It appears Obama management of the economy is one more big failure. U.S. consumer confidence plunged in January to its lowest level in more than a year. Could it possibly be the sudden shock employees received when they saw their first paycheck of the New Year and realized that Obama’s pledge that no one making under $250,000 would see one penny of increase in taxes was just so much campaign baloney?
Adding to the president’s woes the U.S. economy unexpectedly posted a contraction in the fourth quarter of 2012 for the first time since the theoretical end of the recession in 2009. Well folks, welcome to reality Just because housing prices have begun to rise don’t believe the Liberals when they tell you the economy as a whole is improving; it’s a bald-faced lie.
If the economy was even close to being healthy, as President Barack Obama told us throughout the election, a minor tightening of the spending by the government could not bring about “negative growth” in the economy.
Caught with their pants down the left began arguing that a contraction of the economy is good news, sort of like a root canal is a party for your mouth. When that trial balloon got laughs the Liberals blamed the Republicans by claiming talk about the debt had suppressed the economy. The closing argument for the left is that the upcoming sequestration and failure to remove all spending limits from Obama is the cause of all our economic woes. How does anyone take these folks seriously?
The problem with the Liberal’s argument is that there was none, zero, nada, austerity of any sort during the fourth quarter of 2012 while the economy shrunk. The government spent $908 billion, $30 billion more than it spent in the last quarter of 2011 and $100 billion more than it spent in the third quarter of 2012. While the economy was shrinking last quarter the taxpayers were saddled with yet another $400 billion in debt. If spending at this level is austerity, can you imagine what robust spending looks like?
With all the blaming of George W. Bush we’ve endured for the past 4 years, now the Liberals are contending that George W. Bush’s wars had been propping up the economy for years. As long as the left feels there’s another direction they can point you can bet all fingers will be heading that direction; it’s just so much more difficult to accept responsibility than to pass it around.
More than 30 years ago the term “tax and spend Liberals” was coined and once again they are demonstrating that their entire belief structure is that spending, no matter where it goes, represents economic growth; trillions in deficit spending be damned ostensibly, as long as the intent is to “stimulate” the economy it’s a good thing to the left.
Back in the good old U.S. of A the economy has generated a paltry average of 150,000 new jobs a month the last two years, despite the Federal Reserve driving billions of dollars into the economy each week. The net result of all this “printed” money has been the creation of barely enough jobs to keep up with new entries into the labor force. Unemployment has bounced around 8 percent for more than a year and still the only thing that’s been on the upswing has been Obama’s popularity.
While the left points at Rush Limbaugh and Fox News for claiming there’s a crisis in spending, the facts aren’t on the Liberals side: In 2009, the White House projected that GDP growth would average 4.6 percent in 2012. In 2010 the White House projected growth would exceed 4.3 percent last year. In 2011, it downgraded its projections to 3.6 percent. In every instance the White House has been not only wrong, but not even close. Last year the economy grew at a pathetic 2.2 percent.
This is, in fact, the worst recovery since the 1800s. In a slow recovery following a deep recession the minimum expected growth rate would be 4 or 5 percent rather than the virtual economic paralysis this supposed recovery has delivered. Now with a shrinking economy that teeters on returning to recession it’s unfortunately too late to take back your vote.
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