“Unemployment has never been so high — 9.1 percent,” Paul Wiseman writes, “this long after any recession since World War II. At the same point after the previous three recessions, unemployment averaged just 6.8 percent.”
(H/t Instapundit.)
NB: Tweaked the title.
Let me count the ways…
ObamaCare
Porkulus
Frank-Dodd Bank Law
4,000 new regulations from the above
new taxes exploding like fiscal bombs
How’s Obama’s Hope & Change working out for you? At this rate, he’s an uncooked omelet with all the egg over his face; it has grown to encase his body. The chickens have come home…to roost!
I saw this great summary of the cold, hard facts related to Obama’s record on the economy written by Peter Wehner of Commentary Magazine:
-An unemployment rate of 9.1 percent;
-28 straight months of unemployment being above 8 percent, a post-World War II record;
-Chronic unemployment worse than during the Great Depression (about 6.2 million Americans, 45.1 percent of all unemployed workers in this country, have been jobless for more than six months);
-A nation in which 2.5 million fewer people are employed than when the president was sworn in and which has seen only 600,000 jobs created during our two-year “recovery”;
-A housing crisis that has recently entered a double dip and is now worse than the Great Depression;
-A record $1.65 trillion deficit this year;
-A record $14.3 trillion debt;
-First quarter growth in 2011 of only 1.8 percent;
-A presidency in which real annual growth in GDP averages 1.5 percent, just barely above what it was during the decade of the Great Depression (1.3 percent); and
-Gas prices roughly doubled what they were when Obama took office.
If the GOP candidate consistently (and fearlessly) hammers Obama with these facts in the 2012 election, it seems unfathomable to me that he could be reelected. But as we’ve seen over and over again in the past, finding and backing true conservative candidates who understand this, agree with it, and have the courage to do it is maddeningly elusive.
To be perfectly honest, at this point (and yes, admittedly, VERY early in the process) I’m not optimistic at all. As amazing and unprecedented the Tea Parties were in shaking up the DC Republican establishment in 2010, there just still seems to be too many powerful, embedded GOP dinosaurs in the John McCain mold pulling the strings, setting the Party’s objectives, and controlling its public image. And the left-wing media is all too eager to help them steer the GOP down the same failed “moderate”, “centrist” road to oblivion.
I hope and pray that’s not where we’re headed, but it’s clear to me that to have any shot at winning the White House and taking down Obama in 2012, the real conservatives in the GOP are FIRST going to have to take down the establishment albatrosses that are STILL more interested in their legacies (and being memorialized in the history books as universally-adored-reach-across-the-aisle-bipartisan statesmen) than they are in the future of this country.
http://www.commentarymagazine.com/2011/06/30/the-economy-and-the-record-obama-owns/
Clearly, it just wansn’t enough money. /sarc
Clearly, it just wasn’t enough money. /sarc
That’s because it’s a depression, not a recession; it’s far from even beginning to end; and like the one before it, it’s been made much longer and worse by all the “stimulus” spending during it.
The biggest difference is that this time, it’s not the Germans who are going to suffer hyperinflation and maybe a panic. It’s us. So keep your head and don’t vote for anyone who runs for dictator while promising to end it!
We need to call this recession what it truly is, a depression.
Pile on trillions in national debt and entitlements that make it more expensive to employ people and threaten to suck the life out of everybody for generations to come, and yeah, employers will employ people less.
It’s called, cause and effect. But Obama’s supporters want us not to notice.
It is my dream that one day we will elect a conservative republican who, at some point during his/her term, will change from the republican party to the conservative party thereby giving us a national conservative party from that point forward.
The more I read the financial blogs and commentary essays the more I suspect that the Democrats “Grand Scheme” to pay-off the Debt owed to the Chinese is a strong dose of Hyper-Inflation Dollars like those of the 1970s and 80s. A decade or two of inflation and 30-years later your current dollar’s worth 20-cents on the Dollar….just as today’s’ Dollar worth twenty-cents of the Nixon Dollar. When those two trillion-dollars of low-interest T-Bonds come due to the Chinese in 30-years, they’ll be worth 400-Billion inflated-dollars instead.
But even that requires getting the current spending-gap under control first.
What a plan….GENIUS!!
H-m-m-m-m. Democrat Grand Scheme. DGS.
Looks to me that they are termites eating the last timber holding up the roof and when it falls, light will pour in and they will all scatter underground.
LBJ saw the handwriting on the wall…..think BHO will?
Nice glossing over of any depth of consideration of what the stimulus did considering a) the package was compromised from the start with concessions to Republicans in the form of tax breaks (the least stimulative type of stimulus) and b) where we would be without any kind of stimulus which was the real preference of Republicans.
#12: “Nice glossing over of any depth of consideration of what the stimulus did considering a) the package was compromised from the start with concessions to Republicans in the form of tax breaks (the least stimulative type of stimulus)…”
Fine, Counterfail, let’s not “gloss over” any of the facts related to the Stimulus. Your first TIRED talking point that the Stimulus was “compromised from the start” due to Republican demands is pure bullsh*t. Obama asked for $787 billion from Congress for the spending package and ended up getting even more than he asked for. The final law authorized $820 billion and the CBO recently (May) reported that the final cost is going to be even higher ($830 billion and counting…)
“…and b) where we would be without any kind of stimulus which was the real preference of Republicans.”
Well, according to Obama (and his “best and brightest” economic team of advisers–most of whom have now fled DC to return to their previous positions at universities to avoid the fallout from their complete failure) the Stimulus would cap unemployment at 8 percent. Obama also promised unequivocally that even without the Stimulus, unemployment would not exceed 9 percent. Well, the unemployment rate stands at 9.1 percent and has been above 8 percent for 28 straight months, a post-World War II record.
What this means is that Obama’s policies not only failed to improve US economic conditions, they made them WORSE than they would have been had Obama done NOTHING.
If you disagree and think the Stimulus was a raging success, I suggest before you post a comment to that effect you review the findings of a report issued by the White House’s Council of Economic Advisors on Friday:
http://www.weeklystandard.com/blogs/obama-s-economists-stimulus-has-cost-278000-job_576014.html
It’s never a good sign when the White House quietly releases an economic report on a Friday before a long weekend, and this new report doesn’t disappoint. The White House’s own numbers confirm that the Stimulus is a total failure and is now working in reverse, causing the economy to shed jobs. See for yourself and please, don’t waste our time “glossing over” the report and coming back here to post baseless denials and fabricated defenses of Obama that are not supported by the FACTS. Thanks.
Nicely done, Sean A.
And also, good job of holding Counterfail to the numbers that his own Obama Party produced which stated that, without the “stimulus”, unemployment would be lower than the current figure is.
So Obama and Counterfail’s own numbers prove that the “stimulus” not only had no positive effect….it made things even worse.
Which is no surprise, given that Obama’s own economist found that a) tax cuts are more highly-stimulative to the economy and b) tax increases are highly contractive.
The basic problem here, again, is that Counterfail and his fellow Obamabots start from the premise that the government should confiscate all wealth and “redistribute” it according to ideological adherence. Hence, Counterfail is never going to support a tax cut, since that leaves money in the hands of people who earn it instead of confiscating it from them to give to people like Counterfail who don’t work and don’t want to earn.
#14: “So Obama and Counterfail’s own numbers prove that the “stimulus” not only had no positive effect….it made things even worse.”
Counterfail’s a.m. strategy:
Accuse conservatives of “glossing over of any depth of consideration of what the stimulus did.”
Counterfail’s p.m. strategy:
Gloss over of any depth of consideration of what the stimulus did.
And the hilarious part, Sean A; even Obama’s own economists admit the “stimulus” made matters worse.
My favorite?
The report was written by the White House’s Council of Economic Advisors, a group of three economists who were all handpicked by Obama, and it chronicles the alleged success of the “stimulus” in adding or saving jobs. The council reports that, using “mainstream estimates of economic multipliers for the effects of fiscal stimulus” (which it describes as a “natural way to estimate the effects of” the legislation), the “stimulus” has added or saved just under 2.4 million jobs — whether private or public — at a cost (to date) of $666 billion. That’s a cost to taxpayers of $278,000 per job.
No wonder Counterfail and his ilk are so defensive and tantrum-y. They can’t even fudge the numbers any more.
I am intrigued by the good news/bad news in this analysis:
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Global_Economy/MF14Dj05.html
Until some measure of confidence is restored which will encourage us that we can return to greater employment and some meaningful GDP growth, I believe we are going to drift for a very long time.
Obama is incapable of stimulating trust and his insistence on increasing the deficit in order to throw borrowed money into a fan is a depressing show of impotence on his part.
And this dovetails with the link in #18.
http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/07/04/us-britain-banks-jobs-ifr-idUSTRE7633RT20110704
The most amusing part of Counterflail’s comment: Even though the Stimulus was written by an overwhelmingly Democrat Congress, signed by a Democrat president, and managed by a Democrat administration, it’s still Republicans’ fault that it failed.
Where would we be without any Stimulus? We’d have $800 Billion less in national debt and we would be in better shape, economically, because the market would have worked through its recession without the distorting effects of wasteful Government spending.
#20: “The most amusing part of Counterflail’s comment: Even though the Stimulus was written by an overwhelmingly Democrat Congress, signed by a Democrat president, and managed by a Democrat administration, it’s still Republicans’ fault that it failed.”
It’s in the same category with another talking point a lot of liberals are chanting these days in light of how bad the economy is performing. They’re condemn Republicans/conservatives as evil, power-hungry, anti-American scumbags because we purportedly don’t WANT the economy to improve because if it does, Obama might get the credit for it and it would hurt the GOP’s chances of retaking the Senate and WH.
It’s as if they think that if all of us conservatives just crossed our fingers, prayed reeeeelly reeeeelly hard, and authentically hoped for Obama’s policies to work, then somehow they would. Or that our surly, pessimistic attitudes are CAUSING Obama’s policies to fail. It’s just unreal. They’re so insane. Next thing, some liberal is going to tell me that it’s my fault Tinkerbell died because I didn’t TRULY believe in faeries and clap more enthusiastically during a performance of Peter Pan.
Hmmmmmm….maybe if we clap louder and believe reeeeeelly reeeeeelly hard in Keynesian economics and socialism the economy will improve. We all have to do our part, I guess.