I have no idea how many people are out there wondering exactly what happened to the economy. Recessions happen, but they aren’t normally this long and painful. Why did it have to be this way? Anyone paying attention for the past two years already knows what happened – we’re repeating the mistakes of the Great Depression. Maybe we should re-name it. We can call it “The Depression that Didn’t Have to be So Great,” sort of like what’s happening now.
The Wall Street Journal has a great piece up dissecting Obama’s economy. While some of it started with Bush when he decided to chuck the free market to avoid panic, President Obama put his predecessor’s misguided attempts to help the economy on steroids. The current economy is what we have to show for it.
Only yesterday at a Labor Day event in Milwaukee, Mr. Obama was at it again, declaring that “anyone who thinks we can move this economy forward with a few doing well at the top, hoping it’ll trickle down to working folks running faster and faster just to keep up—they just haven’t studied our history. We didn’t become the most prosperous country in the world by rewarding greed and recklessness.”
Whatever else one can say about such rhetoric, it is not the way to restore business confidence or turn a fragile recovery into a durable expansion. It has only spread fear and even greater uncertainty.
As for blaming the Republicans, with only 40 and then 41 Senators they couldn’t stop so much as a swinging door. The GOP couldn’t even block the recent $10 billion teachers union bailout. The only major Obama priorities that haven’t passed—cap and tax and union card check—were blocked by a handful of Democrats who finally said “no mas.” No Administration since LBJ’s in 1965 has passed so much of its agenda in one Congress—which is precisely the problem.
***
To put it another way, the real roots of Mr. Obama’s economic problems are intellectual and political. The Administration rejected marginal-rate tax cuts that worked in the 1960s and 1980s because they would have helped the rich, in favor of a Keynesian spending binge that has stimulated little except government. More broadly, Democrats purposely used the recession as a political opening to redistribute income, reverse the free-market reforms of the Reagan era, and put government at the commanding heights of economic decision-making.
Mr. Obama and the Democratic Congress have succeeded in doing all of this despite the growing opposition of the American people, who are now enduring the results. The only path back to robust growth and prosperity is to stop this agenda dead in its tracks, and then by stages to reverse it. These are the economic stakes in November.
Read the whole thing, it’s all laid out there in black and white. For whatever reason, the statists among us never learn.
Most people, especially business owners are afraid and untrusting of government at this time; some folks are truly struggling as we see from unemployment, foreclosure and assistance numbers. Its gone way past Bush or any other straw men the president wants to blame for his own shortcomings. The economy is the president’s and his alone, he created it, he fosters it and he owns it. It’s the Obamamy.
Like or Dislike:
0 
0
I strongly suspect that neither political party really knows what to do regarding the economy, nor do the experts, although they have opinions and theories. (If you want to really check out their level of confidence, ask them to guarantee the stated results of their anticipated policies, and then require them to put up their family assets resulting in forfeiture if they are wrong.)
The problem is simply too large, complex, and interconnected with economies of other nations, over which the US has no control.
To fix most things in the universe, you have to get them to “sit still” at least for a short period of time, and suspend those outside factors bearing on the problem. This is a dynamic situation. If we as a society actually knew what worked, and could establish a cause and effect relationship with any certainty, we would have done it by now. Don’t you think?
Like or Dislike:
0 
0