Kyle Becker On July 29, 2013 https://twitter/kylenbecker Since the moment he came into office, President Obama has pursued the same failed liberal policies that extended the Great Depression, instituted the socially corrosive Great Society programs, and has grown government beyond America’s ability to afford it. Estimates of the U.S. long-term unfunded liabilities range from $87 trillion to an astounding $211 trillion. One of the first measures Obama undertook was passing an ultimately $812 billion “stimulus” program. After glibly admitting that ‘shovel-ready (jobs) was not as shovel-ready as we expected,’ the U.S. is still far off the jobs trajectory projected by his advisers; while it was presumed the U.S. would be near 5% unemployment, we are at 7.6% — and that’s with millions dropping out of the workforce. Instead of focusing on generating jobs and growing the productive economy, President Obama decided to work with the Democrat Congress to force through a trillion-dollar boondoggle known as ObamaCare against the objections of the majority of Americans. President Obama said in an ABC News interview in 2009 that if Congress did not pass health care legislation that brought down costs, the federal government “will go bankrupt.” The ten-year cost estimate since then has tripled from $900 billion to nearly $2.7 trillion, and the GAO estimates the program will add $6.2 trillion in debt liability. The “unintended consequences” of the ObamaCare provision that employers with 50 or more full-time employees at 30 hours a week or more must offer certain health insurance plans has predictably led to small businesses with more part-time employees. While the president has illegally suspended his enforcement of duly passed law, the “employer mandate” provision, full-time hiring is not expected to pick up due to long-term uncertainty. Nearly 2.5 million of the ‘jobs created’ under President Obama are part-time; as a separate figure, 2.7 million of those ‘jobs created’ are temporary hires a 50% increase over Obama’s time in office. The president claims he has created 7.2 million jobs. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, there were 154,526,000 in the Civilian Labor Force in February 2009 and in June 2013 there were 155,835,000. That would be a net gain of 1.309 million more people working civilian jobs as of the latest figures. The labor force participation rate of 63.5% is hovering at the lowest levels since late 1978. Even if we took this at face value, like a good Democrat loyalist would, this is still less than half the people added to the food stamp rolls — 15 million folks. The escalating gas, electricity, and food prices, as well as the ObamaCare “sticker shock” on health insurance premiums for an estimated 75% of Americans will not ease their budgets. And the AP now estimates that 4 in 5 Americans are in poverty, low-income, or have no jobs. Far from being some curse on Obama’s record, a historical anomaly or the Republican Party refusing to give the president his way on every issue over the course of his entire term, the results of Obama’s economic policies are 100% predictable. On May 9th, 1939, ten years after the 1929 stock market crash and a decade in the Great Depression, FDR’s Treasury Secretary had a taste of bitter medicine for the statists: “We have tried spending money. We are spending more than we have ever spent before and it does not work. I want to see this country prosperous. I want to see people get a job. I want to see people get enough to eat. We have never made good on our promises. I say after eight years of this Administration we have just as much unemployment as when we started. … And an enormous debt to boot!” While many would point to the constriction of the money supply after the stock market crash and protectionist policies like the Smoot-Hawley tarriff as the prime reasons for the extended deflationary depression, the Fed’s pumps were eventually primed — only to lead to another recession in 1937. Even if we are of the inclination that the “Great Depression” was extraordinary, the track record of other Orwellian-named “Great Society” and “War on Poverty” welfare programs is more unmistakable. Thomas Sowell has documented well the social and family decay traceable to such 1960s-era programs. Remarkable are a few statistics: The poverty rate among black families fell from 87 percent in 1940 to 47 percent in 1960, during an era of virtually no major civil rights legislation or anti-poverty programs. It dropped another 17 percentage points during the decade of the 1960s and one percentage point during the 1970s, but this continuation of the previous trend was neither unprecedented nor something to be arbitrarily attributed to the programs like the War on Poverty. Despite the United States spending $15 trillion on a “War on Poverty” since its inception in 1964, there are 50 million Americans or one in six people in poverty — the same proportion as under LBJ. For every job the president has “created” (including all the part-time, temporary, low-pay and low-skill jobs), two people have gone onto the food stamp rolls — now totaling over 47 million people. There is an alternative to the growing state intervention into the economy and the disruption, dysfunction, inefficiency and cronyism that ensues. The United States has enjoyed a 5.2% unemployment rate historically, and GDP growth at 0.8% over the last four years, which is the less than half the worst rate of any other president in the last sixty years. And for those who think this is some kind of “fairness,” inequality is worse under Obama than under Bush. There’s a simple reason for this, and it bears repeating until everyone understands it: economic freedom is indisputably better for wealth creation and does not correlate with more income inequality. The record is abundantly clear: governments can spend their people into poverty.
Posted on: Mon, 29 Jul 2013 19:14:02 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015