Russ Smith 21 mins · Obama Should Be Thanking Bush not Blaming Him! President Bush could not have handed the United State’s first black president a better chance at looking successful if he tried. Even before Obama won the democratic presidential nomination in 2008 he could assume that if he were to win the presidency he would likely do so with a democratically controlled congress as a war weary American had already handed back control of the Senate and the House during the second half of Bush’s 2nd term in office. And so it was, Obama took the Office of the President of the United States and could have essentially moved any agenda forward he wished without opposition. But Obama screwed up the greatest opportunity that could have been handed to a president, party control of congress! During the two years Obama had this luxury the only major agenda item he managed to accomplish was the passage of his namesake healthcare reform law aka ObamaCare. Certainly the president had his hands full in dealing with the recession however, he squandered away an easy opportunity to move forward immigration reform, gun control, income inequality legislation and a list of other progressive line items on his “to do” list while the balance of power was in his favor. Due to the extreme unpopular of ObamaCare and American’s disappointment in Obama for failing to get the economy moving, the luxury of a democratic controlled congress was taken away from him in 2010 when Republicans won back the House of Representative in a landslide victory. Obama’s first great opportunity squandered away. Next President Bush handed over a horrible recession right at its end. Obama took office in January 2009, the very same month the economy turned the corner and started to grow again. The economy, at its very lowest point, had no place to go but up and Obama should have easily been able to capitalize on this and come out smelling like roses. Instead, the failed policies of the president created the worst US economic recovery in the history of our nation. There was no sharp spike in spending, as is always the case when consumers realize that a recession has reached its end and starts spending some of the money they have been holding in safety. So much uncertainty in Obama’s plan for recovery existed that people lacked the confidence to spend heavily, fearing that the policies being put in place by the new president were going to slip the economy back into a recession. Obama somehow screwed up an economic growth opportunity that was virtually impossible to screw up. President Bush handed Obama a massive hole in the job market, 8 million jobs deep. With a recover that was just starting to turn upward when he took office, there should have been a surge in new employment to quickly fill at least a portion of the jobs lost, once people started spending money again, but that never happened. Obama’s plan was to buy jobs and vowed that unemployment would drop to 5.6%, by the end of his first term, if congress passed his nearly $1 trillion taxpayer funded stimulus package. Obama missed it by almost 3% with the unemployment rate dropping to only 8.3% (from 9.5%) four years and nearly $1 trillion dollars later. To add insult to injury, when Obama was lobbying for his stimulus package, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) projected that unemployment would have dropped to 6.0% without the massive stimulus. This leads us to conclude that Obama’s economic recovery policies did more harm to the recovering economy than good. In every recession that the US has faced since the Great Depression, the lost jobs were recovered in 1 to 2 years however, it took the policies of the Obama Administration over 5 years to recover the 8 million jobs lost during the 2007-2008 recession. This puts new job creation in a massive hole, nearly as large as the one created by the recession itself. Another massive opportunity to look good in front of his supporters, handed to him by George W, and he pissed it away. Next, driven by a large expansion to government and the cost of 2 wars, President Bush handed Obama 8 years of massive debt and deficit growth. This should have been an easy success story for Obama, all he needed to do was slow down the debt and defect growth of the Bush era. Knowing that the Iraq war was soon to end and the Afghanistan war would follow shortly, reducing spending should have been easy but he failed to do so, he failed miserably. We often heard Obama “Blame Bush” for the debt and deficit problem, claiming he inherited two wars and a recession but unless Obama was asleep at the wheel, he knew exactly what he had when he made the following statement at a White House meeting dubbed the Fiscal Responsibility Summit held on February 23, 2009, two years into the recession and both wars long underway: Today Im pledging to cut the deficit we inherited by half by the end of my first term in office, Obama said. Now, this will not be easy. It will require us to make difficult decisions and face challenges weve long neglected. But I refuse to leave our children with a debt that they cannot repay, and that means taking responsibility right now, in this administration, for getting our spending under control. President Obama echoed those words the next day when he addressed a joint session of Congress. He knew exactly what he inherited and still believed he could significantly lower the nation’s debt and deficit. How could he screw this one up? The recession turned the corner at the very time he took office, the Iraq war had begun to scale down and actually ended by the end of his 1st term and the scale down of the War in Afghanistan also started midway through his first term. The Wall Street bailouts were almost paid back by the end of Obama’s 1st term and the auto industry bailout was partially paid back. There were no new major extraordinary expenditures during President Obama’s first term and the ones just mentioned he knew about so how in the world did he go from vowing to cut the defect in half into created the same amount of new national debt ($5.8 trillion) in 4 years that the spend thrift President George W Bush did in eight? And it does not end there as even with all of the bailout bills paid, with the war in Iraq ended and the war in Afghanistan winding down, President Obama is still racking up over $1 trillion in new debt each year and has the nation on a trajectory of exceeding $20 trillion by the end of his 2nd term. Somehow even what Obama campaigned as a Bush gift to himself he managed to screw up and not just a little bit but in a massive way. Yes Bush handed Obama the dream situation in regards to providing him the ability to make himself “Look Good” and Obama should have been thanking Bush instead of blaming him, it wasn’t Bush’s fault that Obama’s progressive policies led him to failure.
Posted on: Tue, 30 Sep 2014 20:21:10 +0000
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