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Obama loses 2.5 million jobs, 9.5% unemployment, worst in 26 years

When Democrats talk about economic policies, they don’t actually know what they are talking about. They just make up numbers and conducting kabuki-theater townhalls with pre-screened questions from hard-core Democrat activists. They’ll say whatever is necessary in order to maintain power.

Want proof?

Here’s proof from the Heritage Foundation. Democrats promised us that if their pork-filled spending bills were passed, that unemployment would be much lower than if we did nothing at all. But guess what? They passed the spending bills and unemployment is MUCH HIGHER now than if we had done nothing at all.

Obama caused us to have much higher unemployment than if we had not spent a dime
Obama's massive spending bills caused us to have a much higher unemployment rate than if we had not spent one thin dime

That means that we are now stuck with trillions of dollars in spending, massive budget deficits and a ballooning national debt. And not only did it not help unemployment, it actually HURT the unemployment rate.

Heritage writes:

In January, President Obama pressed for an $800 billion economic “stimulus” package to turn the economy around. Though the bill largely consisted of increased spending on traditional liberal priorities, the President claimed that it would “create or save” 3.5 million jobs. The President’s economic advisors predicted that unemployment would rise to 9 percent by 2010 if Congress did not pass the stimulus bill, but that with the stimulus unemployment would stay below 8 percentage points.

Congress passed the stimulus bill in February 2009 and the President has repeated his claims. President Obama recently said that the stimulus bill has already created or saved 150,000 new jobs and that it will “create or save” another 600,000 jobs by the end of the summer. Asked when the public should begin to judge the effects of the stimulus, White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs said “I think we should begin to judge it now.”

Surprise! You can’t borrow and spend your way out of debt. Maybe having rich parents is not the best preparation for higher office, yes?

Where is President Bush when you need him?

Comparison of Bush and Obama unemployment rates
Comparison of Bush and Obama unemployment rates

Bush “spent” money on trillions of dollars in tax cuts. That’s how you stimulate an economy. Put the money back in the private sector – in the hands of working families and businesses – not in the hands of bureaucrats.

How out-of-touch are the Democrats?

The Wall Street Journal reports on how sincere the Democrats are in their empathy for the common man. (H/T Hot Air)

Excerpt:

The spending on overseas travel is up almost tenfold since 1995, and has nearly tripled since 2001, according to the Journal analysis of 60,000 travel records. Hundreds of lawmakers traveled overseas in 2008 at a cost of about $13 million. That’s a 50% jump since Democrats took control of Congress two years ago.

The cost of so-called congressional delegations, known among lawmakers as “codels,” has risen nearly 70% since 2005, when an influence-peddling scandal led to a ban on travel funded by lobbyists, according to the data.

Although complete travel records aren’t yet available for 2009, it appears that such costs continue to rise. The Journal analysis shows that the government has picked up the tab for travel to destinations such as Jamaica, the Virgin Islands and Australia’s Great Barrier Reef.

People are suffering under a recession caused by the Democrats and they just keep collecting and spending more and more of our money!

We knew that Democrats would do this: we had access to their voting records, their pork and earmark records, their records on spending, waste and other issues. People who studied their voting records and voter guides knew that Democrats would mess up the economy.

The Republican response

Read this statement by Eric Cantor and you will hear a completely different attitude from the Democrats.

Excerpt:

“First and foremost, the American people are concerned about the economy, job creation and the unsustainable debt obligations incurred in the last 6 months.

Beginning in January, House Republicans laid out a serious and substantive agenda that put jobs first. House Democrats, along with the White House, instead took an unfocused, ‘go it alone’ approach that has fallen well short of its goals and has failed to create jobs.

“Inexplicably, instead of focusing on jobs and restoring the financial security that has been lost by millions of struggling families, the President continues to push an agenda that the majority of Americans are uneasy with. The American people do not support a government healthcare plan that will increase costs, reduce patient choice and flexibility, and lower the quality of care available in our country. The American people do not support the radical Cap & Tax plan which will impose a hard-hitting tax upon families and small businesses costing our struggling economy thousands of jobs.

“As job losses continue to mount, families’ worries about losing their healthcare, paying their mortgage, and sending their children to college continues to intensify. Employment must be our focus, yet Speaker Pelosi and the unchecked Democrat majorities continue to increase Washington’s hand in the free market, at the expense of job creation. At some point, even the Speaker must realize that enough is enough.

Mike Pence gives his assessment of the situation here.

Obama loses 2.19 million jobs, 9.4% unemployment, worst in 25 years

UPDATE: Welcome readers from 4Simpsons! Thanks for the link Neil!

Gateway Pundit has the story in graphs. (H/T Lonely Conservative)

What was the unemployment rate under Bush?

Despite the recession he inherited, 9-11, stock market scandals, Hurricane Katrina and two wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the unemployment rate during the Bush years averaged out to 5.27%. (Misery Index)

How about so far under Obama?

The US economy lost 598,000 jobs in January.
The US economy lost 706,000 jobs in February.
The US economy lost 742,000 jobs in March.
The US economy lost 545,000 jobs in April.
And, in May the US economy lost 345,000 jobs.

Here’s a graph that may help you to understand how bad Obama really is, compared to Bush:

US Unemployment Rate
US Unemployment Rate

Clinton’s rate is good because Newt Gingrich was in charge of the House in 1994 onward, and the House is where all spending bills originate

Hot Air reports (with a graph) that the unemployment rate is worse than the White House predicted it would be if they hadn’t passed the stimulus:

We are heading towards double-digit unemployment and doing that while we incur the massive debt of the unstimulating stimulus package. We could just as easily have kept the money and ridden out the unemployment, much as we’re forced to do now, only being a lot poorer while doing it.

Why is this important?  It demonstrates that the President and his economic advisers have gotten pretty much everything about this economic collapse wrong.  Instead of contracting government spending and shoring up the credibility of the currency, they’re setting records in dissipating it instead.  Instead of focusing on fixing the problem that government explicitly created — mortgage-backed securities — they’ve literally left that for last while they waste money chasing every Democratic constituency but ignoring the actual cancer in the financial system.

Bush was cutting into the deficit until the Democrats Community Reinvestment Act caught up with him in 2008. But Obama has ruined Bush’s effort to balance the budget, with his massive redistributions of wealth.

Obama's projected deficits
Obama's projected deficits

And the Heritage Foundation shows that the national debt is getting much worse under Obama’s tax and spend policies:

debt-deficits_04-580
Debt as % of GDP under Obama

The Heritage Foundation writes:

The national debt is skyrocketing. In 2009 publicly held debt is projected to jump to 54.8 percent of GDP, up from 40.8 percent in 2008. A year to year increase of this size hasn’t occurred since World War II. While the main causes of this massive increase – $787 trillion economic “stimulus” and the $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) – are sure to be debated for some time, the truly freighting revelation should be not what has already taken place, but what our elected officials have planned.

President Obama’s budget, if passed, would send debt to levels 26.3 percent of GDP over current law. Although President Obama has publicly stated his desire to both bring down deficits and reform entitlements under his watch, his actions don’t match his words.

Who caused the recession? The democrats caused the recession, Bush tried to stop them in 2003. And Obama’s spending spree is only making things worse. We have a worse economy than Canada now, in every measure that counts. Obama’s planned tax hike is causing companies like Microsoft to ship jobs overseas, and his cap and trade plan will cost us even more jobs.

High tax rates cause the most productive people to stop working, costing us jobs. Obama is to blame. His total ignorance of economics means that he will be playing whack-a-mole with the US economy – always inventing new interventions into the market to fix the problems his last intervention caused.

UPDATE: Muddling Towards Maturity links to a comment by a business owner who explains why he will be hiring in Panama, not in the USA.