Four More Years (Of Failure By Any Economic Metric)!
Actual flyer as seen in the White House break room, detailing President Obama’s double secret plan to balance the budget: assume all Americans are as bad at math as he is. |
‘Puter was making his daily round of blogs he enjoys. Over at Glenn Reynolds’ Instapundit ‘Puter happened onto this pithy answer to the question on everyone’s lips: “Are you better off today than you were four years ago?”
The editors at Investor’s Business Daily succinctly state President Obama’s four year track record of failure on all fronts. The editorial is so good, ‘Puter reprints it in its entirety, but you should click over to Investor’s Business Daily’s site so they get credit with their advertisers.
Economic Conditions: All weekend, Democratic party leaders kept fumbling their answer to a simple question: Are we better off than we were four years ago? There’s a good reason for that: We’re not.
It wasn’t until Monday that the campaign was able to figure out how to answer the question, with Obama’s deputy campaign manager, Stephanie Cutter, saying, “Absolutely.”
Obama’s argument is simple: The economy was headed for a second Great Depression when he took office — hemorrhaging GDP and jobs. His stimulus, the auto bailouts and so on, prevented that, and the economy has since been slowly digging out of the massive ditch into which President Bush drove it. Thus, Obama says, he deserves an “incomplete” grade.
It’s quite a stretch that Obama stopped another depression. The recession ended just five months into his first term, before most of his policies had a chance to take effect. It’s an even bigger stretch to say that people’s lives have been improving during the 3-year-old Obama “recovery,” which started in June 2009.
By most measures the country isn’t making slow progress; it’s falling further behind. Some examples:
• Median incomes: These have fallen 7.3% since Obama took office, which translates into an average of $4,000. Since the so-called recovery started, median incomes continued to fall, dropping $2,544, or 4.8%.
• Long-term unemployed: More than three years into Obama’s recovery, 811,000 more still fall into this category than when the recession ended.
• Poverty: The poverty rate climbed to 15.1% in 2010, up from 14.3% in 2009, and economists think it may have hit 15.7% last year, highest since the 1960s.
• Food stamps: There are 11.8 million more people on food stamps since Obama’s recovery started.
• Disability: More than 1 million workers have been added to Social Security’s disability program in the last three years.
• Gas prices: A gallon of gas cost $1.89 when Obama was sworn in. By June 2009, the price was $2.70. Today, it’s $3.84.
• Misery Index: When Obama took office, the combination of unemployment and inflation stood at 7.83. Today it’s 9.71.
• Union membership: Even unions are worse off under Obama, with membership dropping half a million between 2009 and 2011.
• Debt: Everyone is far worse off if you just look at the national debt. It has climbed more than $5 trillion under Obama, crossing $16 trillion for the first time on Tuesday and driving the U.S. credit rating down.
Ironically, the only people better off under Obama are corporate chieftains, who’ve seen corporate profits climb more than 50% under Obama’s “recovery,” and investors, who’ve benefited from a near-doubling in the Dow industrials from its March 2009 lows.
Given this record, we can only hope Obama doesn’t have the chance to get a “complete” on his plans.
The next time one of the hairy-limbed, patchouli-stinking, misspelled-placard-carrying lliberals dares to defend President Obama’s economy, smack them down with facts. Just stand back so you’re not covered with hippie brain particles after you’ve blown their mind.
Always right, unless he isn’t, the infallible Ghettoputer F. X. Gormogons claims to be an in-law of the Volgi, although no one really believes this.
’Puter carefully follows economic and financial trends, legal affairs, and serves as the Gormogons’ financial and legal advisor. He successfully defended us against a lawsuit from a liquor distributor worth hundreds of thousands of dollars in unpaid deliveries of bootleg shandies.
The Geep has an IQ so high it is untestable and attempts to measure it have resulted in dangerously unstable results as well as injuries to researchers. Coincidentally, he publishes intelligence tests as a side gig.
His sarcasm is so highly developed it borders on the psychic, and he is often able to insult a person even before meeting them. ’Puter enjoys hunting small game with 000 slugs and punt guns, correcting homilies in real time at Mass, and undermining unions. ’Puter likes to wear a hockey mask and carry an axe into public campgrounds, where he bursts into people’s tents and screams. As you might expect, he has been shot several times but remains completely undeterred.
He assures us that his obsessive fawning over news stories involving women teachers sleeping with young students is not Freudian in any way, although he admits something similar once happened to him. Uniquely, ’Puter is unable to speak, read, or write Russian, but he is able to sing it fluently.
Geep joined the order in the mid-1980s. He arrived at the Castle door with dozens of steamer trunks and an inarticulate hissing creature of astonishingly low intelligence he calls “Sleestak.” Ghettoputer appears to make his wishes known to Sleestak, although no one is sure whether this is the result of complex sign language, expert body posture reading, or simply beating Sleestak with a rubber mallet.
‘Puter suggests the Czar suck it.