Over at PJ Media, David Goldman wrote a wonderful analysis of the so-called economic recovery. President Obama talks about how things are getting better, but that only makes sense if you ignore reality and create your own metrics. The following graph is included in Mr. Goldman’s article.
The gray bars indicate recessions. The blue line is the percentage of people working. After almost every recession you can easily see a sharp increase in the employment rate. The only two exceptions are the early 1960s and the current administration. My version of the graph highlights the trends.
What caused the spike in the 1980s? I think it was those evil Wall Street investors and that evil Trickle Down Economics that the left claims didn’t work. What caused the rise in the 1990s? The dot-com boom, you know, all of those evil rich kids creating companies with daddy’s trust fund money.
I would also like to point out that despite the recession after the dot-com bust AND the attacks on 9/11 Under Bush and a Republican controlled congress, America was rising economically. Unemployment was around 4%. But what happened? Democrats took control of Congress and the spending spree began. Sadly, President Bush went along with it, which was one of the vital seeds that led to the rise of the Tea Party.
If you listen to the left, America is not a place where people can start a company in a garage, or drop out of college to become 1%-ers. Nobody earns that success, therefore it needs to be stolen and given to the “less fortunate.”
I would like to point out that the largest drop in the employment numbers followed the housing bubble burst while Congress was under Democratic control. I’ve written about how Democrats enabled the disaster we are still recovering from, despite Republican attempts to prevent it. These are facts, not opinions. Why isn’t it getting better? Because the current president is doing nothing to give business the confidence to hire or invest. This is a major distinction. Until our government gets reigned in, businesses will have no choice but to keep things very tight financially.
The bottom line: Obama is making things worse. He is extending America’s suffering. No amount of government spending will help. In fact, it will make 0ur future far worse than most average Americans can imagine. Obama is making things worse. Repeat and share.
Let’s take a trip down memory lane. Some of the OWS crowd are still parroting the Obama campaign mantra of “eight failed years of Bush policies” that half of America bought into. But when you look back at the facts you learn that Obama is on the team that helped create the problem we are facing. This has been well documented (and equally ignored by Democrats and their pet press cronies). Despite 9/11, Bush II enjoyed a strong economy for six years. What changed? 1) Democratic control of Congress, and 2) the much anticipated burst of the housing bubble. Republicans don’t entirely own this process, in fact, Democrats own the vast majority of the responsibility. But that’s not what the President said in his first press conference. (for some perspective on the first presser, read this and/or this.)
“As I said, the one concern I’ve got on the stimulus package, in terms of the debate and listening to some of what’s been said in Congress is that there seems to be a set of folks who — I don’t doubt their sincerity — who just believe that we should do nothing.”
Democrats today are fond of calling Republicans “the party of no” and falsely claiming that Republicans have never offered alternative plans. As Ed Morrissey said after an Obama press conference in 2009, Republicans in both the House and Senate have offered at least two alternative stimulus packages. None of them demanded that Obama “do nothing”. In fact, it was the Congressional Budget Office and not Republicans that suggested that doing nothing might have a better effect than the Obama/Pelosi/Reid stimulus bill.”
At the time Nancy Pelosi, Barney Frank and Chris Dodd among others were, and still are, in complete denial of how this crisis was created. Team Obama campaigned on the “eight years of failed Bush policies” slogan that is frankly a bald-faced lie. In fact, according to Barron’s, “Contrary to a view popularized during the 2008 presidential election season, the current economic crisis was not the result of deregulation. The Bush administration made many mistakes, but deregulation was not one of them. Not only was there no major deregulation passed during the past eight years, but the Bush administration and a Republican Congress approved the most sweeping financial-market regulation in decades.”
Let me repeat that. “The Bush administration and a Republican Congress approved the most sweeping financial-market regulation in decades.” Even Liberal financial genius George Soros has opined on the cause of the crisis.
“Consider how the crisis has unfolded over the past eighteen months. The proximate cause is to be found in the housing bubble or more exactly in the excesses of the sub-prime mortgage market. The longer a double-digit rise in house prices lasted, the more lax the lending practices became. In the end, people could borrow 100 percent of inflated house prices with no money down. Insiders referred to sub-prime loans as ninja loans—no income, no job, no questions asked.” — George Soros
Our economic situation was not created by “eight years of failed Bush policies.” It was not created by big oil or Dick Cheney. It was born in1977 under Jimmy Carter in the form of the CRC; it was strengthened in1995-1999 by Bill Clinton and Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin. Rubin “brokered a deal between the administration and Congress that allowed banking deregulation to move forward. Shortly after the compromise was reached, Rubin took a top position at Citigroup, which went on to embark upon mergers that would have been rendered illegal under Glass-Steagall. As the New York Times put it, Rubin would be leading “what has become the first true American financial conglomerate since the Depression”—a conglomerate that could exist only because of legislation he had just shepherded through Congress.” (source)
Our liberal friends are saying ”But Bush was a de-regulator! It was the deregulation that did it man!” Wrong. GWB started raising red flags in 2001, and disclosed at a Congressional hearing in 2003 that “a new agency would have been created within the Treasury Department to assume supervision of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the government-sponsored companies that are the two largest players in the mortgage lending industry.” What was the Democratic response to this suggestion?”These two entities — Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac — are not in a financial crisis,’‘ (source: see 2:25) said Representative Barney Frank of Massachusetts the ranking Democrat on the Financial Services Committee in 2003. Personally, if we can jail the CEOs of Enron and Worldcom, I think Frank should be in jail for his poitical and financial negligence. He is willfully denying the truth that has put America in a scary place.
So, I implore President Obama and the left to stop with the scare tacticts and stop with the lies. Stop blaming the previous president for the country’s woes and start doing something about it. And I don’t mean do anything, I mean do the right thing. Swift, knee-jerk actions made under diress do not usually have positive outcomes. Funding green companies with billions of tax dollars without doing the proper financial analysis will give you the same result experienced by many that funded anything with “dot com” after its name about a decade ago. Slow down, think this through. And for God’s sake please include both parties in the problem solving process. Stop campaigning, start leading.
A co-worker forwarded me an email that makes so much sense I have no choice but to post it. The following list of lessons comes from Umair Haque via twitter. Dear Congress, dear Mr. President. Stop everything you are doing and read these. They are short enough to fit into your schedule, and simple enough to understand.
- The first lesson is: when you don’t reinvent institutions at a time of systemic failure, the problem doesn’t just magically disappear.
- The second lesson is: when you prop up the institutions causing the crisis, instead of reinventing them, the crisis will deepen.
- The third lesson is: when dysfunctional institutions prop one another up, prosperity’s a house of cards. Crisis becomes stagnation.
- The fourth lesson is: when propping up failed institutions has drained your resources, you’ve turned a crisis into a catastrophe.
- The fifth lesson is: the longer it takes you to see a crisis for what it truly is, the disproportionately worse it’s likely to get.
- The sixth lesson is: when people who are prisoners of the paradigm that caused the crisis are in charge of fixing it, bet on… more crisis.
I’m not buying it.
Back in January of 2009, newly inaugurated President Obama warned America that we needed to support his $750B bailout. He warned that failure to take “dramatic action” on the package as soon as possible would have devastating long-term consequences for America
Two and a half years later we have seen the Obama administration deliver devastating long-term consequences for America, but not because of TARP. Uncontrolled spending and the appointment of radical ideologues has taken America down a financially disastrous path. Now we are being warned that failure to raise the debt ceiling will be “like ‘Star Wars’”
Funny thing, we’ve seen scare tactics before. Hank Paulson said back in October 2008 about the proposed $700B bailout, “I am convinced this bold approach will cost American families far less than the alternative — a continuing series of financial institution failures and frozen credit markets unable to fund economic expansion.”
Did that happen? Of course not. What did happen is that hundreds of banks received billions of dollars and the common man paid the bill without getting anything for it. Credit markets are still tight, borrowing money is as difficult as ever, and there is no end in sight to the president’s desire to spend even more under the guise of saving America via big government.
America has lost all confidence in its leadership. Politicians on both sides of the aisle have spent us into a dark corner and there is no easy way out. From the mouth of our charismatic uniter, the champion of hope and change, all we seem to get is a stern lecture and down the nose condescension the likes the American people have never, ever received from their president before. Instead of guidance and direction we get scare tactics and stern yet hollow words from an inexperienced president in way over his head.
I don’t want to sit through the Sunday news shows and listen to people claiming that words said behind closed doors are the justification for the continued destruction of our economy. Damn it, you people work for us!,If you want our support you better open those doors. Break out some transparency before we open up another can of whoop ass in the voting booth next year. There is no shorter leash than the one around every neck in Congress right now.
And here’s a tip. We need real evidence. Show us charts, cite your sources, and speak in terms that real people can understand. Paulson, Pelosi and Dodd tried to scare us into supporting the $700 billion TARP package. What convincing evidence did Americans see? Nothing. We were told to trust Congress. We were told that behind closed doors some really powerful people were shown very scary charts and that the whole situation was perilous. too perilous for little ol’ taxpayers to get a glimpse at. Funny thing, the $700 billion TARP figure was not even based on any analysis or facts. A Treasury spokeswoman told Forbes magazine “It’s not based on any particular data point, We just wanted to choose a really large number.”
Really? A really large number? Why not eleventy fiveteen twenty seventy? Give me a break people, if you want voter support you better bring something to the table better than a wild-ass guess. So until I see some actual data, some real fact-based consequences, I’m not buying the “debtastrophy” horror movie script you are selling us. IF you provide compelling and realistic data, I’m willing to listen. Until then you have no more credibility chicken little.
Have you seen the latest GM commercial? It’s a minute of liberal emotionalism, underscored with heart-tugging music, and is based on zero economic reality. Give it a view before moving on to my analysis of the GM IPO.
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