Catastrophic Failure Of Leadership: US Birthrate Falls To Lowest Level In 100 Years

Have you heard?  America’s birth rate is lower than at any time in the last last 100 years.

There seems to be something profoundly wrong with Obama’s central message of hope and change.  There is something profoundly wrong with Obama’s “fundamental transformation” of America.

22/08/2010
Recession effect? US birth rate lowest in 100 yrs

Milkwujee [sic]: The US birth rate has dropped for the second year in a row, and experts think the wrenching recession led many people to put off having children. The 2009 birth rate also set a record: lowest in a century. Births fell 2.7 per cent last year even as the population grew, numbers released Friday by the National Center for Health Statistics show.

“It’s a good-sized decline for one year. Every month is showing a decline from the year before,” said Stephanie Ventura, the demographer who oversaw the report. The birth rate, which takes into account changes in the population, fell to 13.5 births for every 1,000 people last year. That’s down from 14.3 in 2007 and way down from 30 in 1909, when it was common for people to have big families. “It doesn’t matter how you look at it — fertility has declined,” Ventura said.

The situation is a striking turnabout from 2007, when more babies were born in the United States than any other year in the nation’s history. The recession began that fall, dragging stocks, jobs and births down. “When the economy is bad and people are uncomfortable about their financial future, they tend to postpone having children. We saw that in the Great Depression the 1930s and we’re seeing that in the Great Recession today,” said Andrew Cherlin, a sociology professor at Johns Hopkins University. “It could take a few years to turn this around,” he added, noting that the birth rate stayed low throughout the 1930s.

As the report shows, it’s actually the lowest in a lot more than a hundred years.  But we’ll go with the lamestream media’s headline.  The REAL news here is that – while the low birthrate is being blamed on the recession – the birthrate is actually lower than it was during the Great Depression years (it was 21.3 births per 100 Americans in 1930, the year AFTER the Depression began).

The birth rate is shockingly down for not one but two years in a row.  Which is contrasted with 2007 (“Miss me yet?”),  when more babies were born to Americans than at any time in our history.  The Democrats under Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid would soon screw that up, however.

And now, Obama has not only crushed “hope” in America, but love as well.

Gotta ask: how’s that “Marxist as Moscow” “hopey changey” thing working out for ya here in “God damn America”?

The media is depicting this frightening news that American can’t replenish it’s population and is now going the way of the Dodo bird to the impact of the recession.  It’s the economy, stupid.  There’s only one problem with that: it wasn’t this bad in the GREAT DEPRESSION.

Now, I remember when Obama was campaigning for office and when he was trying to ram his stimulus – that he said would keep employment under 8% – through a Democrat-owned Congress.  Those were the days when Obama

… turned fearmongering into an art form. He has repeatedly raised the specter of another Great Depression. First, he did so to win votes in the November election. He has done so again recently to sway congressional votes for his stimulus package.

In his remarks, every gloomy statistic on the economy becomes a harbinger of doom. As he tells it, today’s economy is the worst since the Great Depression. Without his Recovery and Reinvestment Act, he says, the economy will fall back into that abyss and may never recover.

Obama got his presidency.  He got his massive stimulus boondoggle.  But he poisoned the well of American confidence in doing so.

For all his many failings – such as keeping the Great Depression going for seven years longer with his terrible economic policies – FDR was a man of incredible confidence who gave his people optimism in the future.  “Things are bad for us now,” he essentially said, “But we’ll lick this depression.  You just wait!”  And most Americans, perhaps gullibly given his awful policies, believed him.

Ultimately, FDR’s own Treasury Secretary and close personal friend Henry Morganthau, acknowledged the utter failure of FDR’s economic policies:

“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

But at least the people had confidence -however misplaced – in FDR’s leadership.

Unlike Obama, whom they have no confidence in at all.

I have said this many times, and said it quite forcefully hear only a couple of months after Obama assumed office:

At this point, Obama is demonstrating that he cannot lead. And in a way it’s not his fault; there was never anything in his life experience that indicated he could lead. Community organizer? Obscure Illinois State Representative [who used thug tactics to come from nowhere to claim the seat]? One-term Senator (who promised he’d serve his first six-year term but then ran for President after 158 days???)??? [….]

He is a total failure. We don’t have a leader, we just have a guy who campaigns for four years. The country will begin to increasingly drift until we get a real president.

And boy oh boy was I ever right.

Here’s a short list of news reports I came up with that revealed how America was in the grip of disaster while Obama was on vacation gripping a golf club:

• Jobless claims rise to highest level in 9 months.
• Pre-owned home sales drop 27.2% to lowest level in 15 years.
• New home sales fall 12.4% to weakest level since 1963.
• 1 in 10 homeowners with a mortgage are at risk of foreclosure.
• US foreclosures up 4%; top 300,000 for 17th straight month (Obama’s been president for 19 months).
• 14.42% of all mortgages either delinquent or in foreclosure.
• Foreclosures jump 25%.
• New durable goods orders excluding transportation post largest decline in 1-1/2 years.
• Frightening trend: Commercial Property Owners Choose to Default.
• 401(k) hardship withdrawals, loans SOAR.
• Dow Jones dips below psychologically-important 10,000 level.
• Nightmare ‘Hindenburg Omen’ triggered, but economic fundamentals just as scary.
• US unemployment figures increase fears of double-dip recession.
• Taliban in Afghanistan strengthening, spreading; violence surging.
• Top Marine General says Obama Afghan deadline gives sustenance to enemy.
• Spending baseline has increased $4.4 trillion under Democrat control.
• 2010 Federal Deficit Second Largest in 65 Years (2nd only to 2009).
• Trade gap widens, largest increase in imports in 26 years.
• Weak GDP raises fears, with Fed running out of options.

Did you notice how many of those new bad news releases reveal terrible numbers that go back decades?  And that things were NEVER this bad when Bush was president?

And here’s the headline that Obama finally comes back from the lap of luxury after his sixth vacation of the year to see:

Record number in government anti-poverty programs

And the story there:

WASHINGTON — Government anti-poverty programs that have grown to meet the needs of recession victims now serve a record one in six Americans and are continuing to expand.

One major problem facing the country is that millions of Americans are glad that Obama is giving them welfare, versus the Americans who would rather have a president who leads the nation as a whole out of poverty and back to prosperity.

It’s not just Obama’s bad economy that is causing Americans to stop having babies and start fading away as a nation; it’s not even his terrible policies that are sustaining that bad economy; it’s his total failure of leadership that is creating this unparalleled lack of confidence in America’s future.

Most Americans Finally Blaming The Most Irresponsible President In History

One could conclude – based on rhetoric alone – that George Bush never left office, and Obama never actually ascended to the presidency.

After all, according to the Obama narrative, only one man is responsible for anything these days.  And that man is George Bush.

Obama isn’t “responsible.”  He’s completely irresponsible.

Obama has never once taken the “The Buck Stops With George Bush” sign off of his desk.

Since we all know that the buck stops at the highest political office, and since we all know that Obama keeps passing the buck off to George Bush, we can therefore know that Obama really isn’t our president.  Whether he produces his damn birth certificate or not.  Given the fact that leadership is ultimately about taking responsibility, and Obama refuses to take any responsibility whatsoever, he’s clearly not the POTUS.  And since Bush is apparently STILL responsible for everything, he becomes our defacto president even nearly two years after actually leaving the office.

Well, Barry Hussein may never accept responsibility for the failure of his policies, but at least more Americans are finally saying that this is Barack Obama’s sucky economy, rather than agreeing with Obama that he had nothing to do with anything.

From Rasmussen:

48% Blame Obama for Bad Economy, 47% Blame Bush
Monday, August 02, 2010

For the first time since President Obama took office, voters see his policies as equally to blame with those of President George W. Bush for the country’s current economic problems.

A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that 48% of Likely U.S. Voters now think Obama’s policies are to blame for the continuing bad economy, up three points from last month. Forty-seven percent (47%) say the recession that began under Bush is at fault.

With voters across the country expressing stronger belief that the economy is getting worse rather than better, these new findings spell potential bad news for Democratic candidates this fall. The president is already planning to limit his campaign appearances with candidates because of potential voter backlash.

In June and last October, 45% blamed Obama’s policies for the country’s ongoing economic woes, the previous high finding on this question. The number who blame Bush is down from 62% in May 2009 when Rasmussen Reports first began tracking the question regularly. Only 27% faulted Obama at that time.

As is often the case, Mainstream voters and the Political Class have wholly different viewpoints on this question. While 61% of Mainstream voters now blame Obama’s policies, 87% of the Political Class say the bad economy is due to the recession that began under Bush.

Fifty-five percent (55%) of men blame Obama’s policies for the current economic problems, while 52% of women think Bush is the cause.

Among voters not affiliated with either major party, Obama is now chiefly to blame by a 52% to 44% margin.

That last paragraph is particularly significant.  Independents OVERWHELMINGLY blame Obama over Bush for the worsening economy.

And if that news isn’t revealing enough, Gallup/USA Today just came out with a poll showing Obama at only 41% approval – the lowest of his presidency.  He’s now flirting with being in the 30s.

I don’t really care what Democrats think about Obama vs. Bush.  The Democrat Party can be rightly defined as the party of moral idiocy.  But we are finally seeing rank-and-file Americans who are not involved with political ideology looking at going on two years of failure and false demagoguery and coming to the correct conclusion about whom to hold responsible.

When the economy appeared to be improving, Obama starting talking about his “summer of economic recovery.”

From Politico:

Obama, Biden declare ‘Recovery Summer’
By MIKE ALLEN 6/17/10 5:06 AM EDT

Vice President Joe Biden today will kick off the Obama administration’s “Recovery Summer,” a six-week-long push designed to highlight the jobs accompanying a surge in stimulus-funded projects to improve highways, parks, drinking water and other public works.

David Axelrod, a senior adviser to the president, said: “This summer will be the most active Recovery Act season yet, with thousands of highly-visible road, bridge, water and other infrastructure projects breaking ground across the country, giving the American people a first-hand look at the Recovery Act in their own backyards and making it crystal clear what the cost would have been of doing nothing.”

But then we got all kinds of lousy economic news to rain turds all over Obama’s “Mission Accomplished” summer of recovery tour.

We got news like this:

Steep decline in GDP growth raises alarms
By Don Lee, Los Angeles Times
July 31, 2010

Reporting from Washington — U.S. economic growth slowed sharply in the spring, stoking concerns about a weak job market, a drawn-out struggle for the unemployed and growing financial pressures on millions of American families.

The nation’s gross domestic product grew at an annualized rate of 2.4% in the second quarter, falling from an upwardly revised 3.7% expansion in the first three months of the year, the Commerce Department said Friday.

While many economists had expected growth to moderate, the reported decline was a jolting 35% below the previous quarter. Gross domestic product is the value of all goods and services produced in the economy. […]

In the wake of Friday’s report, a number of economists downgraded their growth forecast for the second half of the year to as low as 1.5%, an anemic rate that would likely push the unemployment rate above June’s 9.5% figure.

Commerce officials also revised downward some prior growth figures for real GDP, which is the inflation-adjusted value of all goods and services produced in the U.S. The government Friday said real GDP grew 5% in the fourth quarter of 2009, down from a previously reported 5.6%.

Overall, the new data painted a picture of a deeper recession than previously believed.

Government spending and inventory adjustments have powered the economic recovery that began last summer, and they juiced up the second quarter as well. But economists expect tighter public spending, particularly by budget-strapped state and local governments, to be a drag on the economy in the coming quarters.

Many private economists projected that the unemployment rate would rise to 9.8% or higher by the end of the year.

And today, we learned that housing prices were down, factory orders were down, and consumer spending was down.  As the LA Times put it:

U.S. consumers did not boost their spending in June and their incomes failed to increase, further evidence that the economic recovery slowed in the spring. And Americans saved at the highest rate in nearly a year.

Personal spending was unchanged in June, the Commerce Department reported Tuesday. It was the third straight month of lackluster consumer demand. Incomes were also flat, the weakest showing in nine months.

The disappointing report on spending and income was among a raft of data released Tuesday that confirmed the economy ended the April-to-June quarter on a weak note.

Factory orders dropped 1.2 percent in June to a seasonally adjusted $406.4 billion, the Commerce Department said. It was the second consecutive decline after nine straight months of gains. Lower demand for steel, construction machinery and aircraft dragged down the figure.

And the number of buyers who signed contracts to purchase homes fell in June. The National Association of Realtors says its seasonally adjusted index of sales agreements for previously occupied homes dipped 2.6 percent to a reading of 75.7. That was the lowest on records dating back to 2001 and down nearly 19 percent from the same month a year earlier.

Last week the government said economic growth for the second quarter slowed to 2.4 percent. Many analysts believe it will dip further in the second half of the year as high unemployment, shaky consumer confidence and renewed troubles in housing weigh on the year-old economic recovery.

What’s funniest of all – if anything is funny during a complete failure’s destruction of what had been the greatest nation in the history of the planet – is that Obama was literally still congratulating himself when the bad news came dumping down:

President Obama was in New Jersey yesterday killing time before his appearance on ‘The View’. So he stopped at Tastee Subs and held a small business summit, pushing for legislation to increase funding to the Small Business Administration. In between sound bytes on jobs and bites of Tastee’s super-sub special, more bad economic news came rolling Obama’s way.

And then all of a sudden the Obama administration is all, “Oh, crap! Stop looking at our “success”!  No!  Don’t look at our “recovery summer”!  We don’t want to take responsibility after all!  Start looking at Bush again!  He’s the only one who is actually RESPONSIBLE!”

So now – after Obama patted himself on the back and congratulated himself for his mission accomplished, all of a sudden we’re back to the “Bush recession.”

BIDEN LAMENTS ‘BUSH RECESSION’…. Vice President Biden appeared on NBC’s “Today” show earlier, and used a line I don’t recall leading White House officials using before, at least not lately.

Ann Curry noted that the administration has been blamed for high unemployment rates, and asked, “Has this administration done enough?”

Biden replied, “Let me put it this way: there’s never enough until we restore the 8 million jobs lost in the Bush Recession. Until that happens, it doesn’t matter. I mean, it matters, but it’s not enough.”

Which is to say that, according to the Obama administration, George Bush is to blame for all the jobs HE lost, PLUS all the jobs that OBAMA lost.  After going on two years in office, Obama still isn’t responsible for anything at all.  Oh, except for that brief period when it looked like maybe things were looking up and Obama could suddenly be “responsible”.

When Bush left office, unemployment was 7.6%.  Barry Hussein promised that his massive stimulus would save the day.  He assured the American people that he understood what was wrong, and that he had the solution.  His administration promised that if the stimulus (which started out at $787 billion, then got revised upward to $862 billion, but which will actually cost taxpayers $3.27 TRILLION) was passed, unemployment would not go over 8%.

From NPR:

President Obama is being forced to wade into a domestic economic debate that just won’t go away: As the unemployment rate rises, there have been calls for a second round of stimulus spending.

Obama is in a difficult position. He has to defend his $787 billion economic stimulus package at a time when there are few visible signs that it has had an effect. Unemployment is at 9.5 percent, even though the White House predicted in January that with the stimulus bill, it would rise to only about 8 percent.

And the LA Times article cites economists as now predicting that unemployment will rise to at least 9.8% – or higher.  Which for the record is a lot higher than 8%.

It’s not enough to say Obama was incompetent.  He lied.  He pitched himself as Mr. Wonderful, and utterly failed to live up to all of his false promises.

In October 2008 I wrote an article which quoted Chief Executive Magazine as follows:

In expressing their rejection of Senator Obama, some CEOs who responded to the survey went as far as to say that “some of his programs would bankrupt the country within three years, if implemented.” In fact, the poll highlights that Obama’s tax policies, which scored the lowest grade in the poll, are particularly unpopular among CEOs.

And I had cause to cite that article again recently, as Obama pursued the incredibly demagogic rhetoric that said we had to go forward with his “change” rather than backward.  Lest you don’t see the obvious flaw, allow me to point out that Germany went forward with Hitler’s “change,” too.  And then there was Stalin’s “change,” and Pol Pot’s “change,” and Castro’s “change,” etc.

To argue that moving forward to “change” is somehow intrinsically good is intrinsically stupid.  It is the very worst kind of moral idiocy.  And that “logic” has repeatedly justified the most evil outcomes in the history of the human race.

The CEOs – whom unlike the Obama administration actually understand something about business – have turned out to be right.  And Obama has turned out to be completely wrong.  Over and over and over again.

Obama pitched his entire campaign for presidency on “hope” to go along with his nebulous “change.”  Sadly, the American people didn’t understand that there isn’t and can be no hope in the progressive agenda of Barack Hussein.  There is only increasing government control over more and more of our lives.

It should terrify you that Obama is well on the way to the three-year plan toward bankruptcy that the CEO’s predicted of an Obama presidency.

Obama Throws ‘New Politics’, ‘Change’ Aside To Focus On Attacks

Don’t you love to say, “I told you so”?

Obama used to dish out the Kool-Aid that he was a “new candidate” offering a “new politics” of “hope” and “change.”  And his believers swallowed it by the gallon.  Why, Barack Obama – who has literally replaced Jesus Christ as the central figure of history – can do no wrong, and it is only Republicans who would stoop to doing anything negative.

Everyone else looked back at the cynical way he wiped Alice Palmer – who would have crushed him in a fair election – off the ballot (along with every other Democrat in the election).  And we remembered that the same guy had earlier been fighting to keep every voter ON the ballot even if there was a good chance that the “voter” was fraudulent.

Obama also knows how to play hardball in other ways:

Pre Convention Angst From A Republican

I wonder how many Republicans are like me today.

Hearing about Sarah Palin’s daughter being pregnant kind of hit me like a punch in the gut.

It wasn’t just the pregnancy; it was the pregnancy on top of the Republican convention being taken offline due to the hurricane.  Two years of planning, and now they’re literally going day-by-day.

I was quite high after hearing about Sarah being named as John McCain’s running mate.  Now I feel like the air has been let out of my football.

In my case, I think it is temporary.  All we need is a good convention, and we’ll have our “Big Mo” back.

Inexperienced Obama Makes Experience The Issue

Politico has the Obama campaign reaction to John McCain’s VP pick, Gov. Sarah Palin:

Obama spokesman Bill Burton: Today, John McCain put the former mayor of a town of 9,000 with zero foreign policy experience a heartbeat away from the presidency. Governor Palin shares John McCain’s commitment to overturning Roe v. Wade, the agenda of Big Oil and continuing George Bush’s failed economic policies — that’s not the change we need, it’s just more of the same.

When Barack Obama ran in the Democratic primaries, he was far away the least experienced candidate.  But it didn’t matter then.  He had “hope” and “change” on his side.  When Barack Obama began to run against John McCain, he was even farther away-er the lest experienced candidate.  But it didn’t matter then, either.  The man who opposed the surge – and the victory it has brought us in Iraq – said it was all about his “judgment.”

Now we get to see his poor judgment in action again.