Last night my friend declared “Come on, Obama isn’t that Bad!”.
No, I disagree. Obama really is “that bad”. We have not seen an across the board failure in policy this bad since the Cater administration.
“One of the great mistakes is to judge policies and programs by their intentions rather than their results.”
― Milton Friedman
Invoking the wisdom of Friedman, lets look at some of the results. A few days ago I read a this post about 83 Numbers from 2013 that “are too crazy to believe”. Let’s consider a few highlights:
- An all time record 102 million Americans do not have a job.
- An record high 49.2% Americans receive money from the government.
- The six largest banks in the United States (JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Citigroup, Wells Fargo, Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley) have collectively gotten 37 percent larger over the past five years.
- According to the U.S. Census Bureau, median household income in the United States has fallen for five years in a row.
- If you assume that the labor force participation rate in the U.S. is at the long-term average, the unemployment rate in the United States would actually be 11.5 percent instead of 7 percent.
- There are 1,148,000 fewer Americans working today than there was in November 2006. Meanwhile, our population has grown by more than 16 million people during that time frame.
- When Barack Obama took office, the average duration of unemployment in this country was 19.8 weeks. Today, it is 37.2 weeks.
- Wal-Mart recently opened up two new stores in Washington’D.C., and more than 23,000 people applied for just 600 positions. That means that only about 2.6 percent of the applicants were ultimately hired. In comparison, Harvard offers admission to 6.1 percent of their applicants.
- The number of Americans on food stamps has grown from 17 million in the year 2000 to more than 47 million today.
- The number of Americans on Social Security Disability now exceedsthe entire population of Greece, and the number of Americans on food stamps now exceeds the entire population of Spain.
These statistics and trends are truly disturbing. There is no change on the horizon. The January jobs report showed an increase of 74,000 jobs (mostly temporary and part-time), but 347,000 people left the work force. Heroically the Obama Administration can claim the unemployment rate is improving…
It is true Obama did inherit a floundering economy from Bush. That was 5 years ago. Time to stop blaming Bush. This is Obama’s economy. And it is Obama’s recovery, which is pathetic.
Luckily Obama is calling 2014 ‘A year of Action‘. Whew! Maybe this will be the year when taxing the rich more, giving more tax payer dollars to those ‘in need’, and adding more big government regulations will start working. Clearly it hasn’t worked for the last 5 years. I guess the problem is we just have not been doing enough of these things over the last 5 years. I’m sure this year will be different.
No, Obama really is that bad.
Libertarian Dude 