt that there's any funny business going on here, and this is a miniscule shortfall considering how big the trust fund is.

"Those who stand for nothing fall for anything...Mankind are forever destined to be the dupes of bold & cunning imposture" -- Alexander Hamilton
[ Parent ]
Better Days Maybe (0.00 / 0)
I've been ripping Obama mercilessly since last January, but I think--I hope--he might be coming around. The stakes are a lot higher now than when he started running for president.

Part of my optimism centers around Peter Orszag. If he's in the inner circle, we might be okay.

The director of OBM is clearly in the inner circle (4.00 / 2)
I was really impressed by this budget. Bold, gutsy, smart, principled, a big FU to the GOP and rich crooks and a big thumbs up to the other 80% of us.

"Those who stand for nothing fall for anything...Mankind are forever destined to be the dupes of bold & cunning imposture" -- Alexander Hamilton
[ Parent ]
Has Obama Adjusted his Poker Game? | 15 comments





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