Saturday, October 13, 2012

Obama Saves Capitalism! Right-Wing Haters Dismayed!

IMAGINE ON JANUARY 20, 2009, one half second before Barack Obama completed the oath of office to become president, that Dick Cheney pushed an innocent bystander off the top of the Empire State Building.

Could the GOP really argue that it would be Mr. Obama's fault when the victim splattered on the ground?

That's how dumb you have to be to buy the line Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan are peddling:  that the president and the Democrats are responsible for all 23 million out-of-work Americans and the millions of families on food stamps. (It's odd to hear Romney mention these "moochers" and their "mooching" children. Aren't they part of the 47% he disdains? Let them go look in the dumpsters for stale donuts if they're hungry, right, because we can't raise taxes on billionaires! And once they have heart attacks in their apartments just load them into ambulances and rush the poor schmucks to the emergency room and then maybe we can save them. Ah, but who cares if we don't? They won't vote for you anyway, Mitt. Isn't that what you said?)

Really, who gets credit for all those millions of unemployed and the fact that the economy hasn't recovered?

The obvious comparison when it comes to unemployment would be President Ronald Reagan with President Obama. This isn't even hard to understand, right wing types. Sure, many of you think that Mitt Romney killed Osama bin Laden. But for this all you need to do is look at a simple graph.

Ten days before your hero, St. Ronald of Tampico, took office, in February 1981, the unemployment rate was 7.4%. You probably remember that the economy was in terrible shape and that you blamed it on Jimmy Carter.

Job losses soared after Mr. Reagan took control and the unemployment rate peaked at 10.8% in November 1982. In fact, it took Reagan his entire first term to reduce unemployment, so that by January 1985, the rate had fallen only to 7.3%, a stunning "recovery" of  one tenth (.1) of one percentage point in four years.

That's right. The Gipper cut unemployment .1 percentage point.

In four flippin' years.

FAST FORWARD TO JANUARY 2008, when unemployment stood at 5% and the U. S. economy appeared healthy. The crash began on President George W. Bush's watch. By February 2009, ten days after Obama took the oath, the rate had soared to 8.3%. The housing market was collapsing, the stock market had tanked, the auto industry was on life-support, and the ranks of those on food stamps were already ballooning.

Worse yet, the victim still had more stories to fall. In October he finally slammed to the ground and unemployment topped out at 10%.

Since then, the rate has declined slowly but surely, just as it did in 1982. The rate is now 7.8%, still high, but down half a percentage point (.5) since President Obama took over. Yep, you read that right, right-wing haters. The guy you call a communist is beating out the dude whose face you want to chisel on Mt. Rushmore.

When the U. S. economy finally began to recover in June 2009, nearly 600,000 people were filing new unemployment claims monthly. That rate fell last week to 339,000, the lowest figure in four-and-a-half years.

So let's be clear. The stock market crashed when Mr. Bush was twidling his thumbs in the Oval Office. Trillions of dollars of private wealth were wiped from the books. The market bottomed out at 6,547 early in 2009. Today stocks have rebounded, closing out last week at 13,329. Obama hasn't wrecked the U. S. economy.

He helped save it.

We might also remember that panic gripped the nation in the early days of 2009. By February car sales were drying up as families in red states and blue states alike felt the economic pressure. That month the auto industry was on a pace to sell 9.3 million vehicles for the year. Today GM is coming back, Chrysler is solid, and Ford Motors is on a roll. Car sales in September reached a 14.88 million pace.

Meanwhile, sixteen trillion dollars in home equity had been erased by the end of the first quarter of 2009. None of that loss could be blamed on Mr. Obama.

As of today, home prices are headed up. In fact, home equity has rebounded more than $11.5 trillion since the moving van backed up at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue and deposited Sasha and Malia's books and toys. That's the gain since President Obama rolled up his sleeves and got down to work.

Guess what else is on the mend? U. S. consumer confidence hit a five-year high this month, the best since July 2007.

IN OTHER WORDS, YOU POOR DUMB RIGHT-WING CLUCKS, President Obama saved your free market-loving asses.


If a pilot puts a plane into a crash dive you don't blame the co-pilot
if it takes him a while to stop the steep descent.
 

10 comments:

  1. This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.

    ReplyDelete
  2. I was excited to see a jump in traffic; until I checked out the comments section and saw all kinds of stupid advertisements.

    I have deleted them all: 20+ in one day.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Typical posts, written I think by maybe poor Chinses workers slaving away in some computer sweat shop somewhere:

    1 Thanks designed for sharing such a good opinion, piece of writing is fastidious, thats why i have read it entirely

    2. all the time i used to read smaller posts that as well clear their motive, and that is also happening with
    this post which I am reading now.

    ReplyDelete
  4. I have now erased at least a hundred stupid adds from this post. I wish you people would give up, although you do help make my blog look more popular.

    ReplyDelete
  5. Geez! I am not kidding. I have erased 500 links by now.

    ReplyDelete
  6. Here's the kind of stupid posts I get, always followed by a link:

    Remarkable! Its truly amazing piece of writing, I have got much clear idea concerning from this piece
    of writing.

    ReplyDelete
  7. I knew I smelled a rat as soon as I saw that chart showing the very end of the bush presidency, in which the numbers fell after a mostly Democrat-caused housing crisis. Please tell me you haven't bought the Kool-aid that the housing crisis was all Bush's fault. This had less to do with the man who happened to be in charge in 2008 than you think.

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IyqYY72PeRM

    As for your hokey chart:

    http://factcheck.org/2012/06/obamas-economic-sleight-of-hand/

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Just the facts, son, just the facts. I'm more of a Coca Cola man. Kool-aid is for kids. Car sale up, stock market up, it's just the facts.

      Delete
  8. Wow. I liked one of your pieces a lot, but then I read this.
    I see the man destroying the country, and you see him saving it. Absolutely no way to bridge that perception gap.

    Open your eyes, dude. Look around you -- at the lies, the vacations, the withholding of information, the bullying, the federal takeovers, the threats from the DoJ, the spying, the willful disregard for the law and the Constitution, the purposeful federal targeting of conservatives, the voter fraud, and the general contempt for Americans...

    Look at the "unprecedented" increase in the national debt -- from $10 trillion at the start of Obama's first term to $16 trillion at the end of his first term. It took hundreds of years to build a $10 trillion debt, and just four years of Obama to add another $6 trillion to it.

    Look at the expensive debacle known as Obamacare, at the expensive debacle known as the Common Core, at the shifting of tax dollars to failed "green" ideas and to other countries and to rebel groups in other countries.

    And then there's the Benghazi cover-up -- in a class by itself. That should have been a deal breaker for all Americans.

    Maybe try to step away from MSNBC and other biased media before you decide on what you think you know ...

    ReplyDelete
  9. Hmmm...I'm no fan of Common Core, that's the truth. I did a little checking sometime back. The federal deficit for Fiscal Year 2009, which Obama had no hand in creating was $1.4 billion. So the policies and programs which got us into the hole we're in aren't really his fault.

    As for the Benghazi cover-up, I don't believe in that story much at all. Confusion in a confusing situation, more like to me. I'm reading a book about Custer right now; and no two officers or men or Native-Americans saw that story the same way.

    The NSA story, that one troubles me. Not a fan of too much government power in any one person's hands. As for the disdain Obama has shown the U. S. Constitution, I don't see him trying to overturn decisions by the Supreme Court; and he can't get any of his program past Congress these days. To me, the U. S. Constitution seems to be working quite well. So, I have to stand by the examples I listed in the post above, all related to measurable economic data.

    ReplyDelete