FDR’s Economic Policies FAILED. But Don’t Take My Word For It, Listen To Obama’s TOP Economic Adviser

Everyone ought to be familiar with the words of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’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

And for the record, in April 1939, the unemployment rate was 20.7%.  Anybody who thinks that FDR’s policies did anything but dig us deeper into depression are morons.

But few Americans have ever heard those words from that FDR economic official.  It’s an example of the kind of thing the mainstream media – or what should more accurately be called the progressive propaganda conspiracy – is designed to prevent you from knowing.  They regard themselves as “gatekeepers” of the news, and they want to be able to decide what you get to know and what you should not know.

If you knew that FDR’s very own Treasury Secretary had openly admitted that FDR’s economic policy had failed, you would probably not want to try that path again.  And the mainstream media – which is firmly under the control of the liberal/progressive/socialist/Democrat agenda – simply doesn’t want you to come to such an accurate and informed opinion.

So it really shouldn’t surprise me very much that I was unaware of the words of “President Barack Obama’s top economic adviser,” Lawrence H. Summers, on the economic policies of FDR:

Larry Summers blasphemy: Hitler saved FDR’s ass
by Lee on July 23, 2011 21:16 pm

Larry Summers is often quotable and Charlie Rose is occasionally watchable. Put ‘em together and you get the very definition of a blind sow finding an acorn.

The whole clip is interesting, but the money quote begins a hair after the 21:30 mark when Summers says something about left wing icon FDR that will undoubtedly result in fewer dinner invitations in the Hamptons this summer:

“Never forget, never forget, and I think it’s very important for Democrats especially to remember this, that if Hitler had not come along, Franklin Roosevelt would have left office in 1941 with an unemployment rate in excess of 15 percent and an economic recovery strategy that had basically failed.”

Why next thing you know Summers will be saying that Keynesian economics don’t work.

Clip here to watch the video: CharlieRose.com

Pardon me?

Nope.  I read it right.

After eight years of miserable failure, FDR would have and should have left office as a disgrace with a disastrous unemployment rate.  But Adolf Hitler bailed him out.  And the country rallied around their president – no matter how much or how badly he had failed them.

And the mainstream media decided it was unimportant that we know that – in spite of the fact that Obama had cast himself as the economic reincarnation of FDR:

It ought to interest the American people that FDR prolonged the Great Depression by seven completely unnecessary years of miserable anguish and suffering:

FDR’s policies prolonged Depression by 7 years, UCLA economists calculate
ByMeg Sullivan
8/10/2004 12:23:12 PM

Two UCLA economists say they have figured out why the Great Depression dragged on for almost 15 years, and they blame a suspect previously thought to be beyond reproach: President Franklin D. Roosevelt.

After scrutinizing Roosevelt’s record for four years, Harold L. Cole and Lee E. Ohanian conclude in a new study that New Deal policies signed into law 71 years ago thwarted economic recovery for seven long years.

“Why the Great Depression lasted so long has always been a great mystery, and because we never really knew the reason, we have always worried whether we would have another 10- to 15-year economic slump,” said Ohanian, vice chair of UCLA’s Department of Economics. “We found that a relapse isn’t likely unless lawmakers gum up a recovery with ill-conceived stimulus policies.”

In an article in the August issue of the Journal of Political Economy, Ohanian and Cole blame specific anti-competition and pro-labor measures that Roosevelt promoted and signed into law June 16, 1933.

“President Roosevelt believed that excessive competition was responsible for the Depression by reducing prices and wages, and by extension reducing employment and demand for goods and services,” said Cole, also a UCLA professor of economics. “So he came up with a recovery package that would be unimaginable today, allowing businesses in every industry to collude without the threat of antitrust prosecution and workers to demand salaries about 25 percent above where they ought to have been, given market forces. The economy was poised for a beautiful recovery, but that recovery was stalled by these misguided policies.”

Using data collected in 1929 by the Conference Board and the Bureau of Labor Statistics, Cole and Ohanian were able to establish average wages and prices across a range of industries just prior to the Depression. By adjusting for annual increases in productivity, they were able to use the 1929 benchmark to figure out what prices and wages would have been during every year of the Depression had Roosevelt’s policies not gone into effect. They then compared those figures with actual prices and wages as reflected in the Conference Board data.

In the three years following the implementation of Roosevelt’s policies, wages in 11 key industries averaged 25 percent higher than they otherwise would have done, the economists calculate. But unemployment was also 25 percent higher than it should have been, given gains in productivity.

Meanwhile, prices across 19 industries averaged 23 percent above where they should have been, given the state of the economy. With goods and services that much harder for consumers to afford, demand stalled and the gross national product floundered at 27 percent below where it otherwise might have been.

“High wages and high prices in an economic slump run contrary to everything we know about market forces in economic downturns,” Ohanian said. “As we’ve seen in the past several years, salaries and prices fall when unemployment is high. By artificially inflating both, the New Deal policies short-circuited the market’s self-correcting forces.”

The policies were contained in the National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA), which exempted industries from antitrust prosecution if they agreed to enter into collective bargaining agreements that significantly raised wages. Because protection from antitrust prosecution all but ensured higher prices for goods and services, a wide range of industries took the bait, Cole and Ohanian found. By 1934 more than 500 industries, which accounted for nearly 80 percent of private, non-agricultural employment, had entered into the collective bargaining agreements called for under NIRA.

Cole and Ohanian calculate that NIRA and its aftermath account for 60 percent of the weak recovery. Without the policies, they contend that the Depression would have ended in 1936 instead of the year when they believe the slump actually ended: 1943.

Roosevelt’s role in lifting the nation out of the Great Depression has been so revered that Time magazine readers cited it in 1999 when naming him the 20th century’s second-most influential figure.

“This is exciting and valuable research,” said Robert E. Lucas Jr., the 1995 Nobel Laureate in economics, and the John Dewey Distinguished Service Professor of Economics at the University of Chicago. “The prevention and cure of depressions is a central mission of macroeconomics, and if we can’t understand what happened in the 1930s, how can we be sure it won’t happen again?”

NIRA’s role in prolonging the Depression has not been more closely scrutinized because the Supreme Court declared the act unconstitutional within two years of its passage.

“Historians have assumed that the policies didn’t have an impact because they were too short-lived, but the proof is in the pudding,” Ohanian said. “We show that they really did artificially inflate wages and prices.”

Even after being deemed unconstitutional, Roosevelt’s anti-competition policies persisted — albeit under a different guise, the scholars found. Ohanian and Cole painstakingly documented the extent to which the Roosevelt administration looked the other way as industries once protected by NIRA continued to engage in price-fixing practices for four more years.

The number of antitrust cases brought by the Department of Justice fell from an average of 12.5 cases per year during the 1920s to an average of 6.5 cases per year from 1935 to 1938, the scholars found. Collusion had become so widespread that one Department of Interior official complained of receiving identical bids from a protected industry (steel) on 257 different occasions between mid-1935 and mid-1936. The bids were not only identical but also 50 percent higher than foreign steel prices. Without competition, wholesale prices remained inflated, averaging 14 percent higher than they would have been without the troublesome practices, the UCLA economists calculate.

NIRA’s labor provisions, meanwhile, were strengthened in the National Relations Act, signed into law in 1935. As union membership doubled, so did labor’s bargaining power, rising from 14 million strike days in 1936 to about 28 million in 1937. By 1939 wages in protected industries remained 24 percent to 33 percent above where they should have been, based on 1929 figures, Cole and Ohanian calculate. Unemployment persisted. By 1939 the U.S. unemployment rate was 17.2 percent, down somewhat from its 1933 peak of 24.9 percent but still remarkably high. By comparison, in May 2003, the unemployment rate of 6.1 percent was the highest in nine years.

Recovery came only after the Department of Justice dramatically stepped enforcement of antitrust cases nearly four-fold and organized labor suffered a string of setbacks, the economists found.

“The fact that the Depression dragged on for years convinced generations of economists and policy-makers that capitalism could not be trusted to recover from depressions and that significant government intervention was required to achieve good outcomes,” Cole said. “Ironically, our work shows that the recovery would have been very rapid had the government not intervened.”

Don’t you think this would have been highly relevant for the American people to know in 2008 when Obama was running as FDR’s long-lost ideological twin???  I don’t know, maybe Time Magazine (the magazine that eulogized FDR as the bestest and most wonderfulest president ever ever, I noticed from the article above) could have ran this article instead of photoshopping Obama into their socialist hero.

I get so pissed off so often about how utterly dishonest the media is.

I mean, Scott McClellan wrote a book attacking President George W. Bush that I heard about for weeks and weeks in the press in 2008.  It didn’t matter how many lies and half-truths that amounted to whole lies might have been in it; it was anti-Bush; it was NEWS.

But when President Obama’s TOP ECONOMIC ADVISER basically says that Obama’s entire premise for the economy of the United States had already been a documented historical failure – which the prudent person should therefore expect to fail AGAIN – shouldn’t like SOMEBODY have reported that fact???

And now here we are, grinding our national gears and SUFFERING.  We’ve had a massive and massively failed $3.27 TRILLION “stimulus.”  We’ve had an absolutely godawful takeover of the health care system that is frankly so damaging to the economy that half of the 1,372 waivers (as of May 16) were requested by and given to the very liberal unions who had PUSHED FOR OBAMACARE IN THE FIRST PLACE.  We’ve had the absolutely disastrous Dodd-Frank financial regulations that have so stifled investment that EVEN ÜBERLIBERAL FINANCEER GEORGE SOROS said he couldn’t continue operating under such requirements.  We’ve got Obama’s packed National Labor Relations Board basically playing the role of union thug laying a beatdown on Boeing for daring to build a plant in a right-to-work state.

And these FDR-Obama Democrats say, “We’re doing all of this to help the poor.”  And it’s just a LIE.  They HURT the poor.  Over and over again, THEY HURT THE POOR.

Black people have been devastated.  Women have been devastated.  Under Obama, we’re seeing the highest poverty rate increase in fifty years. 

And the news we’re hearing right now is simply awful.

Manufacturing has tanked.  Consumer spending is the lowest since when we were seeing the panic-side of the “great recession” in October 2008.  The housing crisis is WORSE than – you guessed it – FDR’s Great Depression.  The credit rating agencies are giving the U.S. a negative outlook for the year.  China’s credit rating agency (remember who we borrow from!) just cut our rating for the second time in history – with both times occurring in Obama’s failed presidency.  Food stamp enrollment is at an all-time high, with one in six on the program.

And because we live in an age of constant media deception and propaganda, the news of Obama’s mishandling of the economy is always “unexpected.”

Here we are, déjà vu and voilà, in the worst shape since the LAST time FDR’s policies were poisoning America.  And we don’t learn because the media won’t LET us learn.  But you find out that FDR’s “progressive tax rates” that attacked the rich actually ended up hurting the poor as the rich sheltered their wealth to protect themselves and their families and the poor bore the brunt of economy and employment-killing taxation policies.

Obama is back to the same utterly failed Marxist class warfare tactics that have always failed before. In the 1990s, Democrats imposed a “luxury tax” on items such as yachts, believing that the wealthy “could afford it.” Maybe they could and maybe they couldn’t, but the FACT was that the rich STOPPED buying yachts. As in stopped completely.  As in NOBODY bought a yacht with that damn tax on it. The Democrats finally rescinded that stupid tax two years later after destroying the yacht building and yacht maintenance industries and killing over 100,000 jobs. Rich people weren’t hurt at all; ordinary people were devastated.

And now Obama wants to do the same thing with corporate jets that previous Democrats did to yachts. And they only people who will get hurt if Obama gets his way are the companies that hire people to build and maintain those jets and the workers themselves who will lose their jobs and their livelihoods. And the only thing that is stopping this rape of businesses, workers and the economy that depends on workers and businesses are Republicans – who are trying to do the right thing and make the tough decisions necessary to lead in the face of constant demagoguery.

And people wonder why this economy is struggling, and why it will CONTINUE to struggle until this FDR-clone (or clown?) is finally gone.

There’s Something About Rats And Sinking Ships: Obama Economic Advisors Fleeing Administration

A cartoon puts this story into perspective nicely:

That’s five Obama senior economic advisors.  And five rats swimming to shore.

And, yes, they can:

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.

Remember in 2012.

Unemployment would never rise above 8% if this group of “America’s great economic thinkers” got their way, we were assurred.  And they got their way.

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…

Let’s Contrast Obama’s Work Schedule With His Economic Team’s

I found this interesting.  We’ve heard the inside stories that Christina Romer is quitting over conflicts with Lawrence Summers and frustration at being left out of Obama’s incredibly insular “team.” And then there’s also the fact that Romer recently published an academic paper that contradicts Obama’s central theses regarding government spending and high taxes.

But now we’re fed a different story, courtesy of the Official Obama Propaganda Service (OOPS):

Obama’s economic team exhausted
By Sam Youngman – 08/07/10 06:00 AM ET

President Obama’s economic team is exhausted, according to White House spokesman Robert Gibbs, and that is one the reasons Christina Romer announced her departure Thursday.

Gibbs dismissed reports that Romer, the outgoing chairwoman of the president’s council for economic affairs, was leaving because of conflicts with Larry Summers, the director of the National Economic Council.

The press secretary told The Hill on Friday that Romer and the rest of the economic team have worked the equivalent of six years during the 18 months they’ve been in office, and Romer wanted to return to her normal life.

“These guys have probably packed a term and a half into a half of a term,” Gibbs said.

Romer is the second member of the economic team to leave this summer. She follows Peter Orszag, director of the Office of Management and Budget.

The early days of the administration alone were enough to wear the team down, he said, as they realized the depth of the recession.

“If you think about what we went through in the beginning, nobody knew when we woke up if the whole thing was just going to come crashing down,” Gibbs said.

[If one listens carefully, one can hear a shrill, whiny voice screaming, “It’s all Bush’s fault Romer is resigning!”].

Romer was involved in the administration’s planning of the $787 billion economic stimulus package. Ever since the legislation was approved by Congress, she’s been at the forefront of the administration’s effort to sell the product to the public.

That’s been difficult given the fact that the nation’s unemployment rate soared to 10 percent after the legislation’s approval. The administration had hoped the jobless rate would top off at 8 percent.

Romer was the administration’s public face every month when the national unemployment numbers were released – usually to bad news. She issued a statement on Friday noting the private sector created 71,000 jobs in July, not enough to lower unemployment.

Reports surrounding her departure suggest she was leaving because of the heavy presence of Summers, an economist with a reputation for less than stellar people skills, and because she was frustrated with life in Washington.

Gibbs dismissed those stories, saying Romer had been in on every critical meeting with Obama on the economy and played a key role in the White House’s economic policies. […]

So here’s the White House narrative to cover up the fact that there are big pissing matches going on inside the White House economic team, and the fact that Obama’s own economist has written a paper suggesting that her boss is leading the nation to “highly contractionary” economic ruin: Romer is quitting because she’s been working 32 hours a day (6 years divided by 1.5 years, times an average 8-hour work day).

Let’s not laugh and take it seriously for a moment.  The White House economic team has worked themselves into a frazzled mess, burdened with their profound care for the average America.

Well, what about their boss, Barry Hussein?

From the GuardianUK:

As Barack Obama settles into the White House, the differences between the way the old and new presidents manage their time will begin to show. Now it is time to break the puritan fiction that the only way to achieve is to get up early and live clean.

Ex-president Bush rose at 5.45am and was at his desk by 6.45am. He worked until 6pm, taking meetings in strict five-minute blocks. He ran three miles in 21 minutes before lunch every day. He does not drink. Women’s skirts – in his White House – had to fall below the knee.

Obama gets up hours later – aides during his campaign said he did much of his strategising after midnight. He smokes, he drinks beer while watching sports, and has mentioned keeping his regular poker night while president.

Bush showed up ready to work at 6:45AM.  For Obama, it’s kind of nice if he shows up by 9:30 – and not particularly bright-eyed or bushy-tailed after the partying from the previous evening.

That economic team is working themselves to the bone.  Obama couldn’t give a flying favorite-Emanuel/Blagojevich-phrase.

But staggering in to the office late in the morning at a time when useful people might be typically taking their first break of the day isn’t really enough to get the picture of contrast between those frazzled, overworked economic team members and their boss Barry Hussein.  Because we haven’t taken into account for all the vacations and all the golf outings, have we?

Obamas Take 4 Vacations in 1 Month

While many Americans are cutting back on their vacation plans or eliminating them altogether, Barack Obama is setting an aspirational example for all of us. Sure, times are tough, but perhaps we can enjoy a life of leisure vicariously through our betters.

On July 16-18, the Obamas enjoyed their first summer vacation in beautiful Bar Harbor, Maine. The idyllic town has long been favorite summer getaway for the rich and powerful going back to the Gilded Age. Truly a resort fit for a king public servant.

Anticipating exhaustion from two long weeks in Washington, D.C., Michelle Obama is hosting her eldest daughter and several family friends on a “private vacation” to Spain, August 4-8. Staying at the luxurious Villa Padierna, Americans can rest easy knowing the accomodations will “pamper guests with elegance, spaciousness and a comforting array of amenities.”  With three golf courses on the property, it’s quite a shame Barack must attend a party thrown in his honor by one of his billionaire friends.  Despite this hardship, I’m sure Michelle will sing “Don’t Cry for Me, America”. Or at least hum a few bars. (After the spa’s Chakra Balancing treatment with Hot Stones.)

The five days back in the White House will be a horrible burden to the family. Thankfully, the Obama clan will take a third vacation, Aug. 14-15, to Florida’s Gulf Coast, following charges of hypocrisy for vacationing in Maine earlier. As any PR pro will tell you, the best response to “out of touch” accusations is to face them head on. Preferably from a balcony, sipping a mojito while watching Helios’ golden rays paint the beach in myriad shades of gold as the fiery orb slips ‘neath the azure horizon.

Obama started out partying in a wildly inappropriate way:

WASHINGTON (AP) – The White House is the place to be on Wednesdays.Since the presidency changed hands less than six weeks ago, a burst of entertaining has taken hold of the iconic, white-columned home of America’s head of state. Much of it comes on Wednesdays.

The stately East Room, where portraits of George and Martha Washington adorn the walls, was transformed into a concert hall as President Barack Obama presented Stevie Wonder with the nation’s highest award for pop music on Wednesday.

// <![CDATA[//

A week before that, the foot-stomping sounds of Sweet Honey in the Rock, a female a cappella group, filled the East Room for a Black History Month program first lady Michelle Obama held for nearly 200 sixth- and seventh-graders from around the city.

Cocktails were sipped during at least three such receptions to date, all held on Wednesdays.

And he hasn’t let up since:

President party boy
The wrong kind of leadership
By JOHN GIBSON
Last Updated: 4:15 AM, June 10, 2010

Last week’s jobs report tanked the stock market; the president took weeks to assert control of the oil spill that threatens doom on the Gulf Coast — but at the White House the Gatsby-like parties roll on as if happy days were here again.

Just yesterday, President Obama held another fun-filled White House event, a picnic for Congress members, complete with hot dogs, cold beverages and a fire pit.

All told, during the last seven weeks of spewing oil and rampant unemployment, he has frolicked and danced through three major White House music parties:

Of course, the hypocrite propagandist lamestream media constantly criticized George Bush for golfing or vacationing or partying or pretty much anything, claiming that he needed to be constantly working to solve all the problems they said the nation faced.  And that was, you know, at a time when the nation didn’t have anywhere NEAR as many problems as it faces now.

Obama’s golf outings have generated favorable reports from the media, in contrast to his predecessor, George W. Bush.

On Aug. 5, 2002, The Washington Post wrote about President Bush golfing near his parents’ home in Kennebunkport, Maine. Under the headline “Before Golf, Bush Decries Latest Deaths in Mideast,” staff writer Mike Allen described Bush as he “sprang from his golf cart at 6:15 a.m. and said he was distressed to hear about the latest suicide bombers in Israel.”

“Bush, wearing khakis and a knit shirt, was holding a driver in his gloved left hand,” Allen wrote.

“However incongruous the setting, the president plunged ahead,” Allen wrote.

And the entire country wasn’t falling apart at the time Allen took his leftwing cheap shot at Bush in the name of “journalism,” unlike what’s going on all around us today.

Blatant media hypocrisy and total disregard for anything approaching objectivity aside, the real emphasis needs to fall back on our Vacationer-in-Chief, as contrasted with his near-dead from exhaustion economic team.

There’s an ad for Direct TV that features a Russian Zillionaire.  He says, “Opulence, I has it.”  As he strolls leisurely along, he looks at two golden sculptures of himself, and without bothering to seriously study either he casually points a finger and says, “Zis one.”

That pampered Russian is apparently playing the roll of Obama strolling through the White House at noonish after getting home from another vacation or from attending another lavishly-opulent and taxpayer-funded party.

On this scenario, Lawrence Summers and Christina Romer were both up all night working on an economic report – according to Robert Gibbs – and Obama strolls in while they each hopefully hold up their work and says “Zis one.”

And of course, according to the stories, most of the time it’s Lawrence Summers’ report Obama points at.  Because Summers can piss farther.

Obama is so out-of-touch with reality it’s unreal.  He knows nothing about business.  None of the people who are making all the stupid decisions around him know anything about business.

Our post turtle president:

There’s just one difference between Obama and the post turtle – or apparently Obama’s economic team.  The post turtle can actually be found at his post.

Update: In addition to the massive criticism Michelle Obama has deservedly received for her massively expensive vacation to Spain (complete with government-funded transportation and over seventy Secret Service agents), we now learn that the Obama’s are going on their FIFTH vacation since July.

Let them eat cake.