How much responsibility do Republicans have for the weak recovery?

A lot of people are blaming the republican party's obstructionist methods for the failure to reach any agreement on economic matters and thus ensuring that the recovery is weak. Do you agree with this view? Why or why not?

Yes, America's political system is seriously hindering effective debate.

Too much factors to list, and I am not going to in this new format.
(Bring back the old all assuming thread)

I'm done with just blaming the Republicans. Obama should be proving to be a better leader than this. At least going with what he promised.

In conclusion the nation lacks good leaders and has a crap political system.

english_jewel wrote:I'm done with just blaming the Republicans. Obama should be proving to be a better leader than this. At least going with what he promised.

In conclusion the nation lacks good leaders and has a crap political system.

Well Obama doesn't make the final decision.... everything he purposes gets shot down by the Reps when getting voted on.....for example the health care, increasing taxes etc.....and currently the Reps hold more seats in the Senate if i am not wrong....

The political system in question is the longest running representative system in the world... It's not the system that's the current problem so much as the people of the country. Obama's campaign was built on plans to bridge the gap between the parties and build compromises and bridges between the two sides. Unfortunately, once he got into office both parties went even further to their respective sides and left Obama isolated in his works. And even when the compromise DOES work and gets a bill passed he gets only criticism for it from much of the punditry.

It really is a nonsense situation.

RedOranje wrote:The political system in question is the longest running representative system in the world... It's not the system that's the current problem so much as the people of the country. Obama's campaign was built on plans to bridge the gap between the parties and build compromises and bridges between the two sides. Unfortunately, once he got into office both parties went even further to their respective sides and left Obama isolated in his works. And even when the compromise DOES work and gets a bill passed he gets only criticism for it from much of the punditry.

It really is a nonsense situation.

The political system was built to maintain parity and stability. When you have two polar parties, and a bunch of lobby's influencing power, all in a rugged system that does not allow for haste. You get yourself a slow process.

When people get impatient at the slow process, the process gets stopped times and time again. What is the use of passing a health-care bill that is watered down to nothing. Rome wan not built in a day, and the health care project for the U.S. includes hundreds of thousands of people.

The system is never the real problem, it is the people who use the system that are. Which is why the system chages with the people. Some politicians like Rick Perry stick to the system like a holy grail, unaware that the U.S. had several silent revolutions since its inception.

While the ideal of the system is the longest running, the system itself changed shape several times. Look at shift in the FDR era for a clear shift in the system.

So republicans should help obama print more money and socialize the country? This will just result in things becoming worse

Yuri Yukuv wrote:So republicans should help obama print more money and socialize the country? This will just result in things becoming worse

This is the type of nonsense propaganda that makes the situation untenable. I did not say the republicans were alone to blame, any more than Obama is attempting to make the US "socialist"... not that socialism is actually a bad thing in any case.

I'd have expected better of you, Yuri.

I wasnt adressing you redoranje, I was addressing OP. I know what you are talking about Obama has always been someone that wanted to get everyones approval before he went ahead. As much as I dont like it I admit that the biggest hinderance to obama's plans were not the republicans but how he paid attention to republicans even when they had no power. Obama could have passed laws that mandated that you had to be high to drive a car in his first two years but he kept trying to please everyone. Instead the republics made him stop whenever they shouted from the sidelines.

I am not going overboard and saying that obama is trying to make the country socialist rather that he is trying to socialize it more than it is (which is not as capitalistic as it used to be)

For me as a libertarian I believe that the problem is that we as a country subscribed to crony capitalism, I fear if we counter this by socializing we will be worse off and it will be harder to change as people become reliant on the government with little cushion.

We as a people messed up when we borrowed more and more to consume more and more, the way to become healthy again is to tighten our belts, work hard and deleverage for the next 5 or so years. What obama plans to do is to further leverage us.