After watching last night's Presidential Debate, I was frankly depressed. And then subsequently listening to the many irrational reactions of the pundits to this Presidential Debate, I was even more depressed. I think this tells you why so many in the country are suffering so much economically.
The President did not do a good enough job of explaining specifically the ways the country's economy has gotten better than it was when he took over.
And he failed to explain why the larger businesses, their stockholders, their executives, and all of their employees are so much better off economically now than they were when he took office, while so many other people are not better off economically.
But worse than the President on this same issue was Mitt Romney, who only continued to attack on what he considered to be the country's many substantial economic negatives, without presenting a balanced view of the country's economic positives. An objective review of the numbers clearly show that Romney's many base Republican supporters.....stockholders, large business owners, their executives and their employees.....are in the aggregate much better off now than they were at the end of the Bush 2 Presidential term.
In my view you have a President who deeply tried to turn the economy around for the entire country, but his well-intentioned economic advisers convinced him to enact economic policies that instead only benefited primarily and immensely the upper half of the US economic scale.
But at least that is a much better approach than what Mitt Romney would have done. Romney's economic approach to the country's Near Depression would have been pretty much laissez faire.....let the country's economy turn around on its own. The one thing of economic substance Romney would have enacted would have been a substantial income tax rate cut for the wealthy, and expecting it to trickle down to everyone else. This policy would have made the economic gap between the wealthy and everyone else even much worse than it is now.
But what the country is looking for now from both Presidential candidates is how this biforcated US economy can be improved for everyone. Neither Romney nor the President did the job here.
I think the policies that President Obama presented clearly lack specificity and also need to be much bolder. The country is looking for much more than this.
But worse than this was what Romney presented. His economic policies are even much less specific. The clear beneficiaries of his policy to cut the top income tax rate of the wealthy are the wealthy.....period. And he needs to explain in detail and with coherent logic how this would help the bottom half of the country economically.
But as bad as both Presidential candidates were in this debate, the worst performer was the Moderator Jim Lehrer, who permitted such an incredibly off target economic discussion by both Presidential candidates.
Clearly, the real loser in this 1st Presidential Debate was the country.
