I’m beginning…just beginning, mind you…to have some doubts about the sanity of our Commander-in-Chief. Sure, I’ve disagreed with almost every piece of domestic policy he’s shoved down our throats in the past year and a half, but I’ve never had any reason to doubt that his mind was as fit as his body.
But then he’s quoted in an NBC interview as claiming this his policies “got us out of this mess.” Obama would like you to believe that the drastic drop in employment in late 2008/early 2009 would have continued at the same pace in perpetuity had he not stepped in and stemmed the tide with his enormous ego fiscal policies. It’s nonsense. The massive employment drops of a year and a half ago, to the tune of roughly 700,000 a month, were never going to continue at that pace. The rate of job loss would slow as employers scaled back to the bare minimum needed to stay in business. In any time of increasing unemployment there is always a peak (or valley, if you prefer) to which the numbers both build up and recede.
Getting us “out of this mess” would not entail tepid job growth where the largest hiring firm in the nation is the Federal government. Getting us out of this mess would mean seeing job growth in the hundreds of thousands per month, not the tens. Getting us out of this mess would involve the unemployment percentage steadily dropping instead of hovering around the 9.5% mark. Let’s consider Obama’s pride and joy, the Stimulus Plan. Only about 50% of the $787 billion has been spent. If you take Obama’s ludicrous assertion that “three million” jobs have been created or saved, that amounts to spending about $131,000 per job. Now that’s government efficiency for ya. Obama promised that passing the stimulus bill would keep the unemployment rate below 8%, but now takes it as a point of pride that the unemployment rate hasn’t gone up to 15%. Why not just tell the people that without the stimulus the unemployment rate would be 20%? Or 25%? Anyone want to believe 50%? Memo to Barry: Saying “it would have been worse” is 1) unprovable, and 2) not saying much of anything at all when things are this bad. He’s starting to remind me of Igor in Young Frankenstein who cheerfully said, “Could be worse, could be raining” just before the deluge started.
George H.W. Bush was accused in 1991 of being out of touch with the common man because he downplayed a mild recession. There was some truth to that, though I think the bigger truth is that H.W. had not been in touch with the common man since he left the military after World War II. But the same media that hammered Bush as an aloof country club Republican passes over Obama as if he’d decorated the White House doorway with the blood of a thousand Republican lambs.
Does Obama really not see the world of hurt this country is in? He and his lackeys keep talking about how this is the “Summer of Recovery” when it’s really just a summer of economic pain. Yes, it’s not as bad as it was during the worst of it 18 months ago, but that’s not the same as good news. There are real people out there hurting, and people so depressed and dispirited that they have given up even looking for work. There are employers who would like to hire but won’t because of the million and one regulations that Obama/Pelosi/Reid have put into place with health care and now with financial reform. Obama has personally put thousands of people out of work with his ridiculous drilling moratorium in the Gulf. The fear of inflation, maybe hyper-inflation, is real. The stock market is bringing new meaning to the word “tumultuous.” The oil spill that Obama was so slow to react to has already crippled the economy of the Gulf areas and threatens to impact the economy of the entire nation. Yet despite all this Barack Obama is on a campaign tour telling everyone that he’s responsible for getting us out of this mess. A man with a sense of decency…a sane man…would wait until we were actually out of it before taking credit.
“Summer of Recovery” indeed.
The Clampdown 