Tag Archives: Great Depression

I Guess Reality Is Optional

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Breitbart.com posted an article today about some recent statements President Obama made while visiting Britain.

The article reports:

“Saving the world economy from a Great Depression — that was pretty good,” Obama bragged when asked by a student in London what he wanted his legacy to be.

He recalled that when he visited London in 2009, the world economy was in a “freefall” because of irresponsible behavior of financial institutions around the world.

“For us to be able to mobilize the world’s community, to take rapid action, to stabilize the financial markets, and then in the United States to pass Wall Streets reforms that make it much less likely that a crisis like that can happen again, I’m proud of that,” he said.

Obama also touted his Iran nuclear deal as “something I’m very proud of” asserting that he successfully stopped their nuclear weapons program without going to war.

He griped that everybody forgot about his efforts in stopping the Ebola crisis, saving “hundreds of thousands of lives.”

“I think that I have been true to myself during this process,” Obama said, insisting that the things he said while running for office “matched up” with his presidency.

“I’ll look at a scorecard in the end,” he concluded. “Change takes time. Oftentimes what you start has then to be picked up by your successors or the next generation.”

He added that the fight for change was like a relay race and that he was prepared to pass the baton to his successor.

“Hopefully they’re running in the right direction,” he joked.

I don’t know what to say, but I will attempt to deal with one comment at a time.

President Obama did not save the world from a Great Depression, and the financial crisis was not caused by the behavior of the financial institutions. The financial crisis was caused by Congressional action that encouraged bad lending policies. Reforming Wall Street does nothing that is related to the financial meltdown–the reforms only make it more complicated for the people who work on Wall Street to do their jobs.

This is an old video, but it needs to be shared everywhere:

The Iran nuclear deal is a disaster. Use the search engine at the top of the blog to see what I have written about it in the past. It represents a shift in American policy from fighting terrorism to funding it.

The Ebola crisis was stopped–by the Center for Disease Control working closely with doctors. The President had very little to do with it.

I guess in the final year of the Obama Administration, reality will be optional.

The Real Number In The Economic Recovery

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Investor’s Business Daily posted an article today about the impact President Obama’s economic policies have had on middle-class Americans. The numbers are not good.

As you can see from the chart, there are more people in poverty, the median household income has dropped, and the average income for the bottom fifth of American households has gone done. That is not a recovery.

The article reports:

A couple of months ago, he (President Obama) was in Wisconsin, crediting his policies for “record” job growth, tumbling deficits and big gains in the stock market.

“Step by step, America is moving forward,” he said. “Middle-class economics works. It works. Yes!”

It’s hard to see any evidence of that in the Census numbers. Indeed, the latest report shows that, despite more than six years of economic “recovery,” the middle class is, incredibly, worse off than at the end of the Great Recession.

From 2009 to 2014, real median household income dropped by more than $1,000 — or 2.3% — to $53,657. (And that decline would likely have been steeper if not for a 2013 change in the way the Census does its annual survey.)

Obama’s economy has been particularly harsh on those already at the bottom. Census data show that the bottom fifth of households saw their average income fall by 8% from 2009 to 2014.

Looked at another way, the share of households with incomes below $25,000 climbed from 22.4% to 23.6% over those years.

Among blacks, it went from 35.5% to 36.8%.

President Obama has practiced policies of increased taxation, overregulation, and crony capitalism. All of these policies waste money and inhibit economic growth. Our debt is growing, and if we do not change course in the next election, we will probably not survive as a country.

Where Is The Economy?

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The economy hasn’t been in the news lately–there seem to have been a few other things going on–but the economy is something we do need to be keeping an eye on.

CNBC posted an article today describing where the country is economically.

The article reports:

GDP growth is in the midst of its longest sub-3 percent annual growth rate since 1929, the beginning of the Great Depression, according to Bespoke Investment Group. The economy hasn’t topped 3 percent since 2005—before Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke took over—and is unlikely to do so this year.

The article points out that in two months the revised economic numbers will show that the United States economy has grown to more than the currently stated $15 trillion. This has nothing to do with economic growth–it has to do with a change in the way that the size of the economy is calculated.

The article points out:

Under the new math, the government will add research and development spending, as well as the capital value of all books, movies, records, television programs and plays produced since 1929.

In jacking up the economy’s size, the revisions also will skew the ratio of debt to GDP, considered important in determining government spending.

Of course, the recent attempt at debunking a critical study of the ratio by Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff also has dimmed the prospects for government debt-cutting. The two economists asserted that a 90 percent debt-to-GDP ratio restrained growth, but the data set they used has been challenged as faulty.

The new GDP calculations, combined with the souring on the Reinhart-Rogoff conclusions, likely will add to the thirst to keep Washington’s debt machine purring.

Meanwhile, the unemployment rate remains high.

The article reports:

Though employment has risen by 1.3 million over the past year, unemployment that counts the discouraged and underemployed, as well as the jobless (often called the “real” unemployment rate) has remained stubbornly high, at 13.8 percent of the workforce, according to the most recent count.

In fact, a state-by-state look at the numbers, released a few days ago and current through the first quarter, shows that just six states have real rates below 10 percent.

There are a lot of reasons for the high unemployment numbers. One of them is the fact that businessmen are reluctant to hire new employees until they understand the impact of Obamacare will have on their business. Uncertainty is creating an environment where hiring is at least temporarily delayed. The other thing to keep in mind is that as the government grows, it takes money away from the private sector. When the private sector isn’t growing, the economy isn’t growing.

There hasn’t been a lot of reporting lately on the economy, but we still need to be aware of what is going on around us economically.

News That Really Does Not Make Me Happy

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Bloomberg reported yesterday that incomes in America declined more in the three year expansion since 2009 than during the longest recession since the Great Depression. The ‘great recession’ in America officially ended in 2009. There is a technical definition of a recession, and according to that definition, the recession in America ended in 2009. However, the income and unemployment numbers for Americans have not improved.

The article reports:

“Almost every group is worse off than it was three years ago, and some groups had very large declines in income,” Green (Gordon Green, Sentier Research LLC.), who previously directed work on the Census Bureau’s income and poverty statistics program, said in a phone interview today. “We’re in an unprecedented period of economic stagnation.”

While gains in hourly earnings and average hours worked per week may have had “a minor mitigating effect” on income declines, they couldn’t offset a jobless rate that hasn’t fallen below 8 percent since February 2009 and a record duration of unemployment, according to the Annapolis, Maryland-based firm.

The average duration of unemployment increased to a record 41 weeks in November and remains at 39 weeks, Labor Department data show. Almost 5.2 million Americans have been out of work for at least six months.

This snapshot of the economy does not bode well for the re-election chances of Barack Obama.

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