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.
