Oh, the Lies Obama Keeps Telling
Ex-president Obama hit the mid-term campaign trail with an all-new whopper: “Let’s just remember when this recovery started.” The implication is that record stock-market and business-optimism highs, as well as record lows in unemployment and jobless-claims, are just continuations of trends ignited by his policies and not the result of Republican governance. Honestly, is there anything more unbecoming than a retired leader with an underwhelming resume taking credit for his successor’s results. The clinical term for Obama’s behavior is delusional narcissism.
Two months into office, Obama was already playing the blame game: “By any measure, my administration has inherited a fiscal disaster” – and he was still playing it two years later, blaming George W. Bush for driving “the car into the ditch, [making] it as difficult as possible for us to pull [the economy] back.” By 2012, Obama was trashing American self-determination (education and hard work) with his “you did not build that” speech. On his way out of office in 2016, he told the New York Times, “compare our economic performance to how countries that have wrenching financial crises perform [and] we probably managed this better than any large economy on earth in modern history.” The business term for Obama’s behavior is IGJAM syndrome (I’m Great Just Ask Me).
Kevin Hassett, the current Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors, exposed Obama’s false claims like a hot truth-knife cutting through BS butter. With chart after chart, he showed sharp spikes that coincided with Hillary Clinton’s concession in the following key metrics:
Small business optimism
Business investment (up $300 billion over trend)
Durable goods orders and shipments
The ISM purchasing managers index
EIN applications required for businesses start-ups
Prime-age workers re-entering the labor force
Blue-collar employment
Capital spending (up 10%)
In the spirit of full disclosure, some events (stock market highs and business optimism) might be due to the fact Hillary Clinton was NOT elected. However, Trump’s Republican economic message was the same as Reagan’s: remove tax-and-regulation constraints on the economy. I believe any growth that took place during the Obama years occurred in spite of his policies and the economy would have bounced back sooner with McCain in the White House.
Let’s consider Obama’s effect on net job creation (total sum of job losses and gains). George W. Bush (8 years) created only 2.1 million jobs. Barack Obama (8 years) created only 2.6 million (lost 8.7 million jobs and added 11.3 million). Donald Trump (1.5 years) has created 3.4 million jobs. For comparison’s sake, Ronald Reagan (8 years) created 15.9 million jobs and Bill Clinton (8 years) created 22.9 million jobs. Reagan and Clinton managed post-recession recoveries that launched boom eras. After Clinton’s results, Obama’s excuses should make Democrats apologize.
Now consider annualized GDP growth (total growth from inauguration to last day in office) under previous Democrats. Obama’s GDP growth was only 2.1% (the worst since World War II), when even Jimmy Carter delivered 3.4% growth. Bill Clinton’s GDP growth was 3.7%. Lyndon Johnson managed 5.2% GDP growth and John Kennedy delivered 5.5% GDP growth (I wish he’d gotten 8 years). I consider myself a clear-eyed Republican, who credits a Democrat (such as Bill Clinton) for a job well done. Obama was an economic disaster - and that is based on irrefutable data.
Democrats and their media cronies are “frightened” by the current budget deficit that means to paint a Republican president as reckless. To be sure, budget deficits are a concern; however, the US economy is in a massive private-public investment phase that is needed to re-build America’s small business and industrial foundation. Obama re-built almost nothing, but the national debt grew from $11.5 trillion to $20 trillion on his watch – even with $3.5 trillion less interest paid because of the Fed's quantitative easing. As far as budget deficits go, the CBO forecast a 10-year cumulative budget deficit of $4.32 trillion when Obama took office, and that will actually be $8.93 trillion (double the pre-Obama projection).
I know Obama intends to help Democrats re-take Congress, but he should talk about Michelle or his daughters – anything but his handling of the economy. He should not remind middle-class voters that median household income actually fell 4% on his watch or remind moderates that his policies increased Americans living in poverty to 14.5 percent of the population. He should not remind taxpayers his policies created 13 million more food-stamp recipients (46.5 million Americans by 2016).
Above all, Obama should not remind blue-collar voters 303,000 manufacturing jobs disappeared on his watch, because they might remember his claim that Trump would need a “magic wand” to bring manufacturing jobs back to the USA. Now that Republican policies have added 330,000 good-paying factory jobs, mid-term voters just might ask themselves: why throw away the magic wand?