THE REAL OBAMA ECONOMY

Our economy is stinko.  And most people know it – even some of the ones who, for various reasons, feel compelled to protect and defend Barack Obama by pretending otherwise.

Investors Business Daily is not one of that group – and it has published an excellent, plain-spoken editorial explaining why.

Please read it all by clicking here.  But, for now, read this excerpt and you\’ll see what the problem is:

It seems that every winter, we get poor jobs numbers that Obama apologists blame on the weather – as if we\’ve never experienced snowstorms in January, February and March. And this is the president who says that we have to fear global warming.

Drawing conclusions from one discouraging jobs report or one bad quarter of growth is a fool\’s errand. But the five-year trend on jobs tells us a lot.

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This is a pitiful economic recovery, and the underperformance didn\’t happen by accident. The chart above shows the difference in job growth under President Reagan (whose policies underscored his philosophy that government was “the problem, not the solution”) vs. Obama. We are some 6.5 million jobs short of where we should be. That can\’t be blamed on the weather.

The policy takeaway? Obamanomics is a grand failure. We\’ve spent and borrowed $7 trillion in six years. The Fed has printed and expanded its balance sheet by over $3 trillion and pursued near-zero interest-rate policies.

Fiscal stimulus, tax hikes on the rich, ObamaCare, cash for clunkers, minimum-wage increases, housing bailouts – none of it has returned the economy to anything near the prosperity we saw in the 1980s and \’90s.

Not only does every word of this analysis ring true, but let\’s also remember that the Obama protecters/defenders never fail to remind us that he took office during “the great recession” – as if it were the worst thing that happened since FDR dealt with the great depression (which FDR did, albeit not at all successfully – but that\’s for another blog).

If President Obama had truly turned around a horror show as bad as he claimed, the turnaround, just to get back to par, would have been dramatically greater than it is. let alone what it would have taken for the economy to go beyond flatlining and into a growth mode…which, pretty obviously, is way beyond Mr. Obama\’s capabilities (what isn\’t?).

So we see that, while they don\’t rival his foreign policy failures in scope or dimension, Barack Obama\’s economic failures are at least in the ballpark. 

Can we agree that these last 6 years have not been very good for the home team?