The First Six Weeks

Greetings from the Left Coast, where we here at Left Coast Blues do the heavy thinking for those who just can’t be bothered.

According to the local newspaper, today (3-3-09) is a “square root day” – a date when both the month and the day are the square root of the last two digits of the year. And that means…well…nothing of significance, really, except that it’s kinda cool in a nerdy sort of way, and we won’t have another date like it until April 4, 2016. But in the spirit of “square root day,” and all matters numerological, I thought I’d share a few more numbers with you.

We’re just finishing the first six weeks of the Obama Presidency. Over the last 6 weeks, the Dow Jones Industrial Average has dropped from 7949 on Inauguration Day to 6726 at today’s close. That’s a 15% decline, on top of the 17.5% decline between Election Day and Inauguration Day. Yep, an overall 30% decline since Election Day. Now you can blame the previous administration all you want, but the fact is that stock prices are driven not by what has happened, but by what investors believe will happen. And clearly they don’t have much faith in Obama’s ability to make things better. In fact, according to Rasmussen, investor confidence reached a record low on February 25. And the longer this goes on, the harder it’s going to be for Obama to dodge responsibility for it.

Also, according to yesterday’s Rasmussen tracking poll, his popularity has dropped from a 70% approval rating down to 58%. He’s now lower than Jimmy Carter was six weeks into his Presidency, and some of us still remember how that turned out. The number of people who strongly approve of President Obama has dropped to 39%, and the number who strongly disapprove of him has risen from the low teens on Inauguration day to 29%.

Yet, they don’t seem to be that concerned about the status of your 401k. Just a couple of weeks ago, Robert Gibbs, the White House press secretary, said, “I think it is unwise to believe that either everything we do is designed to cause an immediate market reaction or that the score should be kept by that.” So they continue sprinting to the left as fast as they can.

We’re looking at a budget plan that projects a $1.75 trillion deficit for 2009, and most honest analysts believe that’s an extremely conservative estimate. And despite his campaign promise to ban earmarks, the budget bill, which Obama has said he would sign, contains roughly 8,600 of them, according to the watchdog group Taxpayers for Common Sense. How do they defend it? Well, according to chief of staff Rahm Emanuel, “That’s last year’s business.” Said Peter Orszag, the administration’s budget chief: “We want to just move on. Let’s get this bill done, get it into law, and move forward.”

In a way, it is “last year’s business:” according to the congressional report that accompanies the budget legislation, President Obama himself, along with Rahm Emanuel, Vice President Joe Biden, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and three other Cabinet secretaries who served in Congress last year are themselves responsible for hundreds of millions of dollars of those earmarks. But I’m sure that’s not what Emanuel meant. He just wants to forget about what they said to get elected, and focus on the political agenda they now want to enact. Remember yesterday’s post about how truth to them is relative and changing?

Of course, much is made of Obama’s plan to “cut the deficit in half” by the end of his first term, but that strikes me like the department store “sale” where they mark up the prices so they can “discount” them back to where they were. The fact is that even if Obama can cut the deficit in half by 2013, it will still be bigger than any deficit under the Bush administration. And once you get past 2013, the deficits are expected to start growing again as more and more Baby Boomers hit retirement and start drawing Social Security and Medicare benefits. So I don’t quite get why “I inherited this terrible deficit, therefore…um, let me see…I know - I’m going to quadruple it! And then I’ll cut it in half over the next three years, and you'll be happy because you’re so dumb you won’t figure out that it’s still the largest in history!” is supposed to be an applause line.

But maybe math works differently on Obama’s side of the looking glass. Anyway, happy square root day. And thanks for listening.