Monday, January 26, 2015

The Obama Epic Fail Series, Part 2C - Economics


We are going to take a few days and discuss the track record of the Obama Presidency across several perspectives. The impetus for this discussion and review was the fact that when the world leaders and millions of French men and women rallied in France to protest and take a stand against global Islamic terrorism, this President embarrassed himself and the United States by NOT attending the gathering of world leaders in Paris. In our opinion, this was an epic fail and a missed historical opportunity.

Not only did he not attend, no high ranking member of his administration bothered to make the trip either. While world leaders of over 40 countries attended and high ranking officials of other countries made the trip, the highest ranking U.S. person was just the current French ambassador.

This snub of the French is a tremendous, and possibly historic, missed opportunity. This could have been a defining moment in the Obama Presidency where he rallied the rest of the world in its fight against global terrorism. The whole world was watching but apparently the President was back in the White House, rumored to be watching NFL football games instead of leading in Paris. 

If Obama was a true leader, he could have used the commonality of the fight against terrorism to also work on other global issues. The leaders of Israel and the PLO were at the rally with a common, shared goal of fighting terrorism. What a great time in might have been of using that common objective to move onto other problem resolution opportunities.

The Russian Foreign Minister was also at the Paris rally. Why not use the common goal of fighting terrorism to talk about the Ukraine and other troubling Russian and U.S. issues? But the President missed this historic window of leveraging this common objective across most of the world.

But missed opportunities seems to be the theme of this President. Whenever an opportunity to be bold, productive, epic, and a leader arose, this President, and the administration he has put in place, has usually failed and failed miserably. Bad economic policies, divisive race politics, a failing health care reform law, a clumsy foreign affairs management history, bad management processes as a Federal government bureaucracy teeters on the edge of total incompetence, etc., this administration has not been able to get out of its own way to attain any problem resolution at all.

Given that we are comfortable calling his absence in Paris an epic fail, we are going to take a few days and see if there are other epic fails that this administration has attained. We will discuss the policies track records of this Presidency over the next few days according to the following general topics and see if the failure as epic as his absence in Paris has been repeated in other areas of governance:


  • Transparency and integrity
  • Economic policy
  • Foreign policy
  • Healthcare policy
  • Government management policy

Economic Policy Part C

1) President Obama presided over the first ever credit agency rating downgrade of the financial viability of the Federal government. None of the forty three Presidents who preceded him, despite some of which dealt with world wars and economic depressions, ever managed the U.S. economy so badly that the nation's credit worthiness was downgraded.

2) The wonderful website, Bankrupting America, recently took a look at some of the latest economic statistics to see if the rosy picture the Obama administration is trying to paint about the economy was true. Unfortunately but no unexpectedly, the fantasy of the Obama administration does not match the grim reality of the economic situation that pervades the country:

  • Obama Care will cost the country $1.84 TRILLION over the next ten years. So much for the promise that the legislation would reduce the cost of health care over time.
  • The Obama administration has added $95 billion in annual regulatory burden to the economy, or over $800 for every U.S. household.
  • 46 million Americans received food assistance in 2014, a number that is up 13 million since Obama took office.
  • over 400,000 construction jobs have disappeared since Obama took office.
  • 321,000 manufacturing jobs have disappeared since Obama took office.
  • The labor force participation rate is 62.7%, down three percent during the Obama administration and at its lowest level since the dysfunctional Carter administration in 1978.
You cannot claim you are doing a good job at managing the economy when hundreds of thousands good paying jobs disappear, people have given up looking for work, and the cost of living has gone up as a result of self inflicted burdens of debt, Obama Care, and over regulation.

The Bankrupting America data sources and original article can be accessed at:


3) The Wall Street Journal recently reported that recently survey found that 62% of Americans say that they do not have enough savings to cover an unexpected $500 car repair or a $1,000 home repair. 28% of those surveyed they would have to borrow money from friends or family or over extend their credit card bills to handle the situation.  

You cannot say that the economy is in good shape if more than two thirds of Americans are living that close to the edge of fiscal insolvency.

4) Let's wrap this third part of our analysis on how the Obama administration has been an epic failure when it comes to economic management, policies, and strategies. The following charts come from a recent analysis of the President's State Of The Union by the Heritage Foundation:  

- The Obama recovery from the recession took 77 months. Previous economic recoveries over the past fifty years were far shorter despite involving stagflation and other severe recessions, as illustrated by the following graph from Heritage:

(These figures are through August of 2014)















- Not only has unemployment taken so long to recover during the Obama recovery, but overall economic growth has still not returned to the levels that woulds have been expected based on previous recessions and Presidential administrations' reaction to it:


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- Despite Obama's claim that he is for the poor and middle class in this country, his economic policies have hit the poorer citizens in this country far more than the more affluent citizens:


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That will do it for this three part series on the Obama administration's epic fail when it comes to managing the economy vitality and growth of the country. Despite annual trillion dollar deficit spending, an energy revolution, a failed $800 billion economic stimulus plan, and trillions of printed dollars from the Federal Reserve, this administration failed to take advantage of these historic conditions. We ended up with weak employment growth, tepid economic growth, non-existent wage growth, expensive regulatory burdens, etc., definitely an epic fail of this administration.

Tomorrow we will move on to look at how well or how poorly the administration has done int he foreign affairs arena. Want to bet we are looking a different area but another epic fail?


Our book, "Love My Country, Loathe My Government - Fifty First Steps To Restoring Our Freedom And Destroying The American Political Class" is now available at:

www.loathemygovernment.com

It is also available online at Amazon and Barnes and Noble. Please pass our message of freedom onward. Let your friends and family know about our websites and blogs, ask your library to carry the book, and respect freedom for both yourselves and others everyday.

Please visit the following sites for freedom:

Term Limits Now: http://www.howmuchworsecoulditget.com
http://www.reason.com
http://www.cato.org
http://www.bankruptingamerica.org

http://www.conventionofstates.com
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08j0sYUOb5w










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