You are correct that you have to live in the now and adjust to things as they are and we are in a period of lowered expectations so people think they are doing well if they aren't losing ground.
Pure nonsense.
First of all, you are ignoring the fact that people in this thread were
not asked if they were doing
well right now, they were asked if they were
better off than they were three years ago. Someone who is
better off might still be struggling. That has precisely jack **** to do with expectations and politics.
Next, you are ignoring any and all data that doesn't provide support your own position. Stock market data, for example. Any moron with a blog and an agenda can cite cherry-picked numbers and charts that imply whatever they want to imply. Only a complete hack considers such overtly biased sources to be useful in any way, shape, or form. An intelligent, unbiased source will put
ALL of the data out there.
Finally, you are employing the fallacy of false causes. In simple terms, this means that you (and your "source", and I use that term very, very loosely) make the claim that correlation equals causation. Despite teh clear fact that every single piece of data cited shows that the
starting point of the decline pre-dates the hypothesized
cause of the decline. That not only indicates piss poor logic skills, but it implies complete and total ignorance of the very nature of cause and effect.
As I said in an earlier post,
at most a president can help speed up or slow down a recovery. They cannot start or stop it, and more often than not they have little to no effect on it, overall.
And frankly, the blogger you cited shows himself to be clueless of why, exactly, this recovery is going slower than others. Take this load of ****, for example: "10. The slow, anemic recovery has contributed to keeping the housing market in a depressed state."
That shows a
profound ignorance of what actually caused the decline: The housing bubble. Jesus himself couldn't raise the housing market to previous levels because the previous levels were all bull****. And the slow nature of this recovery is in part due to the fact that an investment option which had previously been considered "safe" was the cause of of the economic collapse in the first place. The housing market had traditionally been a
positive factor in economic recoveries. This time, we don't
want the housing market to get anywhere
near where it was before the recession for a
least another
decade.
Trying to use real estate data as a way to claim Obama's recovery plans aren't working is downright
asinine. People with such mentalities are actually complaining about real estate investments where they made $90,000 over a 15-year period on a $100,000 investment. That's an appreciation rate of about 4.4% annually over 15 years and a 90% return on the initial investment in 15 years. Just on the value increase. If they rent the property they are probably earning off of the property and if they are smart, they are paying less in mortgage than what they are renting it for meaning that they essentially aren't even really putting in that initial $100,000 since the investment is paying for itself, at
least partially.
But that person might focus on the highest prices during the bubble and come to the
absurd conclusion that they
lost money due to the housing bubble bursting. But they never
had any money. They simply failed to
maximize the return from their investment because they didn't sell when the market was inflated. They are
still getting a mighty fine return on their investment, though. Certainly a more sustainable one.
Like I said, though, if one hand picks the data to suit their goals, they can say almost anything they want. Perhaps educating one's self instead of blindly trusting biased and ignorant sources is a better approach.
impdaddy:
