Open Thread, January 11-17, 2016

username2

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If it's worth saying, but not worth its own post (even in Discussion), then it goes here.

Notes for future OT posters:

1. Please add the 'open_thread' tag.

2. Check if there is an active Open Thread before posting a new one. (Immediately before; refresh the list-of-threads page before posting.)

3. Open Threads should be posted in Discussion, and not Main.

4. Open Threads should start on Monday, and end on Sunday.

Yes, I'm aware politics kills minds.

What did Obama do wrong?

I hear people say (1) the economy didn't grow fast enough and (2) the U.S. is weaker, globally.

Is there objective evidence of either of these claims? Or is this mostly just blue vs. green tribalism?

I think Obama's greatest accomplishment was the overhaul of military spending he worked with Secretary Robert Gates on at the start of his administration. I'm also highly supportive of his executive actions on immigration reform.

I find the Affordable Care Act to be difficult to evaluate. They made so many changes at once that it's hard to ascertain their net effect on health care overall. Yes, increases in health care costs have gone down. Yes, younger people are spending more on insurance that they probably don't need. Yes, there are multiple ways to... (read more)

9knb10y

The economy definitely is not growing fast enough, but blaming Obama doesn't really make sense. Very weak growth is a problem throughout the developed world, and the US economy is if anything better than average. [...] Leaving aside issues that are primarily questions of personal values, I see a couple of important failures that seem pretty objective. * Affordable Care Act: The rollout of Healthcare.gov was an embarrassing debacle, but the law itself just isn't very good--even from a liberal perspective (the basic plan was originally a proposal by the right-wing Heritage Foundation). It doesn't achieve anything like universal coverage, there have been continued large increases in insurance premiums, the insurance "corridors" are hemorrhaging money faster than expected, and there are some signs of the "death spiral." (United Health is losing so much money they plan to exit the [individual] market.) Even Obama has admitted that "if you like your health plan, you can keep it" turned out not to be true. Keep in mind that ACA was designed so that many of its aspects don't take full effect for years, so we still don't really know how things will shake out, but it's clear Obama's signature legislation isn't curing America's healthcare woes. * Obama administration policies of supporting regime change against secular Arab governments has basically been a disaster, leading to disastrous civil wars in Libya and Syria. Islamists are almost certainly a lot stronger than they would have been if the administration had done nothing. The side effects of this are disastrous for long-term US policy goals like supporting European integration, since the resulting refugee crisis has (temporarily?) killed Schengen and made the nationalist parties in Europe stronger. And the crisis is ongoing, we have no idea how bad it will get.

-1Douglas_Knight10y

What are you trying to explain? Why do you believe that Obama did anything wrong? Are you trying to explain his approval ratings? Shouldn't ~50% approval be your default assumption of political polarization? If so, there is nothing to explain. Are they very different from other presidents? A little lower, but nothing out of the ordinary. W's peak approval was just after 9/11. Clinton's peak approval was during the impeachment. Clinton's rose over the course of his term, while W's and Obama's fell. I guess you could interpret that as judging their actions, but W's ended low and Obama's ended mediocre. Added: better than the summary statistics in wikipedia are these graphs (correcting the dead link in wikipedia). Obama had a two year honeymoon period and has bounced around 50/50 since then.