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Obama’s debt: federal debt up over 7 TRILLION dollars since January 2009

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CNS News has the story.

Excerpt:

The total federal debt of the U.S. government has now increased more than $7 trillion during the slightly more than five and a half years Barack Obama has been president.

That is more than the debt increased under all U.S. presidents from George Washington through Bill Clinton combined, and it is more debt than was accumulated in the first 227 years of this nation’s existence–from 1776 through 2003.

The total federal debt first passed the $7-trillion mark on Jan. 15, 2004, after President George W. Bush had been in office almost three years.

[…]The $7,060,259,674,497.51 in new debt that the federal government has taken on during Obama’s presidency equals $61,341.82 per household.

The median household income in the United States in 2012 (the latest year estimated) was $51,017. Thus, President Obama has increased the federal debt by more than the typical household’s annual income.

I sometimes get annoyed by the fact that the stock market hasn’t tanked under Obama in the last 6 years, but there is a reason why. The reason is that he has borrowed and spent SEVEN TRILLION dollars. This makes the lack of economic growth caused by his anti-business policies, e.g. – Obamacare, look less harmful than they are. If you were in debt 30,000 and borrowed another 20,000 and started buying cars and taking vacations, you’d look pretty good. That’s basically what this President did. We look OK, but only because he borrowed $7 trillion from the next generation of Americans.

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Obama’s unemployment: 11,472,000 Americans left the workforce since January 2009

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CNS News reports.

Excerpt:

11.4 million Americans age 16 and over have left the workforce since President Obama took office in January 2009, according to data released today from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS).

In July 2014, there were 92,001,000 Americans, 16 and over, who were classified as “not in the labor force,” meaning they not only did not have a job, but they didn’t actively seek one in the last four weeks.

This number has increased by 11,472,000 since January 2009, when the number of Americans not in the labor force was 80,529,000.

The number of Americans not in the labor force dropped slightly in July, down 119,000 from the 92,120,000 Americans not in the labor force in June.

The participation rate, which measures the percentage of the civilian non-institutional population that participated in the labor force by either having a job or actively seeking one, increased from 62.8 percent in June to 62.9 percent in July.

In July, the number of unemployed Americans increased by 197,000 (from 9,474,000 in June to 9,671,000 in July), meaning they did not have a job even though they were actively seeking one.

While the number of unemployed increased in July, so did the number of employed Americans: In June, there were 146,221,000 employed Americans, and that number climbed to 146,352,000 in July, a one-month increase of 131,000.

By contrast, George W. Bush created 8.1 million jobs after his 2003 tax cut.

Excerpt:

Obama and other critics of Bush’s tax cuts argue that they did little to boost economic growth or jobs. But they tend to start their count when Bush signed the first tax cut bill into law in mid-2001.

The problem is that much of that tax plan — including reductions to most of the income tax brackets — wasn’t scheduled to take full effect until 2006.

Bush’s second tax cut, signed in May 2003, accelerated those tax cuts, letting them kick in retroactively to the beginning of that year. The 2003 law also cut taxes on capital gains and dividends.

It turns out that the month after Bush signed that 2003 law, jobs and the economy finally started growing again.

From June 2003 to December 2007, the economy added 8.1 million jobs, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The unemployment rate fell to 5% from 6.3%. Real GDP growth averaged close to 3% in the four-plus years after that, and the budget deficit fell steadily from 2004 to 2007.

And despite Obama’s claim, Bush’s policies did not increase income inequality. In fact, inequality was the same when Bush left office as when he came in, according to theCensus Bureau. A study by University of California economist Emmanuel Saez found that inequality has climbed much faster under Obama.

What’s more, the rich ended up paying a larger chunk of the federal income tax burden after Bush’s tax cuts went into effect, with the share paid by the top 1% rising to 40% by 2007, up from 37% the year before Bush took office, according to IRS data.

The Congressional Budget Office, meanwhile, found that the federal income tax was more progressive in 2007 than it was back in 1979.

Recall that these tax cuts didn’t cost us a thing – the 2007 deficit was $160 billion dollars, which was down from the previous year. Economic growth raised tax revenues.

When you let job creators keep more of their own money, they create jobs. When you tax and regulate job creators more, you destroy jobs. You can’t argue with the Bureau of Labor Statistics numbers. These are the official numbers and they show that Obama failed where Bush succeeded.

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Do pastors have a responsibility to know apologetics?

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The latest episode of the Reasonable Faith podcast was all about a post done by Pastor Matt Rawlings. The post talked about how churches train children to become atheists.

Pastor Matt offered 6 points in his post:

  • Reason #1 – Churches seem overprotective.
  • Reason #2 – Teens’ and twentysomethings’ experience of Christianity is shallow.
  • Reason #3 – Churches come across as antagonistic to science.
  • Reason #4 – Young Christians’ church experiences related to sexuality are often simplistic, judgmental.
  • Reason #5 – They wrestle with the exclusive nature of Christianity.
  • Reason #6 – The church feels unfriendly to those who doubt.

In his post Pastor Matt said this:

Too many churches do in fact present a shallow faith that skips doctrine and apologetics for “how to…” sermons that are little more than self-help talks with scripture sprinkled over them.  The refusal to learn theology and how to defend the faith as well as to spend the time thinking about how to present them in a clear and winsome manner is at the heart of all four of the valid objections by young people to the evangelical church.  Pastors must simply take this responsibility seriously and put in the time and effort.  There is no other answer.

[…]Det. J. Warner Wallace has argued that we have to T.R.A.I.N. Christian students rather than teach them but I think we need to train all of our fellow Christians (and he would agree).  Training is harder than teaching.  We need to remember that it takes at least seven times for the average person today to hear something before they retain it.  Also, most people do not truly understand something until they put it into practice.  Thus, pastors must be trained in order train congregations to truly be lay theologians and apologists.  The pastors must then challenge the congregation to use their skills reach out to the lost and help each other.  And all of those trained must all help to look after the young to insure they know their faith so well that they do not fall for the poor arguments for atheism.  This means pastors must implement rigorous programs for the people God has entrusted to them.

Pastor Matt lays the blame squarely on pastors for at least some of the problem. And I agree with him. But Dr. Craig asserted in his podcast that pastors should not be responsible to learn apologetics, because they were too busy with all the other duties that pastors have to do. He gave some examples, but they were things like weddings, counseling children about drugs and marriage counseling.

So what I wanted to say about this is that Pastor Matt is right and Dr. Craig is wrong. A pastor should have at least put in the time to learn apologetics so that he is able to inject it into his sermon, where appropriate, and point people to where they can find answers when asked. It seems to me that if you are going to get up there and preach about a bunch of things, then you’d better know at least a little about why those things are true. And it can’t just be “because the Bible says so” or because “that’s just how I was raised”. Respect for the truth claims of Christianity has to come from the top, even if the pastor leverages the skills of people in the church to address different issues in more detail.

Pastor Matt responded to Dr. Craig in this post.

Excerpt:

The biggest disagreement I have with Dr. Craig is that he argues pastors are too busy to be trained in apologetics.  As a pastor and the son of a pastor, I strongly differ!  Unfortunately, what I have witnessed (and heard from several seasoned pastors of very large churches) is that too many pastors are in fact lazy.  I have heard from half a dozen leaders of churches of more than 10,000 that they cannot find young seminary grads who will put in even 40 solid hours a week!  Those statements may ruffle a few feathers and certainly there are hard-working, if not overworked pastors out there but they are apparently few and far between.

Also, pastors often try to do things they shouldn’t do.  As a lawyer who used to defend churches, ministers often get into trouble for counseling those with serious issues that are beyond their training and experience.  A person with addiction issues needs something like Celebrate Recovery, a person with emotional problems needs a licensed professional counselor.  Ministers need to recognize their limits and engage in areas that they can and must address instead of those that are already well covered by other trained professionals.

But to be fair to Dr. Craig, I think he may have misunderstood what I mean by training.  I don’t mean a pastor has to earn a master’s degree or doctorate in apologetics or philosophy.  There are many short but effective training programs out there such as his own Defenders class, the distance certificate from BIOLA, Frank Turek’s short but intense CrossExamined program (that I am attending this week), etc.

I agree with Dr. Craig that we should train layman to create an apologetics team in our churches (see this post) but the pastor has to take the lead.  No pastor can expect his or her church to do what he or she is not willing to do.  If the pastor doesn’t evangelize, the church won’t.  If the pastor is not studying the Bible carefully, the church won’t.  Also, any pastor working in today’s post-Christian culture must know how to meet the challenges of said culture.  It is just part of the gig.  So, every minister should seek some type of solid apologetics training and commit to regular study on the subject as well as subscribe to certain podcasts such as Reasonable Faith.

I wanted to add that I didn’t agree with any of the other points where Dr. Craig disagreed with Pastor Matt. It was really surprising to me, but I think Pastor Matt is right across the board. Leadership starts from the top – how are you supposed to be able to assess different people’s requests to teach apologetics or bring in speakers if you are not comfortable discerning what is good and what isn’t yourself? If the pastor is going to be making those kinds of decisions, then he has to understand apologetics to some degree. Maybe not with formal training, but as much as a typical blogger like me would. Also, don’t you find it weird – the idea that a pastor can get up there and preach on things to people and not be able to show anyone some reasons why these things are true? Christians have to be ready to give an answer, and that answer cannot just be “because the Bible says so”.