The “Worst President Ever”
You have to know how poorly Barack Hussein Obama has performed in office when the phrase the “worst President ever” has already become a cliché.
Peter Ferrara, the Director of Entitlement and Budget Policy for The Heartland Institute, who served in the Reagan White House Office of Policy Development, writing in 2008 cited Reagan’s (1) tax cuts to restore incentives for economic growth, (2) spending reductions, including a $31 billion cut in spending in 1981, close to 5% of the federal budget, (3) an anti-inflation monetary policy restraining money supply growth, (4) deregulation that by 2008 had saved consumers an estimated $100 billion in lower prices, and (5) free trade in the form of worldwide agreements to reduce tariff taxes.
Citing tax cuts, Ferrara noted that “Reagan was not the first or last to adopt sweeping tax cuts to boost the economy. It has happened four, perhaps five, times in the last century, with virtually the same results every time.”
Obama has never stopped talking about raising taxes and his signature legislation, Obamacare, had more than twenty increases in taxes embedded—hidden—in the more than 2,000 pages that former Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi famously said had to be passed in order “to find out what is in it.”
In contrast to Reagan, Obama has spent his years in office blaming George W. Bush and even the Clinton years for the economy he “inherited”, but which more accurately stated, was an economy he campaigned to fix, promising hope and change.
In 2005, Dr. Hans F. Sennholz, the chairman of the department of economics at Grove City College, wrote an analysis of “The Economics of Jimmy Carter” noting that Carter was “unaware of the inexorable economic principles that direct and determine economic life.”
Carter, Sennholz wrote, was unaware that, “Consumers determine not only the prices of consumer goods but also those of the factors of production, that is, land, labor, and capital. They determine and pay the wages of every worker” noting also that “Carter never tires of expounding his displeasure and irritability about the income and wealth of many capitalists and about government policies that seem to favor the rich.” Who does that sound like today?
In January of this year, looking back over the first three years of Obama economic policies, an Indiana University study noted that 46 million Americans are living below the poverty line—up 27% since the start of the recession dated back to 2006.
The report stated that “The Great Recession has left behind the largest number of long-term unemployed people since records were first kept in 1948. More than four million Americans report that they have been unemployed for more than twelve months.”
For those who still think Obama can be reelected, it is worth noting that the most severely affected states are Florida, Nevada, and Arizona which have been badly hit by the housing foreclosure crisis, and Michigan and Ohio that have seen the collapse of traditional manufacturing. These are all key states Obama would need to win.
On July 27, The Washington Post reported that the U.S. economic growth had slowed to 1.5 percent annual rate in the second quarter as consumer spending weakened. “The growth estimate Friday from the government suggested that the U.S. economy could be at risk of stalling three years after the recession ended.” While the official unemployment rate is 8.2 percent, it is widely believed to be above 10 percent.
“No president since Franklin D. Roosevelt, in the depths of the Great Depression, has been reelected when the unemployment rate exceeded 8 percent,” said the Associated Press report. “Presidents Jimmy Carter and George H.W. Bush were ousted when unemployment was well below 8 percent.”
At this point, the Obama campaign, unable to run on his economic record, has devoted itself to depicting Mitt Romney as a rapacious capitalist who grew wealthy investing in companies, a felon who continued to run Bain Capital after leaving to save the Salt lake City Olympics (a job for which he took no pay), and for failing to release his tax returns going back many years. Not mentioned is the fact that Obama is a multi-millionaire or his total lack of experience in the private sector.
Repeating all the errors of the Carter years and exacerbating the 2008 financial crisis by spending billions in taxpayer funds on failed “stimulus” programs, Obama compounded the crisis by waging war on the nation’s energy sector, wasting more billions on “clean energy”, and using executive orders to circumvent immigration and welfare laws on the books.
The result has been the highest levels of federal deficit and debt in the history of the nation. He has, indeed, exceeded the damage Jimmy Carter inflicted during his only term in office. He is, indeed, the worst President ever.
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Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan once stated that: “Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts.”
That means that there are two types of arguments:
1. You agree on facts, but not on interpretations. (The way it should be.)
2. You don’t agree on facts, nor interpretations. (You either dismiss inconvenient facts, or make them up.)
It struck me that there are actually two other types of arguments:
1. Facts don’t matter, only the conclusion. (Facts don’t support the conclusion.)
2. Facts don’t matter, only the conclusion, and your opponent will force you to suffer the consequences of his conclusion. (He will make you an unwilling party to his conclusion.)
In the first type, you argue with a guy on whether him jumping off a cliff is a good idea. You each use facts to draw your conclusions. (This is opinion.)
In the second type, you argue the same thing, but the other guy argues that jumping off the cliff will not result in falling and/or dying. He came to his conclusion beforehand, and changed the facts to fit the conclusion. (This is dishonesty.)
In the third type, you argue the same thing, and the other guy concedes that jumping off the cliff will result in him falling to his death, but is so wedded to his conclusion that jumping is a good idea that he doesn’t care that he will die – a conclusion divorced from the facts. (This is insanity.)
In the fourth type, the conclusion is the same as the third type, but he also wants to handcuff you to him so he can force you to jump with him. (This is criminal insanity.)
Many of the people supporting Barack Obama admit he has done a horrible job, that four more years won’t change that, BUT YET THEY CONCLUDE THAT FOLLOWING HIM OFF THE CLIFF IS A GOOD IDEA! AND THEY WANT TO DRAG THE REST OF US WITH THEM!
Read this, an except from Investor’s Business Daily, and see if you conclude that re-electing Barack Obama is a good idea:
(begin excerpt)
“So abysmal is the president’s job-creation record that, according to a new study, he’d have to create 280,000 every month just to get out of the cellar among modern presidents. Where are the jobs?
Looking at the total job growth and the ending unemployment rate since 1945, the president with the best record was Bill Clinton, credited with creating 22.6 million jobs during his two terms, a time when Republicans took control of the House for the first time in four decades, helping to balance four budgets and passing welfare reform.
Listed second is Ronald Reagan, credited with creating 16.1 million jobs. After inheriting a genuine mess from Jimmy Carter that included inflation raging at 12.5%, policies like across-the-board tax cuts and oil-price deregulation, and policies that helped create the “dot-com” tech boom that fed Clinton’s numbers, inflation was a paltry 4.4% when he left.
Trailing Clinton and Reagan in the rankings are Presidents Johnson, Carter, Nixon, Truman, Kennedy, Eisenhower, Bush 41, and Ford and Bush 43. Dead last and the only president in negative territory is Barack Obama. Even Gerald Ford in his short, post-Watergate term created a net 2.1 million new jobs. Obama is listed at a minus 318,000.
As Mercatus analyst Veronique de Rugy notes, the current so-called recovery is the slowest of all time, and 280,000 jobs would need to be created each month to get President Obama out of last place among post-World War II presidents and into positive territory.”
(end excerpt)
WILL RE-ELECTING BARACK OBAMA RESULT IN AN IMPROVEMENT FOR THE COUNTRY, OR WILL HE DRAG US OVER THE ECONOMIC CLIFF?
LOOK AT THE FACTS, DRAW A CONCLUSION FROM THEM, AND MAKE YOUR CHOICE.