Posted by Tina
The President referred to Mitt Romney’s economic proposals to put people back to work as:
“…the same sales pitch that was made in 2001 and 2003, and we ended up with the slowest job growth in 50 years.”
Was he telling the truth?
Andrew McCarthy put it this way in his article, “Obama Unfiltered”:
Um . . . not exactly: Those bad old days — even after a shocking terrorist attack ripped the nation’s financial capital — featured unemployment rates consistently under 6 percent. Actually, the slowest job growth in 50 years is happening now.
Do the facts back McCarthy up?
Commentary, July 2010:
So President Obama describes his predecessor’s policies as “disastrous.” Just for the fun of it, let’s do compare the two records, shall we?
In the wake of a recession that began roughly seven weeks after President Bush took office, America experienced six years of uninterrupted economic growth and a record 52 straight months of job creation that produced more than 8 million new jobs. During the Bush presidency, the unemployment rate averaged 5.3 percent. We saw labor-productivity gains that averaged 2.5 percent annually — a rate that exceeds the averages of the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s. Real after-tax income per capita increased by more than 11 percent. And from 2000 to 2007, real GDP grew by more than 17 percent, a gain of nearly $2.1 trillion.As for Obama’s claim that Bush “turned a budget surplus into a deficit”: by January 2001, when Bush was inaugurated, the budget surpluses were already evaporating as the economy was skidding toward recession (it officially began in March 2001).
Combined with the devastating economic effects of 9/11, when we lost around 1 million jobs over 90 days, the surplus went into deficit.
Rather than whine incessantly about the situation, President Bush proposed policies that triggered the kind of sustained growth that saw the deficit fall to 1 percent of GDP ($162 billion) by 2007. Indeed, before the financial crisis of 2008 – which I’ll return to in a moment — Bush’s budget deficits were 0.6 percentage points below the historical average.
Since that July 2010 article Obama policies have failed to inspire recovery in our economy.
The facts are there for all to see…foraging through the political spin requires an open mind and a little effort. President Obama is deliberately attempting to mislead and telling whoppers in the process. What is his motivation? I think he’s committed to “fundamentally transforming” America and is prepared to do anything to stay in power and, as he put it recently, “finish what we started”.
President Obama was elected riding a wave of dishonesty. Four more years based on whoppers will not work any better than the first four years have.