Obama Epic Fail Series, Part 2B - 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, eic, 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

I am not denying that Obama came into a difficult economic situation when he came into office. The country was in the midst of the Great Recession. Banks were failing, unemployment was sky high, and economic growth was lousy.

However, he was not the first President that inherited a tough economy. Reagan took office after the disastrous Jimmy Carter Presidency. During that Presidency, a new economic term was coined, stagflation. Previous economic theory stated that you could not have high inflation and high unemployment at the same time. However, Carter mangled the economy so much that we had high inflation, high unemployment, sky high interest rates, and anemic economic growth all at the same time.

But what did Reagan’s economic policies and strategies produce:

• Seven consecutive years of economic growth that never fell below 3.5% a year.
• In four of the seven years, economic growth was above 4.0%.
• One year economic growth was over 7%.

All this robust economic growth came from a place of stagflation. Thus, the argument to protect Obama’s economic performance because of the Great Recession is an empty one compared to what Reagan accomplished.

Even Clinton’s Presidency recovered nicely from a recession, averaging 4% growth coming out of a recession. And both Reagan and Clinton did not have the economic tailwinds that Obama enjoyed:

1. Spending over $800 billion on an economic stimulus program that failed miserably.
2. Adding over $7 trillion of government deficit spending to the economy and the national debt.
3. Benefiting from over $3 trillion of Federal Reserve printed money that was added to the economy.
4. An energy revolution that caused energy prices to drop substantially and created loads of high paying energy industry jobs.

So given this historical background, let’s see how badly the Obama Presidency has come up short and decide if this is also an epic fail.

First, the good news:

• The traditional unemployment rate has been slowly decreasing over the past few years.
• The weekly filing of first time unemployment benefits has been slowly decreasing over the past few years.
• Inflation has been under control during the entire run of the Obama Presidency.

Now the bad news:

• According to an Obama promise, if his economic stimulus program was enacted, unemployment would not go higher than 8% and the unemployment rate would shortly drop back down to 5%. His stimulus program was passed and unemployment soared past 8% and the unemployment rate has yet to drop to the promised 5%.
• But the traditional unemployment rate measure, the so-called U-3 unemployment rate, is now a somewhat deceptive measure since this measure does not take into account the part time workers that want full time work and the workers that want a full time job but have become too discouraged to look for one in the past four weeks. These populations of workers have been increasing in these tough economic times but this trend is not captured by the U-3 measurement.
• The truer measure is the U-6 unemployment measure which takes into account these types of workers. The latest monthly measure of the U-6 unemployment rate is 11.2% vs. the U-3 rate of 5.6%. Thus, the more realistic unemployment rate is twice what the government claims is the unemployment rate.
• This 11.2% is equivalent to about 10 million Americans not being able to reach their full employment desires, either because they are stuck with part time work only or cannot find a job at all.
• This U-6 rate has not been this high since 1994, over twenty years ago, certainly not an economic record to be proud about.
• The economy has been so anemic that ever higher college graduates are having to live back home with their families after graduation due to anemic job growth:

• At the end of the recession in 2009, median U.S. household income was estimated by the government to be $54059. However, since the recession ended, median household income has decreased, not increased, during the recovery, bottomed out at just under $52,000, when adjusted for inflation, according to the Federal Reserve Board, a decrease of about 4%.
• While household income has decreased after the recession ended, wage and salary growth has been flat and anemic, averaging only about 1.5% during the so-called recovery, probably less than the rate of inflation:

• While the economy has been in recovery for years. most, if not all of that recovery was in Texas, a low tax, business friendly state:

Is the economy improving? Yes. Is unemployment down? Yes. Is inflation under control? Yes. Did Obama inherit a difficult economic situation? Yes. These are all true statements.

However, despite record deficit spending, hundreds of billions of dollars spent on an economic  stimulus plan, trillions of dollars of aid from the Federal Reserve Board, and an energy revolution, this recovery has been anemic, weak, delayed, and geographically focused with household income and wage/salary growth behaving as if the recession never ended.

The 70% or so increase in national debt as a result of Obama’s economic plans will place tremendous financial pressure on American families for generations to come. Young Americans have not seen the economic opportunities that previous generations have enjoyed despite being five years out of the recession.

And most Americans agree with this assessment. According to a recent Economist/YouGov poll:

• While Americans in general believe the economy is getting better. they do not think, on average, that their personal financial situation is getting better.
• Americans are far more likely to believe that unemployment and the economy are improving because of themselves and American businesses, not Obama and Congress.
• According to the poll, only one in four think they are better off than when Obama first came into office, with one in three saying they are worse off.
• 52% of those polled do not even believe the government’s unemployment numbers, saying unemployment is worse than what the government admits to.

When the majority of Americans do not believe or trust your basic economic numbers, think they are worse off than before you came into office despite being five years removed from the recession, and do not give you credit even for the weak, delayed, and expensive economic recovery, that can be classified as nothing else than an epic fail.

A long but necessary post to cut through the hype of economic spinning from this administration. Stay tuned over the next few days as we investigate whether there are other epic fails from this administration in other areas of governance.

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

The Obama Epic Fail Series, Part 2A: 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 A

I am not denying that Obama came into a difficult economic situation when he came into office. The country was in the midst of the Great Recession. Banks were failing, unemployment was sky high, and economic growth was lousy. 

However, he was not the first President that inherited a tough economy. Reagan took office after the disastrous Jimmy Carter Presidency. During that Presidency, a new economic term was coined, stagflation. Previous economic theory stated that you could not have high inflation and high unemployment at the same time. However, Carter mangled the economy so much that we had high inflation, high unemployment, sky high interest rates, and anemic economic growth all at the same time.

But what did Reagan’s economic policies and strategies produce:

• Seven consecutive years of economic growth that never fell below 3.5% a year.
• In four of the seven years, economic growth was above 4.0%.
• One year economic growth was over 7%.

All this robust economic growth came from a place of stagflation. Thus, the argument to protect Obama’s economic performance because of the Great Recession is an empty one compared to what Reagan accomplished. 

Even Clinton’s Presidency recovered nicely from a recession, averaging 4% growth coming out of a recession. And both Reagan and Clinton did not have the economic tailwinds that Obama enjoyed:

1. Spending over $800 billion on an economic stimulus program that failed miserably.
2. Adding over $7 trillion of government deficit spending to the economy and the national debt.
3. Benefiting from over $3 trillion of Federal Reserve printed money that was added to the economy.
4. An energy revolution that caused energy prices to drop substantially and created loads of high paying energy industry jobs.

So given this historical background, let’s see how badly the Obama Presidency has come up short and decide if this is also an epic fail.

First, the good news:

• The traditional unemployment rate has been slowly decreasing over the past few years.
• The weekly filing of first time unemployment benefits has been slowly decreasing over the past few years.
• Inflation has been under control during the entire run of the Obama Presidency.

Now the bad news:

• Despite the four favorable economic tail wind components discussed above, annual economic growth during the Obama Presidency has never been above 2.5%, substantially below the Reagan and Clinton Presidencies and certainly below the long term average annual growth rate of the country over the centuries.
• Adding over $7 trillion to the national debt has added over $60,000 in debt burden to every American household and Obama administration economic policies have put us on a path of record deficits both during his tenure and for years afterwards (click on graph for a larger view):

• While the Federal 2014 deficit has been cut in half in 2014 (to just over $400 billion) vs. earlier Obama deficits, it is still higher than any annual deficit run up by any other previous President.
• Even worse from a debt perspective, Obama’s economic policies have pushed the national debt to GDP ratio to over 100, far higher than it has been in at least twenty years and at a level that puts on a par with countries around the world who are approaching insolvency:
• 
  

• His tactical economic policies and programs such as Cash For Clunkers, Cash For Appliances, HARP, Solyndra, etc. have spent billions of taxpayer dollars with no societal benefit in return.
• According to a recent analysis by the National Association of Counties, housing prices have recovered in less than half of all U.S.counties more than four years after the recession ended, about 75% of county economies are still below their pre-recession employment levels, average wage levels have declined in half of all county economies between 2012 and 2013, and only 65 counties across the entire country have recovered to pre-recession levels in jobs, unemployment, GDP, and median home prices.
• While inflation has been under control and gasoline prices have been dropping, Obama's energy programs have driven U.S. electricity rates to sky high levels, sapping American households of whatever gas savings they may have been experiencing:

This concludes the first half of our economic discussion and whether or not the Obama administration's management of the economy was also an epic fail. We will finish the discussion tomorrow but based on what see today, epic fail is probably a very good bet.

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

The Obama Epic Fail Series,Part 1: Transparency and Integrity

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, eic, 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
• Foreign policy
• Economic policy
• Healthcare policy

Transparency and Integrity

Obama came into office promising to operate the most transparent Presidency ever. Sounded like a great future for full government disclosure and integrity of governing, we would be entering a new age of honest politics where politicians and the government it operates would be an open book to the world.

As with most Obama promises, the reality was the exact opposite of the promise. This has turned out to be one of the least transparent administrations in recent memory. From “losing” IRS emails to claiming executive privilege in the Fast and Furious scandal to stonewalling Freedom of Information Act requests to hiding Benghazi witnesses, this Presidency has hidden, stonewalled, and lied about just about every scandal and law breaking act.

One way to measure transparency and integrity is to quantify whether someone is telling the truth. And the method to quantify this administration’s integrity has already been developed and published by the Washington Post. The Post runs a regular feature where they take government and politicians’ quotes and assertions and determine how truthful they are. Their measurement system is a scale of “Pinocchios.” The more deceptive or incorrect the statement, the more Pinocchios the Post assigns to the lie.

According to the Post’s website, the scale is defined as follows:

One Pinocchio - Some shading of the facts. Selective telling of the truth. Some omissions and exaggerations, but no outright falsehoods.


Two Pinocchios - Significant omissions and/or exaggerations. Some factual error may be involved but not necessarily. A politician can create a false, misleading impression by playing with words and using legalistic language that means little to ordinary people.


Three Pinocchios - Significant factual error and/or obvious contradictions.



Four Pinocchios - Whoppers.


And finally, an upside down Pinocchio is a unbelievable whopper of a lie.

Using this scale, a recent posting on the Minority Report website reviewed the many assertions and statements of the Obama administration and published the Washington Post’s Pinocchio rating of each of those statements and assertions. If a Presidency was truly transparent and in integrity, they should receive a minimal amount of Pinocchios.

Before we get started, lets recall that this process previously awarded Obama the “Lie of The Year” last year for his lie that “if you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor” under Obama Care. In fact, according to the Post’s analysis, Obama not only got the top lie last year but, in total, placed three lies in the top ten. Not a good start when talking about transparency and integrity.

Let’s see what the Minority Report found with other Obama assertions (please note that the following false assertions and statements are for ONLY 2014):

• “Unprecedented inspections help the world verify every day that Iran is not building a bomb.” (Two Pinocchios, 2/6/14)
• “We’ve got close to 7 million Americans who have access to health care for the first time because of Medicaid expansion.” (Four Pinocchios, 2/24/14)
• “We didn’t have billions of dollars of commercials [for ObamaCare] like some critics did.” (Two Pinocchios, 4/4/14)
• “Today, the average full-time working woman earns just 77 cents for every dollar a man earns … in 2014, that’s an embarrassment. It is wrong.” (Two Pinocchios, 4/9/14)
• “Thirty-five percent of people who enrolled through the federal marketplace are under the age of 35.” (Two Pinocchios, 4/22/14)
• “[Republicans’] willingness to say no to everything — the fact that since 2007, they have filibustered about 500 pieces of legislation that would help the middle class just gives you a sense of how opposed they are to any progress.” (Four Pinocchios, 5/9/14)
• “I want to announce a few more steps that we’re taking that are going to be good for job growth and good for our economy, and that we don’t have to wait for Congress to do. They are going to be steps that generate more clean energy, waste less energy overall, and leave our kids and our grandkids with a cleaner, safer planet in the process.” (Two Pinocchios, 5/16/14)
• “At the beginning of my presidency, we built a coalition that imposed sanctions on the Iranian economy, while extending the hand of diplomacy to the Iranian government.” (Three Pinocchios, 6/2/14)
• “When you talk about the moderate opposition [in Syria], many of these people were farmers or dentists or maybe some radio reporters who didn’t have a lot of experience fighting.” (Three pinocchios, 6/26/14)
• “So far this year, Republicans in Congress have blocked every serious idea to strengthen the middle class.” (Three Pinocchios, 7/15/14)
• “If Congress fails to fund it [the Highway Trust Fund], it runs out of money. That could put nearly 700,000 jobs at risk.” (Two Pinocchios, 7/16/14)
• “Keep in mind, I wasn’t specifically referring to ISIL [as a jayvee team].” (Four Pinocchios, 9/3/14)
• “Over the past eight years, the United States has reduced our total carbon pollution by more than any other nation on Earth.” (Two Pinocchios, 9/25/14)
• “If we hadn’t taken this on, and [health insurance] premiums had kept growing at the rate they did in the last decade, the average premium for family coverage today would be $1,800 higher than they are. Now, most people don’t notice it, but that’s $1,800 you don’t have to pay out of your pocket or see vanish from your paycheck. That’s like a $1,800 tax cut.” (Two Pinocchios, 10/17/14)
• “Health care inflation has gone down every single year since the law [ObamaCare] passed, so that we now have the lowest increase in health care costs in 50 years–which is saving us about $180 billion in reduced overall costs to the federal government and in the Medicare program.” (Three Pinocchios, 11/6/14)
• “We’ve created more jobs in the United States than every other advanced economy combined since I came into office.” (One Pinocchio, 11/11/14)
• “Well, actually, my position hasn’t changed [on immigration executive action].” (Upside Down Pinocchio, 11/18/14)
• “Understand what this [Keystone XL pipeline] project is. It is providing the ability of Canada to pump their oil, send it through our land, down to the Gulf, where it will be sold everywhere else.” (Three Pinocchios, 11/20/14)
• “If you look, every president — Democrat and Republican — over decades has done the same thing. George H.W. Bush — about 40 percent of the undocumented persons, at the time, were provided a similar kind of relief as a consequence of executive action.” (Three Pinocchios, 11/24/14)
• “It is estimated that 1 in 5 women on college campuses has been sexually assaulted during their time there — 1 in 5.” (One Pionocchio, 12/17/14)
•  “The history is that I have issued fewer executive actions than most of my predecessors, by a long shot. … If you ask historians, take a look at the track records of the modern presidency, I’ve actually been very restrained.” (Two Pinocchios, 12/31/14)

If you add up the total number of Pinocchios, assuming that the single upside down Pinocchio is worth five Pinocchios, you end up with a total of 55 Pinocchios across the 21 statements above. This gives you an average Pinocchio rating of about 2.6, putting per Presidential statement the average degree of lie approaching the “Significant factual error and/or obvious contradictions” level. Four of the 21 statements were assigned four Pinocchios and one was assigned an upside down Pinocchio, making them “Whoppers” or worst. 

You cannot claim you are a transparent Presidency when even a main stream media entity, one that has been very favorable and biased in covering the Obama administration, rates the President’s statements so unfavorable and deceptive. Thus, if his absence in Paris was an epic fail and a missed opportunity, then his failure in the area of transparency and integrity arena was also an epic fail. 

If he was true to his promise of government transparency, he could have ushered in a new dawn of trust between Washington and the rest of the country. The only thing he has ushered in is a new low in trust of anything that comes out of a Washington politician’s mouth. Epic fail. 

More analysis in different areas coming in the following days.

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