Worst U.S. President Ever

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Great joke, Sand.
Dubya truly is the very WORST, ever.

I know I'm going to get a lot of flak for saying this, but Ronald Reagan. On his own, he was a pretty good president, qualified to do the job, and scared every other country on the earth s**tless...

However, the failure in my eyes comes from the fact that his economic policies are still the core of the Republican party today. You know that idea that "reckless spending is good for the economy" that the Republicans are so proud of? That was Reagan's idea (or at least the idea of someone in his staff)... In today's world, the average european makes less money than the average US citizen (albeit working fewer hours), and yet is just as economically stable (if not moreso), and has a good deal of money saved up each year, all because they don't go out and buy s**t every time they have the cash on hand to do so...

The opposite is precisely the counter-thesis. What FDR did during the Great Depression extended it rather than helping the economy improve, and the fact that many of his programs were very very wrongheaded is a well-known fact. I am not going to argue that what FDR did with the bank holiday is terrible, and even if I give you that this is the right choice, this does not mean that he still did not extend the Great Depression with anti-competitive measures, poor rhetoric, tons of misdirected programs, and various misallocations of money that *still* haunt this country. I mean, a man who a significant number of business leaders wanted to *KILL* doesn't seem like the one who will best restore confidence in enterprise in the system.


Sure there is, you are forcing me to do what you want. I consider that something wrong. Also, if I wanted to make another argument, I could argue that current welfare measures are not good due to the fact that they provide poor marginal incentives and thus leave little reason for people to improve their station. I could also argue that political processes are unlikely to ever create good welfare, simply because it is not the interest of the middle class to even care, mostly just to provide aid as helps people feel better. There are no "very socialist countries", only mixed economy welfare states.


Ok, welfare measures, so what? My beef is with the fact that he had poor policy stances and did a lot of nothing in a lot of what he did. I mean, even people such as Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek had no problem with people getting groceries, but that does not mean that FDR was a great president. And the last sentence seems problematic, the money pouring into the food companies is irrelevant, as either this money is taxed away from someone else, or is a Keynesian stimulus anyway.


To me, it seems like a good way to cause regulatory capture by creating a moral hazard. I mean, I suppose it can stabilize the money supply, but the Great Depression was bad partially due to our central bank's failures, and the fact that our banking system was crippled by poor regulatory laws throughout history anyway. I didn't say that Hoover was a great President and rather suggested that he was also a bad one, and if you'll note, it didn't take 7 years to recover from the Great Depression, and we didn't get to a good level of unemployment until we entered the war, as the rate of unemployment was still above or around the tens until 1942, so you are talking about 12-13 years for the economy to recover. As for what economists say, well, honestly, I don't even know which economists you are talking about, and they don't speak with one mouth anyway, so "the economists" is a rather difficult thing to justify, particularly given that some are currently held to be intellectually questionable. In any case, economists have a terrible time with predicting stuff, so you are just saying that highly trained guessers say something, so it hardly matters. I mean, some economists have more weight than others, but still, macroeconomists do not know macroeconomics, they may pretend they do, but they don't, nobody really knows what they are doing with the economy. In any case, 5 years is quite abnormal for a recovery. In any case, most of what I see from the government's actions here is waste, I am still glad that Obama chose a tax cut for fiscal stimulus over some crazed government program.

I don't so much. Because Roosevelt gave an appearance of doing something, Americans are not going to know good policy from bad policy, so why pretend they have the ability. Nope, most don't, but it is rather questionable to completely and thoroughly go the opposite of your 1932 campaign platform. And I don't want politicians in my family, and distrust any actions for them to claim that they are.

That is debatable, and at least has government making moral decisions for the nation, which libertarians would find abhorrent. Also, free market economics does tend to produce the most growth overall, and this eventually benefits everyone. Look at the period of growth from 1870-1910. Also, I have seen studies that found that America's poor have a higher standard of living than Europe's middle class in a number of ways.


I think some economists have questioned the validity of the Keynesian multiplier.


Unions suck.


There is no such thing as "just compensation," and certainly not that should be defined by arbitrary governmental decrees. A worker is worth what the market rate is for their services, and they will tend to receive that.

I certainly know that the power of Keynesian stimulus has been questioned, and if the point is made without reference to a Keynesian stimulus then it is just bad, does not need much to dismiss it.

This.

What about James Buchanan, the president of who literally committed treason along with not keeping the Union together as well.

Grant, Pierce and Harding are far worse than Bush with an honorable mention to my distant relative James Buchanan. Also, Filmore's up there too for managing to achieve absolutely nothing. Although even though he was an awful president, Grant was still one of the greatest generals in the history of the United States.


However, my top favorite presidents are as follows, from #5 to #1: Polk, Wilson, Lincoln, Jefferson, Teddy Roosevelt (who is in the running for "coolest person to ever live" mainly for things like giving a 90-minute long speech after he had been shot)

Jackson also is the reported reason for the 'Cherokee Curse' by which all presidents who were elected in a year ending with 0 died in office (at least until Reagan, and Al Gore...

"Every generation needs a Nixon"...ours was Nixon, yours was Bush...

"Unions suck" because they provide workers with an instrument for fighting the dictatorial powers of management and see to it that workers can fight for a living wage. Walmart has been in court for cheating its workers of their rightful wages and has been forced legally to repay millions for cheating its workers, something it could not do if the workers were organized. That is why Walmart and other managements are so violently against unions. If there were no minimum wage laws workers would have even a worse time. The idiots that are in the management section think that if they can reduce their labor costs to slave levels they could increase their profits but they seem to have no cognizance that labor is consumers and when consumers have to put themselves into debt to buy products and their mortgages and credit cards run out they cannot buy the products they produce. It's a statistical fact that wages in the USA have remained flat for decades while management gained all the rewards for the regular increase in productivity. This is a direct result of the anti-union attitude of government since Reagan. The present economic catastrophe is the result of management shooting itself in the foot.

In one of your comments you condemned FDR because he couldn't walk. How long will it be before you condemn Obama because he's black?

I get bored of class warfare rhetoric pretty quickly. I've heard it all before.


What are their rightful wages? Who determines what a "just wage" is or is not?


There are a number of economists who strongly disagree with your assessment on this matter.


Well, managers tend to be better educated than workers and I doubt they would really be *that* short-sighted and foolish. Nor do employers have such control as you imagine over wages anyways.


In case you were unable to detect it, that was sarcasm. It was a reference to an earlier parody thread we once had about whether you would vote for an amputee for President- I responded with some declamations against "cripples" and got some amusing responses by the time everyone was in on the joke.

Workers don't have to be particularly smart to notice they haven't enough money to get by on. The whole rise of the middle class in the USA came out of the rise of fair labor laws and the recorded shift of wealth away from the middle class into the wealthy classes is a direct outgrowth of the loss of income of the working class. Although the stupidification of the USA is a distressing phenomenon as indicated by a recent report that 25% of the population cannot locate the USA on a map of the world, the superior management class that dumped 50 billion dollars into the Madoff fiasco with clear previous indications to the enforcing government agencies that he was running a ponzi scheme went totally ignored for years, has not displayed any particularly impressive intellect. The revocation by Clinton of Sarbanes Oxley controls on Wall Street let loose the greedy idiots of so-called intellectual superiority that started the mess that the financial system now finds itself and is dragging the world into depression.

Your so-called "humor" in indicating FDR was incompetent because he was paralyzed is in the same class as describing black people as jungle monkeys and cannot be merely put down as bad taste. It was totally inexcusable and disgusting. I grew up during Roosevelt's time and I shudder to think of what other outlandish indications of "humor" you may find entertaining. The anti-Semitic Jew baiting prevalent in previous years in the USA seems to have gone out of style with Hitler's enthusiasm for destroying that sector but Latinos are regularly being beaten to death in Long Island and a helpless black guy was shot to death in Oakland so there are many new areas for you to explore for your future fun.

A causal relationship between these factors is hard to prove, and I could argue that the American middle class began to emerge before the labor laws were enacted, which causes a problem for your proposed chain of causation.


You evidently are unaware of the distinction between sarcasm and more conventional forms of humor.

The decline of the middle class is very evident today. To assume the lack of improvement of wages over the last decades along with the tremendous rise in profits and management benefits has no relationship indicates something lacking in your analytical comprehension.

I am thoroughly acquainted with sarcasm but there is a very clear line between sarcasm and unacceptable declaration and you have crossed it. I lived through the era of Fritz Kuhn and his American Nazis, The America First Committee with Wheeler, Nye and Lindbergh (who accepted an award from Hitler) and who opposed the fight against fascism. I remember well the type of vitriol thrown against FDR at the time and under no circumstances could it be confused with sarcasm.

Well then, I apologize if I have been offensive.

Thanks. I appreciate that. Although I have strong disagreements with a good deal of your comments I find you generally intelligent and worthwhile-

I am especially sensitive to the word "cripple" as I spent the major part of my life trying to give a decent life to my son who was made quadriplegic by a stupid automobile driver at the age of three. He spent the rest of his 33 year life on a respirator but was a brilliant guy and one of the first in the group to get onto the net. We are all "crippled" in one way or another, some more than others.