Comments about ‘All tied up: presidential race between Mitt Romney and Barack Obama could not be any closer’

Let's try something different. Hand both Romney and Obama an identical IQ, and high school standardized tests. As government employers we have the right to evaluate our candidates. Let's see school transcripts and other vital information instead of the constant rhetoric. Give us some information to work with.

Hutterite

"So long as obama wins, that's OK".

Don't be so vague. List some reasons for your statement. Let's make this a learning experience.

It's a sad commentary on American voters that almost half support our Leftist president who appears Hell-bent on destroying the republic!

He's done virtually nothing in his life... and can't even prove who he is.

Anyone with even a low IQ can see that our only hope for survival is Mitt Romney.

@Riverton Cougar

"When Bush was president, unemployment averaged 5.4%"

Did you seriously just try and play that card?

That's like saying in the Utah/BYU game last year, BYU was on average ahead on the scoreboard, in the first half, only to lose by 44 points!

Bush took over at 4.2% unemployment, it was almost double when he left, 8.3% in February of 2009. When will Republicans accept the fact that his Presidency didn't end in 2007, it extended another 2 years as the economy collapsed.

I have no issue with Republicans hitting Obama because he hasn't fixed the economy quick enough, I think everyone wishes it was already done, but all you're doing is showing your utter head-in-the-sand-ness to actually try and say Obama created the mess this country is in. He inherited a Recession, that was later reclassified as a Deep-Recession, that is just a fact.

Pathetic.

williary,

It's not about Bush. He's gone!! Reagan inherited a bigger mess when he took office, and quite well.

Let's have a president who can DO something, rather than play golf, vacation, campaign, and blame.

This is pathetic.

As reported in the New York Times in 2009:

"The deepest and longest-lasting recession the United States has experienced since then began in 1980, when Jimmy Carter was president (the gross domestic product dropped 9.6 percent in the second quarter of that year) and did not end until fourth-quarter 1982, almost two years into the Reagan presidency. There were positive quarters during this almost three-year period, resulting in what is known as a double-dip recession, but GDP did not return to the 1979 level until well into 2003. Unemployment peaked at 10.6 percent in the fall of 1982.

As can be seen in the accompanying chart, both President Reagan and President Obama inherited an economy suffering from a year of no growth, along with rising unemployment. (The numbers are almost identical.) But Mr. Reagan faced a far direr situation in that inflation was in the double digits and the prime interest rate was at 20 percent. In contrast, Mr. Obama inherited an economy in which inflation was falling (in fact, inflation has been close to zero for this year) and interest rates were very low."

More from New York Times 2009:

"President Obama has taken the polar opposite approach to President Reagan’s to reignite the economic-growth engine. Reagan pushed for cuts in marginal tax rates to encourage people to work, save and invest in an effort to spur the supply side of the economy as well as the demand side. Mr. Obama has chosen only to greatly increase government spending in an attempt to increase demand while, at the same time, many of his new labor, environmental, energy and other regulations are impeding the supply side of the economy.

Mr. Obama had the advantage of both houses of Congress being controlled by his party, so he was able to get his stimulus package passed within a few weeks of taking office. Reagan was handicapped by having the opposition party in control of the House of Representatives, whose members both delayed (until August 1981) and reduced his tax-reduction stimulus package."

The Reagan tax cuts were not fully phased in until 1983, more than two years after he assumed office. Reagan, hobbled by an opposition Congress, was not able to get the spending-growth restraint he wanted, at one point reaching 6 percent of GDP.

@JWB
Filibustering was not so common in the 1980s, yes Obama was able to get the stimulus passed, but only under heavy concessions to republicans so that he could get three Republicans (the two from maine and then-Republican Specter of PA) to support it, for instance half the stimulus bill was/is tax cuts.

re:JWB

David Stockman helped Reagan usher in the largest tax cut in U.S. history, a cut that mainly favored the rich. But things didn’t go exactly as they planned them. The economy sagged, and in 1982 and ’84, Reagan and Stockman agreed to tax increases.

In 1985 Stockman left government and wrote a book critical of his own years in power: The Triumph of Politics: The Inside Story of the Reagan Revolution.

Stockman wrote:

"Through the 1984 election, the old guard earnestly tried to control the deficit, rolling back about 40 percent of the original Reagan tax cuts. But when, in the following years, the Federal Reserve chairman, Paul Volcker, finally crushed inflation, enabling a solid economic rebound, the new tax-cutters not only claimed victory for their supply-side strategy but hooked Republicans for good on the delusion that the economy will outgrow the deficit if plied with enough tax cuts.

By fiscal year 2009, the tax-cutters had reduced federal revenues to 15 percent of gross domestic product, lower than they had been since the 1940s."

JWB, why is it that conservatives just can't seem to get facts straight?

The piece you refer to, The Worst Recession? was not reported in The New York Times, it was an opinion piece in the Washington Times by Richard W. Rahn a senior fellow at the Cato Institute and chairman of the Institute for Global Economic Growth.

The CATO Institute, as I'm sure you are aware, is an extreme conservative think tank, founded as The Charles Koch Foundation. Yes, that Charles Koch. 

Rahn is a staunch advocate of supply side economics and was Vice President of the US Chamber of Commerce during President Reagan's administration.

Now there is nothing wrong with using Rahn as a source, I just don't understand why you would attempt to portray his opinion piece as being  "reported" in the NY Times, as though it were news.

This is very bad news for Obama. Basically the contentious primary and all the negative ads run against Romney by Billionaire Las Vegas mogel Sheldon? Didn't gain leverage for Obama. The all out marketing of MSNBC and NBC, CBS,ABC and CNN has not been effective as surrogates for Obama. The fact that it is basically tied actually means that Obama is losing big in the critical swing states and among independents. The next wave will be outrageous and awful anti- mormon ads which will be level two smear attempts. It will be a bumpy ride but Obama may actually be a one term president. Having lived recently in two liberal states Obama won handily in 2008 I can see him losing both states this time.