Obama '08?

You may have missed this line in High Seas post:

Quote:

Since this is the Obama 08 thread (nobody here thinks it will be updated?!) we haven't heard too much about global warming from that quarter, recently.

We’ve just gotten new evidence confirming the shortcomings of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) — a.k.a., Obamacare. The Kaiser Family Foundation reported that in 2010 employer-sponsored health insurance premiums soared. The average cost for a family policy jumped 9 percent to $15,073, with companies picking up 72 percent ($10,944) and workers the other 28 percent ($4,129). Health costs never decline, but the size of the increases surprised even experts.

You can’t blame the cost surge on the ACA, whose constitutionality the administration has now appealed to the Supreme Court. A few provisions (allowing children to stay on their parents’ policies until they’re 26; eliminating patient payments for some preventive services) probably added a percentage point or two to the total, reckons Kaiser. But that’s just the point: The study reminds us that runaway costs are the health system’s core problem; the ACA does nothing to solve it — and would actually make it worse.
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Given the financial crisis, it was a mistake for President Obama to stage a grand health-care debate. It was bound to be divisive and distracting. Regardless of how the Supreme Court decides, the losing side is likely to feel outraged. The ACA was also bound to raise the cost of hiring workers by compelling employers to provide expensive coverage. That prospect can’t be helping job creation.

Having made one mistake, Obama then compounded it by concentrating on the wrong health-care problem. Though steeped in a high moralism, the case for insuring the uninsured was never as strong as it seemed. In a perfect world, of course, everyone would be covered — and that’s a legitimate goal. But in an imperfect world, choices have to be made. Many of the uninsured, young and healthy, don’t need insurance, even though it would be nice to have. And many uninsured who become ill do get care, with costs shifted onto the premiums of the insured.

Meanwhile, fee-for-service medicine propels the cost spiral upward. Insurance becomes less affordable for small businesses — leading to more uninsured — while living standards and other government services are pinched. Breaking this vicious circle is genuinely hard. That may be why Obama chose not to do it.

Many of the uninsured, young and healthy, don’t need insurance, even though it would be nice to have. And many uninsured who become ill do get care, with costs shifted onto the premiums of the insured.

The only people this graph will suprise; the only one's who will naysay it - are the ones who are so completely blinded by their own version of Faux-influenced reality that they just can no longer recognize the truth.

(not 4.5% as Hawkeye said).

But this chart, originally created by the office of House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, is as phony as a three-dollar bill. Our friends at PolitiFact did a pretty thorough takedown of it in May, giving it their worst rating: “pants on fire.” They even caught the Pelosi people in a bad mathematical error, based on the fact that the Democrats calculated the numbers as if Obama took office a year later than he did.

That error greatly reduced Obama’s supposed percentage increase (from 35 percent to 16 percent) and boosted George W. Bush’s increase (from 86 percent to 115 percent). Pelosi’s office corrected the math error after it was spotted by PolitiFact, but amazingly, the chart that turned up in several places in our Facebook feed was the old chart.

But even with the corrected number, this is still a Four-Pinocchio whopper. Let’s explain why.



The Facts
The person who posted this on Facebook noted: “From the US Treasury Dept — any questions?” But it actually is not a Treasury Department calculation, just manipulated data taken from the Treasury Web site.

The chart has some basic conceptual flaws. For instance, as the debt keeps getting higher, the possible percentage increases will keep getting smaller. Under the mixed-up logic of this chart, a person can go from 10 to 20, and that would be a 100 percent increase. If the next person goes from 20 to 30, that’s only a 50 percent increase, even though the numerical increase (10) is the same.

The chart also cherry-picks the data that portray Obama in the best light by claiming to show “public debt” but in actuality using the statistics for gross debt.

Gross debt includes intergovernmental transactions such as bonds held by Social Security and Medicare, but public debt is the more commonly used figure of national indebtedness, at least among economists.

If the chart actually used public debt rather than gross debt, it would have put Obama and George W. Bush virtually in the same league — 60 percent increase (as of September 2011) for Obama versus 70 percent for Bush — even though Bush served as president much longer.

But the biggest problem is that this is just dumb math. What really counts is not the raw debt numbers, but the size of the debt as a percentage of the gross domestic product. The GDP is the broadest measure of the national economy and directly indicates the nation’s ability to service its debts. In fact, the White House budget office historical tables portray much of the data as a percentage of GDP, because that is the best way to truly compare such numbers over time.

If the chart were recast to show how much the debt went up as a percentage of GDP, it would look pretty bad for Obama after not even three years in office. In fact, Obama does almost twice as poorly as Reagan — and four times worse than George W. Bush.

Reagan: plus 14.9 percentage points
GHW Bush: plus 7.1 percentage points
Clinton: down 13.4 percentage points
GW Bush: plus 5.6 percentage points
Obama: plus 24.6 percentage points

it's the Great Recession that Bush left for the next president