Tag Archives: Economy

Commentary

Obamanomics: a closer look at the economic achievements of Barack Obama

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From Investors Business Daily.

Full text:

May’s weak jobs report further confirms the president’s policies are failing to help the economy. This is, indeed, the worst recovery since the Depression.

Negative superlatives associated with this presidency keep piling up. The toll so far:

  • The share of Americans who’ve been out of work a long time — now at 42% of the unemployed — is the highest since the Great Depression (source: Labor Department).
  • The proportion of the civilian working-age population actually working, at 58%, is the smallest since the Carter era (Labor Department).
  • Growth in nonfarm payroll jobs since the recovery began in June 2009 is the slowest of any comparable recovery since World War II (Hoover Institution).
  • The rate of new business startups — the engine of job growth — has plunged to an all-time low of 7.87% of all businesses (Census Bureau).
  • 3 in 10 young adults can’t find jobs and live with their parents, highest since the 1950s (Pew Research).
  • 54% of bachelor’s degree-holders under the age of 25 are jobless or underemployed, the highest share in decades (Northeastern University).
  • Black teen unemployment, now at 37%, is near Depression-era highs (Labor Department).
  • Almost 1 in 6 Americans are now poor — the highest ratio in 30 years — and the total number of poor, at 49.1 million, is the largest on record (Census).
  • The share of Hispanics in poverty has topped that of blacks for the first time, 28.2% to 25.4% (Census).
  • The number of Americans on food stamps — 45 million recipients, or 1 in 7 residents — also is the highest on record (Congressional Budget Office).
  • Total government dependency — defined as the share of Americans receiving one or more federal benefit payments — is now at 47%, highest ever (Hoover).
  • The share of Americans paying no income tax, at 49.5%, is the highest ever (Heritage Foundation, IRS).
  • The national homeownership rate, now at 65.4%, is the lowest in 15 years (Census).
  • The 30-point gap between black and white Americans who own their own homes is the widest in two decades and one of the widest on record (Census).
  • Federal spending, now at 23.4% of GDP, is the highest since WWII (CBO).
  • Excluding defense and interest payments, spending is the highest in American history, at 17.6% of the economy (First Trust Economics).
  • The federal debt, at 69% of GDP, is the highest since just after WWII (CBO).
  • The U.S. budget deficit, now at 9.5% of the economy, is the highest since WWII (CBO).
  • U.S. Treasury debt has been downgraded for the first time in history, meaning the U.S. government no longer ranks among risk-free borrowers (S&P).

This is what Obamanomics has wrought. Fiscal promiscuity. Trickle-up poverty. Shared misery.

Here’s the Obama legacy in two charts:

US Labor Force Participation down 4.9 million people
US Labor Force Participation down 4.9 million people

The updated labor force participation is actually lower now than in January.

And:

Barack Obama: Budget Deficits
Barack Obama: Budget Deficits

What I find alarming is that Obama is still polling competitively with his Republican rival.

News

Ten ways that the Obama administration could lower gas prices right now

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From the Heritage Foundation.

Here’s the list:

  1. Lift offshore and onshore exploration and drilling bans
  2. Approve Keystone XL
  3. Require timely environmental review
  4. Permitting process
  5. Issue leases on time
  6. Allow development of oil shale
  7. Stop the land grab
  8. Implement 50/50 revenue sharing
  9. Prohibit greenhouse gas and Tier 3 gas regulations
  10. Repeal the Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS)

Here’s the detail on #3 and #6 and #9:

3. Require timely environmental review: Environmental review requirements for oil and gas projects to commence on federal lands under the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) take too long. Congress should place a reasonable 270-day time limit on NEPA reviews.

6. Allow development of oil shale: Oil shale production in the U.S. could be a global game changer since we hold the largest known reserves in the world. However, 70 percent of those reserves lie beneath federal lands. The Obama Administration has introduced new regulations, time frames, and significantly reduced the land available for leases. Congress should make permanent the 2008 guidelines for oil shale development in order to provide regulatory certainty.

9. Prohibit greenhouse gas and Tier 3 gas regulations: In 2010, Interior suspended 61 leases in Montana alone because environmental groups charged that the energy production would contribute to climate change, demonstrating the need to permanently prohibit any federal agency from unilaterally regulating greenhouse gas emissions. Additionally, the proposed Tier 3 gas regulations to lower the amount of sulfur in gasoline are costly with no measurable benefits. Congress should prohibit the implementation of these regulations. Unelected bureaucrats should not hold such power over the economy.

Are these steps unreasonable?

Well, Canada already streamlined their environmental review process. Canada also doesn’t let global warming socialism block job creation in the energy sector. Canada’s government strongly opposes global warming socialism. They’ve even pulled out of the Kyoto treaty. Their energy industry is booming, and taking their economy with it. Can’t we do the same? Why is the Democrat Party’s energy policy all about giving money to green energy firms and imposing burdensome regulations on energy companies who do create jobs?

News

Obama lied, the economy died: comparing GDP forecasts to actual results

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2011: (click for larger image)

Obama's broken promises of GDP growth in 2011
Obama’s broken promises of GDP growth in 2011

2012: (click for larger image)

Obama's broken promises of GDP growth in 2012
Obama’s broken promises of GDP growth in 2012

Story from James Pethokoukis of the American Enterprise Institute. (H/T Arthur Brooks)

Excerpt:

After every jobs report, I update the jobs forecast and chart Team Obama put out in January 2009 that projected the future unemployment rate if Congress passed his stimulus plan. It shows the unemployment rate far higher today than what Obama economists predicted back then, 8.2% vs. 5.7%.

[…][T]his White House has continually overestimated the strength of the recovery — as the charts above and below indicate (based on official White House forecasts). This says to me the problem isn’t the data going into the forecast model, the problem is the forecast model built on Keynesian assumptions about the impact of government spending and temporary tax hikes. Obama simply has the wrong model for growth.

It seems to me that the Obama approach to the economy is not to encourage the private sector to create jobs in a sustainable way by lowering corporate taxes from their 35% (highest in the world!) rate and by reducing the regulatory burden. Their plan for the last 4 years was to basically borrow money from private sector job creators to give it to their campaign donors and union supporters. Does cronyism and corruption produce produce private sector job growth? I think not. And, in fact, this is what happened.

Obama was always a drug-taking, affirmative action fraud – even before the election in 2008. That’s why he can’t release his transcripts, and why he’s never run so much as a lemonade stand in the private sector. The man is a buffoon and he has made us into a laughingstock. The only question now is whether people pay attention to charts and figures this time, instead of watch TV ads and teleprompter-assisted emotional rhetoric. It’s your choice America.