Of the sons of Issachar, men who understood the times, with knowledge of what Israel should do, their chiefs were two hundred; and all their kinsmen were at their command — 1 Chronicles 12:32
The major post debate polls are showing most debate watchers think President Obama was the winner — and a typical finding comes in the CNN post-debate poll of registered voters who actually watched the debate. They were 33 percent Democratic and 33 percent Republican — which means it’s weighted a bit to include about 8 percent more Republicans than the voting population as a whole.
Bottom line: by 46-39 percent, the CNN.com poll respondents called Obama the winner. But asked who did the debate make you more likely to vote for, the respondents were tied between Romney and Obama, 25-25 percent.
Still, Romney won in other key areas:
*On who would better handle the economy: 58 percent Romney; 40 percent Obama.
*On who would better handle health care: 49 percent Romney; 46 percent Obama
*On taxes: 51 percent Romney; 44 percent Obama
*On who is a stronger leader: 49 percent Romney; 46 percent Obama
*On who is more likeable: 47 percent Obama: 41 percent Romney
*On who cares more about your life: 44 percent Obama; 40 percent Romney
*On who answered more directly: 45 percent Romney; 43 percent Obama
Okay, first the sampling of Republicans versus Democrats that Marinucci mentions. It is incredibly interesting to me that CNN is giving Democrats an eight-point advantage in their sampling formula. Do you know what the balance between Democrat and Republican voting was in the historic Obama wave election of 2008? It was +7 Democrat. CNN says it’s going to be +8 this time. It’s really amazing when you stop and think about it: CNN and the other polling organizations that have such an oversampling formula for Democrats are literally predicting that this election will be even BIGGERfor Obama than it was in 2008 when he was the messiah and everybody was blaming Bush and nobody could blame Obama because he promised hope and change. Is that what you think? Seriously? Do you believe that the masses are even crazier for Obama now than they were four years ago? I sure as hell don’t.
Okay, so the CNN poll shows that by a seven-point margin that Romney blew the doors off in the last debate, “Obama won the debate.” You might remember that first debate – when Romney destroyed Obama by 50 damn points.
Well, here’s the question, when it’s time to vote, do you believe that voters will ask:
Who won that second debate? The poll says maybe Obama did. And the first debate that Romney won by fifty points is meaningless but that second debate was huge. I’ll vote for Obama…
Or do you think they will ask:
Who will do a better job handling the economy?
If it is the second thing, like every sentient being (sorry Democrats, I know that rules you out) thinks it is, Mitt Romney won last night’s debate HUGE. Who would better handle the economy? After watching the debate, people by an 18-point margin chose Romney over Obama.
[Update, 10/17/12: Oh, my. It’s even worse than I thought it was for Obama. I found out that the CBS post-debate poll was even WORSE in proving that Obama has no answer for the economy and people overwhelmingly know he doesn’t. Check this CBS article points out: the American people think that Mitt Romney will do a better job handling the economy than Obama by a 31-point margin (65% to 34%).
WASHINGTON — Austan Goolsbee, a longtime adviser to President Barack Obama, will resign his post as the chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers this summer to return to teaching at the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business, the White House announced Monday.
Obama called him “one of America’s great economic thinkers.”
Goolsbee has been the face of the White House on economic news, and is a regular every first Friday of the month explaining the administration’s take on the latest jobless numbers.
A comment I came across summed up this latest development brilliantly:
So Obama lost all three of the nitwits who shaped his bizzarro economic policies. Summers bailed early, as did Romer, but Goolsbee was the dumbest of the three.
Which, of course, was precisely why he lasted the longest.
Let’s go back and review the fruit of Obama’s economic triumvirate – the last fool of which just left with his little rodent tail between his legs. It was called “the Recovery Act.” And here’s what these brilliant little rats predicted if Obama could shove his $3.27 TRILLION pile of pork through Congress:
It turns out that the only thing the Stimulus stimulated was public sector union employment.
A large chunk of the union dues will, inevitably, end up in the coffers of Democrat politicians.
It’s legalized theft, plain and simple. All taxpayers, irrespective of political persuasion, are funding Democrat politicians through the unholy, unlawful alliance of big government and the Democrat Party.
It was called “The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.” Jack Kevorkian could have called his suicide machine “The American Recovery and Reinvestment Machine.” The results of bothy turned out to be basically the same.
Reality set in, but when you live in the happy Marxist camper land of Keynesian extremism, love means never having to say you’re sorry for your massive failures.
Obama billed Austan Goolsbee as “one of America’s greatest economic thinkers.” Becuase, apparently, all of America’s greatest economic thinkers, like Obama himself, NEVER HELD A REAL JOB IN HIS ENTIRE LIFE. Why did Goolsbee get such a critically important job? Because, he is a doctrinaire Chicago liberal who could be counted upon to be personally loyal to doctrinaire Chicago thug Obama.
Take a look at the real-world experience Obama has surrounded himself with:
“Well, I’ve never actually performed brain surgery before, but I read a book about it once, and I taught a class in which we discussed brain surgery …” “YOU’RE HIRED!!! BEGIN OPERATING IMMEDIATELY. YOUR PATIENT IS THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA.”
Liberals are abject fools. And the only thing more foolish than a liberal is a liberal “expert.”
Here’s where we’re heading, America:
Poll: Record-high number think country headed into depression
By JENNIFER EPSTEIN | 6/8/11 12:06 PM EDT
A record-high of nearly half the country fears the economy is careening toward a depression, helping push President Barack Obama’s approval rating down by six points in just the last two weeks, according to a new poll.
[…]
Obama’s dropping numbers come as Americans’ fears that the country is headed into another Great Depression are higher than they’ve ever been in the CNN poll. In all, 48 percent of those surveyed said another great depression is likely in the next 12 months, while 41 percent said the same in 2009 and 38 percent said so in 2008. A slight majority – 51 percent – said they don’t think the economy will plunge into a deep depression.
But while Americans are voicing concern that the economy is getting worse and plunging toward a depression, Obama said Tuesday that he’s “not concerned about a double-dip recession.” Job growth in May totaled 54,000 jobs, far fewer than the economy has create for several consecutive months, but Obama said it’s not yet clear if last month was “a one-month episode or a longer trend.”
Let’s sing “All we are is just another bump on the road” to Pink Floyd’s “The Wall” while Obama finds another Marxist egghead academic who can keep steering the good ship USS America into every iceberg in the ocean.
Of course, it’s harder to steer when the economists at the wheel keep seeing the next Obama-caused disaster coming and leap off screaming…
I’m not the only one who thinks this doesn’t sound good at all, am I?
It’s Official: Most Americans Make Their Living Off The GovernmentA widely covered report from TrimTabs Investment Research, based on data from the Bureau of Economic Analysis, has found that 35 percent of all earnings are now direct transfer payments from the government. According to CNBC, “social welfare benefits make up 35 percent of wages and salaries this year, up from 21 percent in 2000 and 10 percent in 1960.”
But the real story is much worse. Nearly 8% of Americans work directly for the government while an additional 9.6% of Americans work as contractors for the government. Taken together, more than half of all Americans make their living directly from the government. “We have reached a tipping point,” says Grassfire Nation’s Steve Elliott. “That’s why what is happening in Wisconsin could have huge ramifications. Unless citizens stand now for less government and fiscal restraint, the government-dependent class will demand more and more government and our nation will be destroyed from within.”
I don’t want to see my country go the way of the Dodo bird, but at this point, it very much looks like we’ll be taking the trip.
Just remember when Soylent Green time comes to eat all the liberals first.
Are you sick of Obama and the left unrelentingly blaming Bush for everything that is happening going on two years after he left office? Do you think that Obama will ever man-up and actually become responsible for his presidency?
Me too, and me neither, respectively.
I went more than a little off on a liberal who dredged up this demagogic rhetorical garbage:
In Europe people laugh at us leaving in false dreams, wall streets spending false money, Bush starting a false war etc.
America is the land of dreams, how come? Idiots like George Bush can get elected to president. If he can Become president, then what can the smart people do? Jump to pluto?.
Do you really expect Obama to fix the worst recession in 80 years in a bit more than 18 months? Which was created by 8 years of Reagan, 4 years by bush, Clinton’s last period and 8 years by Bush? What is he some kind of god?
I didn’t vote for Obama but I expect him to put us in the right direction in this 6 years (he most likely) has left. in 2007-2008 they estimated that the recession will peak in 2012, so there is still a lot left. Just imagine how it would be with Palin/McCain. McCain who wanted to keep Bush’s politics moving and Palin who thought Africa was a country.
Here was my response:
First of all, I must pause to mock you for making Europe the gold standard of measurement. I guess if you like Nazism, fascism, Marxism, socialism, and genocide up the wazoo, Europe must be the coolest place on earth. I can see why you lefties love it so much.
What was it that Jefferson said? “The comparison of our governments with those of Europe, is like a comparison of heaven and hell.” Not that you give a damn what Jefferson said about anything.
Let me assure you that the Iraq War – which 60% of Democrat Senators voted to authorize (just for the record) – was a REAL war indeed.
Here’s a record of how Democrats were for that war before they were against it:
Now, you want to see a REAL idiot in action? How about a guy running for president who thinks there are 58 states? This is a man who is so fundamentally ignorant he doesn’t even know jack squat about his own country.
“It is wonderful to be back in Oregon,” Obama said. “Over the last 15 months, we’ve traveled to every corner of the United States. I’ve now been in 57 states? I think one left to go. Alaska and Hawaii, I was not allowed to go to even though I really wanted to visit, but my staff would not justify it.”
So let’s talk about what a total and absolute ideologue you are to condemn Sarah Palin for a bogus fabricated quote that she didn’t even say, and to then defend a guy who is on video saying something about 20 times as stupid. Because that’s how the Democrat Party operates, in a nutshell.
For the factual record, Obama actually called Europe a country. How is that not just as stupid as calling Africa a country?
“One of the things that is a huge advantage for America compared to countries like Europe is, actually, we’re constantly replenishing ourselves with hungry, driven people who are coming here, and they want to work, and they start a business, and our population is younger and more dynamic, and that’s a good thing!”
Which is to say that Obama is unfit to be president by your own deceitful example.
And as for Bush being an idiot, at least he didn’t need a pair of damn teleprompters to say his name right. Maybe Bush would have sounded more “intelligent” to you if he read absolutely everything he said at every venue he went to off his teleprompters.
Which is why he needs to bring one everywhere – even to sixth grade classrooms – to not sound like the gibbering idiot he truly is.
So, oh, yeah, the country is much better off with its “Genius-in-chief,” isn’t it?
You don’t give one damn about the truth; you live in your own self-created reality in which Sarah Palin is stupid for something that she never said, while Barack Obama who said something stupider than Sarah Palin ever said in her life is still brilliant.
You would be completely ashamed of yourself, if you were capable of that attribute of moral character.
I write an article that shows how BY THE DEMOCRATS VERY OWN STANDARD OF MEASUREMENT Obama is the worst president in American history. And you’ve got nothing to say about that. Nothing but more “blame Bush.”
Another demonstration of your rabid leftist ideology that will NOT be fair: the economy goes into an absolute TOILET under Obama, but he’s not responsible for any of his policies.
Why is it that you refuse to hold Obama to any kind of standard at all – even the standard he set for himself? The Obama administration said this was a terrible economy, but he had the solution, that his stimulus would keep unemployment from going over 8%. And by his own administration’s standard did he not utterly fail? Wasn’t he elected to make the economy better, instead of far worse?
And what do we say about the fact that unemployment is going up, rather than down? Wasn’t Obama supposed to make things better rather than worse?
WASHINGTON – Employers appear to be laying off workers again as the economic recovery weakens. The number of people applying for unemployment benefits reached the half-million mark last week for the first time since November.
It was the third straight week that first-time jobless claims rose. The upward trend suggests the private sector may report a net loss of jobs in August for the first time this year.
Initial claims rose by 12,000 last week to 500,000, the Labor Department said Thursday.
Construction firms are letting go of more workers as the housing sector slumps and federal stimulus spending on public works projects winds down. State and local governments are also cutting jobs to close large budget gaps.
The layoffs add to growing fears that the economic recovery is slowing and the country could slip back into a recession.
Isn’t Obama kind of going the wrong way, Mr. “Blame Bush”???
We’ve got all kinds of measures showing that things are far worse than they ever were under Bush. But you, total rabid fundamentalist leftist ideologue that you are – can only shout “blame Bush!” all the louder.
With consumers and businesses keeping a lid on expenses, more and more small and mid-size restaurants are throwing in their dish towels and closing up shop. […]
Nationwide, the number of restaurants dropped in 2010 for the first time in more than a decade, according to NPD, falling 5,202 to 579,416.
So, wow. That means that things haven’t been this bad since Bill Clinton was president and the Dot-com bubble he created blew up. That means that things were NEVER this bad under George Bush.
Bush inherited a terrible economic situation, too. First of all, the Dot-com bubble that Clinton passed to Bush created huge economic upheaval – to the tune of Nasdaq losing 78% of its value. Trillions of dollars of Clinton economic growth were just blown away like a fart in a hurricane. The mainstream media didn’t report the facts of Clinton’s recession because they are shockingly biased liberal propagandists. Which is why so few Americans trust them anymore. Clinton took all the credit for the Dot-com build-up; Bush got all the pain when it blew up, suffering a huge recession that was all on Clinton’s tab. Then you add to that the 9/11 attack, which crippled the airline and tourism industry for months, and you should understand how bad Bush had it. But he didn’t blame Clinton a gazillion times; he manned up and solved the problem. He took an economic lemon and made 52 consecutive months of job growth. In contrast, Obama hasn’t solved anything. All he’s done is blame and demonize.
In the wake of news about a spike in new applications for unemployment benefits comes another potentially troubling sign: A record number of workers made hardship withdrawals from their retirement accounts in the second quarter.
What’s more, the number of workers borrowing from their accounts reached a 10-year high, according to a report issued Friday by Fidelity Investments.
Wow. Again, things haven’t been so bad since the last time a Democrat was president. Again, it was NEVER this bad under George Bush’s presidency.
WASHINGTON: The US trade deficit widened in September by an unexpectedly large 18.2 per cent, the most in more than 10 years, as oil prices rose for the seventh straight month and imports from China bounded higher, a US government report showed on Friday.
Hey, again, things weren’t so bad since a Democrat president last ran things. And it was never so bad under George Bush.
How about all the foreclosures? Surely Obama has made that better? Oops. Again, things were NEVER this bad under Bush’s presidency:
Foreclosure crisis doesn’t seem to be loosening its hold on the housing sector. After declining for the last three consecutive months, foreclosure activity is back up in the United States.
As per the ‘Foreclosure Market Report’ released by RealtyTrac, an online marketplace, giving insights into foreclosures, 325,229 houses received foreclosure filings in the nation, 4 percent up from June.
Not only there has been a jump in the number of houses receiving filings, the foreclosures have exceeded 300000 for the 17th straight month. One in every 397 houses received foreclosure notice from the lenders in July.
Hmmm. Obama’s been president for all of those 17 months. And Bush was president for none of them. But it’s all Bush’s fault, anyway, isn’t it? At least if you’re a hypocrite liberal, it is.
Under Obama, and ONLY under Obama, foreclosures are up 75% in the major metropolitan areas:
NEW YORK (Reuters) – Foreclosures rose in 3 of every four large U.S. metro areas in this year’s first half, likely ruling out sustained home price gains until 2013, real estate data company RealtyTrac said on Thursday [in its midyear 2010 metropolitan foreclosure report].
Unemployment was the main culprit driving foreclosure actions on more than 1.6 million properties, the company said.
“We’re not going to see meaningful, sustainable home price appreciation while we’re seeing 75 percent of the markets have increases in foreclosures,” RealtyTrac senior vice president Rick Sharga said in an interview.
Has Obama done anything to solve this problem – which was why our economy blew up in the first place? Absolutely not.
Obama failed – because he is a failure, and failing is what he does:
WASHINGTON – Nearly half of the 1.3 million homeowners who enrolled in the Obama administration’s flagship mortgage-relief program have fallen out.
The program is intended to help those at risk of foreclosure by lowering their monthly mortgage payments. Friday’s report from the Treasury Department suggests the $75 billion government effort is failing to slow the tide of foreclosures in the United States, economists say.
More than 2.3 million homes have been repossessed by lenders since the recession began in December 2007, according to foreclosure listing service RealtyTrac Inc. Economists expect the number of foreclosures to grow well into next year.
“The government program as currently structured is petering out. It is taking in fewer homeowners, more are dropping out and fewer people are ending up in permanent modifications,” said Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Analytics.
There’s “hope and change” for you. A failed president with failed policies.
As an update (August 24), I add the following headline:
NEW YORK (Reuters) – Sales of previously owned U.S. homes dropped in July to their lowest pace in 15 years, implying further loss of momentum in the economic recovery.
Existing home sales dropped by a massive 27% in July. And, again, omigosh. We haven’t seen terrible numbers like this since the last time a Democrat was president. We NEVER saw anything like this during the Bush era.
How about budget deficits? Bush never had a trillion dollar deficit in his entire presidency, and the Democrats still blamed him for his spending; but the CBO now says that Obama will run a trillion-plus dollar defict next year, making it three years in a row. And we will have massive trillion-plus dollar deficits for as long as the eye can see because of Obama’s reckless unsustainable spending programs and the debt they will create. How about this? Obama’s deficit for July alone was more than Bush’s entire 2007-year deficit! And how about this one? Obama outspent Bush’s entire eight-year presidency’s deficit in just 20 months – after demonizing Bush for his spending!!!
From The Wall Street Journal, which, unlike the New York Slimes, the LA Slimes, the Chicago Tribune, and other major liberal papers, ISN’T actually financially and morally bankrupt:
Mr. Obama cannot dismiss critics by pointing to President George W. Bush’s decision to run $2.9 trillion in deficits while fighting two wars and dealing with 9/11 and Katrina. Mr. Obama will surpass Mr. Bush’s eight-year total in his first 20 months and 11 days in office, adding $3.2 trillion to the national debt. If America “cannot and will not sustain” deficits like Mr. Bush’s, as Mr. Obama said during the campaign, how can Mr. Obama sustain the geometrically larger ones he’s flogging?
Bush’s deficits were 2-3% of GDP. Obama’s are at 12.8% of GDP – which is five to six times higher and bringing us closer and closer every day to the point of collapse.
Are the people better off under Obama than they were under Bush? I don’t think so:
How about bank failures? We kind of need banks for a healthy economy unless we want to go back to the barter system, you know:
Banks are failing at double the rate of last year. During 2009, which the government claims was the peak of the recession, the total number of bank failures at this point in the year was 40. It is already 83 for this year.
For the record, only 25 banks failed under Bush in 2008. That number soared to 140 banks under Obama’s watch in 2009. And now we’re already past 118 bank failures this year in 2010 with four more months to go.
Do I want to go back to Bush’s “failed policies” when unemployment never got above 7.6% and averaged 5.2% for his presidency? As opposed to “moving forward” with Obama and his 10%-and-rising level? Pardon me, but I’ll take Bush.
Democrats are currently saying, “Do you want to go back to the way things were when Republicans were in control?”
So, yeah. I WOULD like to go back to the way things were when Bush and Republicans were in control. And I frankly want to know what idiot wouldn’t?
As for your question as to whether Obama is some kind of a god, I can’t help but point out that it wasn’t conservatives who kept putting the halo on Obama’s head:
A funny video provides a giant montage of Obama halos.
Without ado, here’s what Obama said the other day about conservatives and tea party people over his inability to get squat done about the Gulf of Mexico disaster:
“Some of the same folks who have been hollering and saying ‘do something’ are the same folks who, just two or three months ago, were suggesting that government needs to stop doing so much,” Obama said. “Some of the same people who are saying the president needs to show leadership and solve this problem are some of the same folks who, just a few months ago, were saying this guy is trying to engineer a takeover of our society through the federal government that is going to restrict our freedoms.”
Obama’s charge simply rests entirely upon his demagoguery. Essentially his implicit claim is that conservatives are anarchists who want no government whatsoever. We want gangs of hoodlums ranging the streets. We want looting and mayhem. We want a complete and total destruction of government, such that every man does what is right in his own eyes – or dies trying.
With all due respect (which amounts to none at all), bull crap. Anarchists are on the side of the left, not the right. Just as virtually every single terrible political philosophy that has ever existed have been on the side of the left, not the right.
Obama’s conclusion that if someone wants the government to do anything at all, he must therefore necessarily want everything that Obama is doing to massively increase the size of the government bureaucracy is so ridiculously stupid it is frankly hard to believe he’d make such an argument.
“If you want any government action at all, you must want want Big Brother.” I mean, please get real.
I can’t help but wonder if mega-government types like Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin described their enemies in the same terms. The charge would have been no more valid for them than it is for Obama. They, too, were proponents of huge government who were warring with those who favored less intrusive government. The argument would have been no more valid for these two leftist socialist tyrants than it is for Obama.
Furthermore, the right is doing nothing more than holding you to the same standard of blame that you personally helped heap on George Bush over Katrina five years ago. If you don’t like being hit with stones, you shouldn’t have started throwing them. Bottom line.
What conservatives and tea party activists want and always have wanted is responsible, limited government. We want the kind of government that is described in the American Constitution, rather than the Constitution of the U.S.S.R.
You’re right, Obama. We DON’T want you “trying to engineer a takeover of our society through the federal government” as you’ve been trying to do from your first day in office. What we DO want – in your own words – is for you to “plug the damn hole.” And unless I’m somehow very mistaken, the two things are clearly not the same, are they???
Am I the only one who thinks that “ObamaCare” and “plug the damn hole” are different?
I can tell you one of the things I most certainly DON’T want my government to do: whine.
So when are you going to stop whining and actually DO YOUR DAMN JOB, Obama???
And if you’re going to kick someone’s ass over this most disgraceful response that demonstrates a fundamental lack of leadership, why don’t you start with your very OWN???
You made so many pathologically narcissistic promises it defies comprehension. You boasted that you were going to be the guy whose election would mark the day “when the rise of the oceans began to slow and the planet began to heal.” Are we just supposed to somehow not notice that you’ve turned the oceans black instead?
You were also the guy who promised that you would keep unemployment from rising over 8% if we enacted your massive porkulus that has completely failed. You were also the guy who promised that you could win Iran over and get them to halt their nuclear weapons program through your policy of what always amounted to appeasement. You were also the guy who promised that you would do a bang-up job winning the war in Afghanistan after demonizing your predecessor’s far more successful efforts.
And now you whine and whine when someone asks the legitimate question, “How’s all your over-the-top bullshit working out?”
You cry about people blaming you even as you systematically blame people who don’t have anywhere NEAR the blame that you have for this mess. YOU’RE the one who took more BP money than anyone else. YOU’RE the one who granted the permit for the drilling platform that exploded. YOU’RE the one who granted a bunch of environmental waivers for that platform before it exploded. YOU’RE the one who dithered for more than two weeks while a massive crisis unfolded. YOU’RE the one who didn’t employ the procedure that has been on the books since 1994. YOU’RE the one who has completely failed to do a damn meaningful thing at every single turn.
If you really want to blame somebody else, Mr. Obama, why don’t you blame the millions of abject fools who elected you when it should have been obvious to anyone with more than two functioning brain cells that you were clearly not up to the job???
At the very least, you’d finally be blaming the right people for a change.
The Obama stimulus was one of the greatest political disasters in American history. It’s not enough to say it did nothing; it did WORSE than nothing. And it is going to be like an anvil weighing down our economy for years and years to come as we struggle to pay back what will ultimately be $3.27 TRILLION.
Compared to Canada, the United Kingdom, Germany, Japan, and Brazil, Americans have real reasons to be dissatisfied with President Obama’s policies.
As President Obama travels today to Illinois, Iowa, and Missouri, he will try to convince voters that his economic policies are creating jobs. But a year after Obama claimed that the stimulus had started creating jobs, it is not just the general public that believes that the stimulus was a waste of money, so do the experts. This week a new survey from the National Association for Business Economics found that 73 percent of business economists believe that the stimulus “has had no impact on employment.”
Many will point out that the unemployment rate has soared well above what the Obama administration predicted would occur if the stimulus were enacted. On Feb. 28, 2009, Eleven days after the stimulus bill signed into law, the White House predicted that the national unemployment rate would average 8.1 percent in 2009 and then decline to an average of 7.9 percent in 2010. Clearly things got much worse than the administration predicted. While the unemployment rate stood at 8.1 percent in February, 2009, by the end of last year it had risen to 10 percent. It still remains very high at 9.7 percent.
As President Obama and other Democrats have correctly pointed out many times, this has been a worldwide recession. Why not compare the changes in unemployment rates in other countries to the unemployment rate in the U.S. Figure 1 shows (click here) the percentage change in the U.S.’s unemployment rate since January 2009 when Obama became president compared to Canada, the United Kingdom, Germany, Japan, and Brazil. While several of the countries experienced similar increases during the beginning of 2009, by October of last year the United States had clearly “won” the race to have the largest percentage increase in unemployment of any of these countries.
Looking at the unemployment changes in terms of just the level of unemployment produces a similar picture (click here). The U.S. and many of these other countries had fairly similar unemployment rates in January last year, but by March the U.S.’s unemployment rate had increased.
Take Canada, whose economy is closely tied to ours and who is our largest trading partner. The Canadian stimulus package was nowhere as extensive as ours. Their stimulus spending of $22.7 billion last year and $17.2 billion, this year, amounts to about 7.5 percent of their federal spending for their 2009 and 2010 budgets — about a third of the per-capita stimulus spending in the United States.
Has Canadian unemployment climbed higher than ours because of their relative inaction? Hardly. Figure 3 shows (click here) the percentage change in unemployment rates in the U.S. and Canada since January 2009 when Barack Obama became president. While the percent increase in unemployment was the same for the first couple of months, Canada’s unemployment rate had peaked by August last year and fallen since then. By contrast, the U.S. rate only really began to decline the beginning of this year.
But it is not just Canada where the unemployment rate is faring better. Other countries, too, decided against a massive stimulus plan. In March, 2009, German Chancellor Angela Merkel pointedly refused to spend more money to “stimulate” the German economy. Yet, Figure 4 (click here) shows that Germany never really saw the unemployment experienced by other countries.
Japan clearly had an initial percentage increase in unemployment that was at least as bad as what we saw in the United States, though the country started from a much lower unemployment rate to begin with. Its stimulus as a percentage of GDP was also relatively large — about half as large as ours. Yet, Japan’s unemployment rate peaked in July 2009 and began to decline after that (see Figure 5 here).
The unemployment data shows that compared to these major countries, Americans have real reasons to be dissatisfied with Obama’s policies.It is also understandable why the vast majority of economists feel that Obama’s stimulus policies have spent a lot of money but produced no benefit. These same economists now expect the U.S. job market to improve, but that improvement won’t be due in any part thanks to Obama’s policies. It will just be due to the normal end of the recession.
As Obama travels the country today telling us what he is doing for us, Americans might do well to remember not just the huge bill that he has left our children and grandchildren, but how poorly he has done compared to other countries.
Only SIX PERCENT of Americans believe that Obama’s porkulus has created any jobs at all. That means more Americans believe that space aliens have anally probed them than believe in the stimulus. It also means that 94% think Obama and his entire administration and the entire Democrat congressional leadership are completely full of crap.
And 48% of Americans polled don’t think porkulus will EVER create jobs.
And now we find out that the people were right.
We have to hold Democrats responsible for this travesty. We have to vote them out, before they destroy the country more than they already have.
Barack Obama began his presidency by fundamentally misunderstanding the economy. There is absolutely no evidence whatsoever that he’s understood it one iota better since.
Let’s start where Obama started, with his massive stimulus. You know, the stimulus that everybody on the left said would cost “only” $787 billion. It didn’t take long before it suddenly cost “only” $862 billion. And by the time it’s all said and done, the real total cost of the stimulus which will actually be a $3.27 trillion porker before all is said an done.
“[I]f I could create one job in the private sector by helping to grow a business, that would be one more than Congress has created in the last six months.”
Only SIX PERCENT of Americans believe that Obama’s porkulus has created any jobs at all. That means more Americans believe that space aliens have anally probed them than believe in the stimulus. It also means that 94% think Obama and his entire administration and the entire Democrat congressional leadership are completely full of crap.
With all due respect to Obama’s spin and the mainstream media’s propaganda that things just keep getting better and better, we keep getting stories like this:
NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) — The number of Americans filing for unemployment insurance for the first time jumped for the second week in a row, according to government data released Thursday.
There were 484,000 initial jobless claims filed in the week ended April 10, up 24,000 from an unrevised 460,000 the previous week, according to the Labor Department’s weekly report.
Well, at least they didn’t say “unexpected.” Like pork to chicken as “the other white meat,” we can call the word “surprise” the mainstream media’s “other favorite adverb” to describe Obama’s unemployment rate.
A Washington Post writer presents the spirit of the constant stream of media excuses in the manner of a master of understatement:
Economists suggest the spike in claims could be related to the Easter holiday. Each week, it seems, there’s some sort of anomaly that affects the new jobless claims — the big February snows, the March snapback from the big February snows, the Easter holiday — so it’s hard to get a good handle on the real jobless picture in the U.S.
When excuses fail, the left resorts to demagoguery and fearmongering.
We might see a recovery. Count how many times the U.S. had a recession we never got out of. But even by Obama’s own analysis, any recovery will be a “jobless recovery,” with joblessness remaining shockingly high throughout his presidency. And the grim scenario of a “W-shaped” recession looms larger and larger.
All that said, an article by Mike’s America at Flopping Aces asks the right question given all the propaganda and spin:
And where was Obama when this dire news was about to hit? He was in Florida telling spaceworkers he was canceling much of the manned space program which means a loss of thousands more of the most highly skilled jobs in both Florida and California’s aerospace industries, not to mention Texas.
The past nine months Obama has talked about little else other than health care. Meanwhile, millions of Americans remain out of work. If a Republican President were in the White House we’d read daily stories about the toll of human suffering wrought by the President’s economic policy. But with Obama in the White House the “news” media hardly notices unemployment or discusses the lack of any effective jobs policy coming from Democrats.
48 of 50 States Have Lost Jobs Since Democrats’ Stimulus Friday, April 16, 2010
While the President recently said the economy had “turned a corner,” it’s hard to tell that from looking at the job situation across the U.S. According to the latest data from the U.S. Department of Labor, and the chart below, through March 2010 a total of 48 out of 50 States had seen net job losses since the President signed the Democrats’ stimulus plan into law in February 2009. The data show that only Alaska, North Dakota and the District of Columbia have seen net job creation since then. And (other than the perhaps predictable exception of D.C.) those states that have seen some increases in jobs are still well short of the growth the White House originally forecast. Additionally, over 3 million jobs have been eliminated since the Democrats’ stimulus, unemployment remains stuck at 9.7 percent instead of 7.4 percent and falling as Democrats predicted, and a record 16 million Americans are out of work.
To see how the Democrats’ stimulus has failed your state, see the table below.
State
Administration Claims of Change in Jobs Through December 2010
The California jobless rate of 12.6 percent for March was slightly higher than the 12.5 percent level reached in February.
Still, that was the worst California unemployment level in nearly 70 years, stretching back to the Great Depression. December 1940 marked the last time California staggered to the dismal milestone of a 12.6 percent jobless rate.
It was 9.3% when Obama took office. Which is to say, unemployment has increased by 35.5% since Obama began to “fundamentally transform” things.
California is a huge chunk of the U.S. economy. It is the eighth largest economy on the planet all by itself. And it represents 13% of the entire U.S. economy. In every single other recession the U.S. has ever had, it was California that led the country out. This time, under Obama, it is California which is lagging the farthest behind, with only two states having a higher level of joblessness.
And Florida – the fourth most populous state with the fourth largest economy in the nation – isn’t in much better shape. It’s unemployment rate under Obama’s “Wonder Boy” management is the highest it has ever been in history.
MIAMI — Florida’s unemployment rate reached an all-time high for the second straight month at 12.3 percent in March.
The figures released Friday by the Agency for Workforce Innovation show a marginal increase from February’s rate at 12.2 percent.
If these two giant states’ economies go boom – and it is very possible indeed that they WILL go boom – then the U.S. economy is doomed. They are too big to fail, and too big to save. The Louisiana Purchase? The Cornhusker kickback? You aint seen NOTHING yet! Get ready for the Mother of All Bailouts, suckers.
All this to say, it’s time to ponder the previously content-free Obama campaign slogan “Hope and Change.” “Change” would be a return to the Great Depression by the same policies that the president pursued during the LAST Great Depression. And “Hope” is hoping that history doesn’t repeat itself.
I remembered what theNew York Times describes as the promise at the core of Senator Obama’s presidential campaign:
WASHINGTON — At the core of Senator Barack Obama’s presidential campaign is a promise that he can transcend the starkly red-and-blue politics of the last 15 years, end the partisan and ideological wars and build a new governing majority.
To achieve the change the country wants, he says, “we need a leader who can finally move beyond the divisive politics of Washington and bring Democrats, independents and Republicans together to get things done.”
But this promise leads, inevitably, to a question: Can such a majority be built and led by Mr. Obama, whose voting record was, by one ranking, the most liberal in the Senate last year?
“I would say to the senator from Arizona that I’m in the dark almost as much as he is. And I’m in the leadership,” Durbin said on the Senate floor.
Obama would flood the airwaves with message after message about transparency and about reaching out to Republicans with a bipartisan spirit of cooperation. But what he says has a bad habit of not jiving with what he does.
And for the first time, Obama acknowledged that House Republicans had crafted measures to stimulate the economy, reduce the budget deficit and reduce health insurance costs.
At a number of times during the rare, televised, question and answer session with members, the president said that he had read many of their proposals.
“I’ve actually read your bills,” the president said to a packed banquet room at Baltimore’s Marriott Renaissance hotel.
The Republicans had been submitting bills to Obama all along. Which means that every single time he characterized them as “the party of no” who weren’t contributing their own ideas to the debate, he was knowingly cravenly and despicably lying.
The only thing that is “bipartisan” now is that Democrat and Republican alike have no reason to trust Obama.
Obama promised again and again that he would transcend the political divide. That was HIS promise, not the Republican minorities’ promise. It was Obama who broke his word. And it is Obama who should be held accountable to his broken promise.
Now disgusted former Obama supporter Mortimer Zuckerman put it this way:
“In the campaign, he said he would change politics as usual. He did change them. It’s now worse than it was. I’ve now seen the kind of buying off of politicians that I’ve never seen before. It’s politically corrupt and it’s starting at the top. It’s revolting.”
All that garbage wasn’t the Republicans’ fault. It was Obama’s and the Democrat leaderships’ fault.
So that’s one giant liberal lie put to bed. Barack Obama and the Democrats in Congress couldn’t have been more hyperpartisan or more ideological.
The Republicans were right to oppose their agenda. And the polls of American voters that have radically swung in their favor prove it.
The second giant liberal lie that Evan Bayh put the kibosh on is the myth that the stimulus has somehow been a giant success in spite of the fact that it was a giant failure even by the Obama administration’s own standard. Obama’s key economic advisers assured us that the stimulus would prevent unemployment from reaching 8%.
Even the leftist Huffington Post had this to say back in June of last year:
“The forecasts used to drum up support for the plan projected today’s unemployment would be about 8 percent. Instead, it sits at 9.4 percent, the highest in more than 25 years.”
Obama and his minions have repeatedly made spectacular claims about the “success” of the stimulus that fly in the face of reality. According to Obama’s own Recovery.gov website, by the White House’s own numbers, Obama only claim 595,263 jobs that were at a cost of $272 billion. That comes out to an astronomical $456,941 per job.
And at that rate, we can’t AFFORD for Obama to “create” any more jobs.
Democrat Senator Evan Bayh, a former governor who presumably knows something about job creation, absolutely destroyed the myth of any kind of stimulus success.
“[I]f I could create one job in the private sector by helping to grow a business, that would be one more than Congress has created in the last six months.”
Obama and his supporters are falsely claiming over and over again that the stimulus created 2 million jobs. And a prominent Democrat is essentially saying, “Show me just ONE.”
Only SIX PERCENT of Americans believe that Obama’s porkulus has created any jobs at all. That means more Americans believe that space aliens have anally probed them than believe in the stimulus. It also means that 94% think Obama and his entire administration and the entire Democrat congressional leadership are completely full of crap.
And 48% of Americans polled don’t think porkulus will EVER create jobs.
All that nothingness for the low, low price tag of only $862 billion.
WASHINGTON – The White House has abandoned its controversial method of counting jobs under President Barack Obama’s economic stimulus, making it impossible to track the number of jobs saved or created with the $787 billion in recovery money.
Despite mounting a vigorous defense of its earlier count of more than 640,000 jobs credited to the stimulus, even after numerous errors were identified, the Obama administration now is making it easier to give the stimulus credit for hiring. It’s no longer about counting a job as saved or created; now it’s a matter of counting jobs funded by the stimulus.
That means that any stimulus money used to cover payroll will be included in the jobs credited to the program, including pay raises for existing employees and pay for people who never were in jeopardy of losing their positions.
The new rules, quietly published last month in a memorandum to federal agencies, mark the White House’s latest response to criticism about the way it counts jobs credited to the stimulus. When The Associated Press first reported flaws in the job counts in October, the White House said errors were being corrected and future counts would provide a full and correct accounting of just how many stimulus jobs were saved or created.
So they’re supposedly not pulling that bogus crap any longer.
Only they still are. It’s amazing how quickly the most dishonest administration in the last century violates its own statements.
“One day after it came out that the administration had decided to stop trying to count the number of jobs created or saved by that $787 billion spending bill the president signed last year, the White House was back doing it again.
Christina Romer, the president’s top economic adviser, announced Tuesday that the spending had resulted in 2 million jobs created or saved. Romer called that a, “truly stunning and important effect,” adding that the spending, “had done exactly what we have anticipated it would do.”
No it hasn’t.
Romer herself said a year ago that the stimulus spending would hold the unemployment rate below eight percent. It’s now at 10 and counting. More than 4 million jobs were lost last year. What’s more, an analysis by the Associated Press has found that the outlays on roads, bridges and other infrastructure, had no discernible effect on local employment and had barely helped the construction industry.
The lesson here is a very old one: Government spending is a poor antidote to recession because the money has to be taxed or borrowed from one part of the economy to be spent in another. Not only that, it’s slow medicine. Even Romer said in her glowing report that only about a third of the money had been spent.
On second thought, given the effect the spend-fest has had on the deficit, maybe that’s the good news.”
— Brit Hume is the senior political analyst for Fox News Channel.
Christina Romer has sacrificed all personal and professional credibility to protect and defend the failed policies of Barack Obama.
Now she’s saying the stimulus which she herself claimed would prevent unemployment from going above 8% – and which ran its course last year after unemployment went up above 10% – fulfilled the Obama White House’s predictions? Seriously?
I suppose businesses paralyzed by uncertainty due to Obama’s policies and the harm that they will do to the economy, which is frightening away new hiring, must be REALLY good.
All I can say is this: if this is the Obama administration’s idea of doing good (at least a good, solid B+ anyway), may God have mercy on our doomed souls if they ever actually screw up.
First of all, did Obama’s stimulus create jobs and help the economy? I put it this way the other day, while writing an article about how ObamaCare amounts to a profoundly dishonest and secretive scheme to hijack one-sixth of the economy:
The answer is readily obvious. No, the stimulus didn’t help the economy. As a solid plurality of Americans now rightly believe, the stimulus HURT the economy.
And they are right. What we find out when we look at the economies of countries that either had or did not have stimulus packages is that the countries with huge stimulus packages (like the U.S.) had much more unemployment than the countries that didn’t:
As President Obama and other Democrats have correctly pointed out many times, this has been a worldwide recession. But if Summers and Biden are right in their assessment of the stimulus measures, one would think that the U.S. economy should be recovering better the many other countries, countries not wise enough to follow Obama’s lead of an extraordinary $787 billion increase in government spending. It is also particularly timely to evaluate the spending since Christina Romer, the chairwoman of President Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers, told Congress today that the stimulus had already had most of its impact on the economy. […]
But it is not just Canada where the unemployed are faring better. Other countries, too, decided against a massive stimulus plan. In March, with German Chancellor Angela Merkel nodding in agreement at his side, French President Nicolas Sarkozy declared: “the problem is not about spending more.” Later that month, the president of the European Union, Prime Minister Mirek Topolanek of the Czech Republic, castigated the Obama administration’s deficit spending and bank bailouts as “a road to hell.”The Washington Postwrote that there was a “fundamental divide that persists between the United States and many European countries over the best way to respond to the global financial crisis.”
The unemployment rate in the European Union was higher than in the United States to begin with even before the Obama administration’s spending. By January, the EU unemployment rate stood at 8.5 percent — almost a whole percentage point higher than ours. So what has happened since the big U.S. stimulus spending spree was passed? We more than caught up with the EU’s high unemployment rate. By August, the last month data is available for the EU, the U.S.’s unemployment rate slightly exceeded the EU’s — 9.7 versus 9.6 percent.
Germany has particularly been out front resisting the call for more public spending. Yet, from January through September, the German unemployment rate only rose slightly, from 7.9 to 8.2 percent.
Data on unemployment rates from 27 countries from Japan and South Korea to Brazil and other South American countries to Europe shows that from January to August display the same consistent pattern. Even in the EU it isn’t just a few countries that are driving the relatively small increase they have experienced. The U.S. had a larger increase in unemployment than 22 countries — that is, 81 percent of the countries had a smaller increase in unemployment this year than the United States. Unemployment in some major countries such as Brazil and Russia has actually fallen since January (see Table here). Other countries, from France to Mexico to Australia to Switzerland, have seen unemployment increase by only about half the amount of the U.S. rate. Indeed, the average increase in unemployment for the 27 countries is slightly less than half the US increase.
In other words, to the extent that there has been any improvement in the economy, it has been in spite of – and VERY CLEARLY NOT because of – the stimulus.
And one of the most frightening things we have in the wake of the failed Obama stimulus is shockingly high unemployment levels. The Obama White House said that if Obama’s stimulus wasn’t passed unemployment would rise to 9% (it was 7.6% when Obama took office; and the Obama White house said it would remain under 8% if the stimulus was passed). But it didn’t, did it?
Thus we come to Obama’s dirty little secret of unemployment:
The problem of people getting discouraged and giving up looking for work is ballooning.
The unemployment rate might be stuck at 10 percent, but the more detailed numbers in the Department of Labor’s Household survey data paint a more dire picture. The number of people with a job fell by 589,000 in December. Even worse, the number of people not in the labor force grew by an astounding 843,000 during just the last month. The Household survey data is what is used to measure the unemployment rate.
To get an idea of the size of this increase in the number of people not in the labor force, since February, when the stimulus package was passed, I repeat, the number of people not in the labor force has grown by 3.2 million. But the number for December represents 26 percent of the entire increase over that period of time. The problem of people getting discouraged and giving up looking for work is ballooning. Of course, they have had good reasons to be discouraged. Similarly since February, the total number of people employed has fallen by 4 million.
In September, Larry Summers, President Obama’s top economic adviser, claimed: “We have walked a substantial distance back from the economic abyss and are on the path toward economic recovery. Most importantly, we have seen a substantial change in the trend of job loss.” Christina Romer, the chair of President Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers, made a similar statement today. While conceding that the December numbers were a “slight setback,” she argued: “In a broad sense the trend toward moderating job loss is continuing, consistent with the gradual labor market stabilization we have been seeing over the last several months.”
The growth in the U.S. unemployment rate has continued to outpace the rest of the world. Since February, the average unemployment rate for the European Union has grown by 1.2 percentage points. By contrast, the US unemployment rate has grown by 1.9 percentage points — a 58 percent greater increase. Nor does the rate look particularly strong compared to what economists were predicting at the beginning of the year. Back in mid-January, business economists and forecasters surveyed by The Wall Street Journal expected the December unemployment rate to be at 8.6 percent.
Unemployment should start to improve, but the numbers indicate that the improvement in unemployment that economists and forecasters were predicting has occurred much more slowly than was expected at the beginning of 2009. By moving huge amounts of money from one industry to another, the stimulus as well as all the regulatory changes have caused a lot of churning in the labor market — movement of people from one job to another than has caused temporary unemployment. Unfortunately, the huge number of people who have withdrawn from the labor force represent a big hangover that will make reducing unemployment a slow process.
Obama could care less about the millions of workers who have despaired of finding a job to the point where they don’t even bother to look for work any more, because those people fall off out of the measurement categories. If you consider them, unemployment is now at 17.3%.
Unemployment is likely to rise to 13 percent or higher and will weigh on the economy for several years, countering government efforts to stabilize the banking industry, analyst Meredith Whitney told CNBC. […]
“We underestimate how much the whole economy is dependent on the mortgage industry, and that has to change,” Whitney said. “This is what happens when you delay the inevitable. We’re buying time here, but we’re not restructuring the economy.”
The Obama administration’s $75 billion program to protect homeowners from foreclosure has been widely pronounced a disappointment, and some economists and real estate experts now contend it has done more harm than good.
(June 9) – Commercial real estate mortgage defaults are at a 15-year high and will more than double by the end of 2010, according to a new report from research firm Real Estate Econometrics (REE).
NEW YORK, Jan 7 (Reuters) – U.S. commercial mortgage-backed bond defaults may more than double this year as the economic recession hurts office building, retail store and multifamily housing assets, Fitch Ratings said on Wednesday.
It was the mortgage industry – imploded by Democrats – that caused the economic implosion of 2008. And our failure-in-chief hasn’t done a damned thing to make that industry better. All he’s given, characteristic of his entire presidency, is false hope.
One day, years from now, an honest Obama administration official (if there is one) will be saying something similar to FDR’s Treasury Secretary:
“We have tried spending money. We are spending more than we have ever spent before and it does not work. And I have just one interest, and if I am wrong… somebody else can have my job. 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!” – Henry Morganthau, FDR’s Treasury Secretary, May 1939
In April 1939, six years after FDR rolled out his failed New Deal, unemployment was still at 20.7%.
We are now only 3.4 percentage points away from Treasury Secretary Henry Morganthau’s moment of clarity.
Start Thinking Right 