Any sane person can see that our economy is on the edge.....the edge of becoming a double dip recession....and that is fitting as the "DIP" in the White House has not done anything effective to change that course.Unemployment is over 9% and that is only those collecting. If you are one of the people that fell off the roll after exhausting your benefits, you don't even matter to the bean counters in WASH DC. Actual unemployment is closer to 15%....The hidden section of unemployed are not worthy of the attention of the media or the pols.
This group of idiots in the Adminstration think they are also worthy of relection...The millions who lost jobs, homes and a future they worked hard for might just disagree with that sentiment.
The "game is afoot" as Sherlock Holmes would state, and it is about time we throw out the penalty flag on this poser who has been in the White House for 2 1/2 years with no real measurable progress....if anything, we are worse off for his sprendthift spending which only lined the pockets of his political friends and stuck the rest of us with the bill.
To quote the guys from TOP GEAR, " How hard can it be? "
Apparently, for the village idiot (read "comunity organizer") from Chicago, it was obviously way outta his league...some of us stated so 2 1/2 years ago but no one was listening.
Obama's biggest deficit is time
By: Joe Scarborough
June 7, 2011 04:48 AM EDT
The headlines are frightening.
America’s unemployment rate has once again broken 9 percent. The U.S. economy created 100,000 fewer jobs than expected last month. And now, Moody’s is threatening to downgrade the country’s prized Aaa debt rating. Despite a massive domestic spending spree during the past several years, the U.S. economy remains stuck in a ditch. The president and Congress are helpless to improve the situation and, on many days, seem determined by their actions to make things worse.
So how did the most powerful economic machine on the planet get to a place where it is juggling both an anemic economy and a terrifying debt?
President Barack Obama and his Democratic allies will, of course, blame all of America’s problems on George W. Bush. But using Bush 43 as a political shield is less effective than it once was. The blame game may have gotten Obama elected in 2008 but will do little to get Americans back to work in 2011.
Republicans who blame our current economic crisis on Obama either have short memories or no shame. The GOP owned Washington when it inherited a booming economy and a $155 billion budget surplus. Mr. Obama was not as fortunate. He inherited a broken financial system, a housing market in free fall and a debt that doubled during the Bush years.
But that doesn’t mean Obama should be given a free political pass for our nation’s dismal economic condition. For while the economic crisis was not of his making, Obama’s unfocused policies and spendthrift ways have had the effect of taking a bad situation and making it worse.
In early 2009, the president allowed then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and the Democratic-controlled Congress to cobble together a tragically flawed stimulus bill that had more to do with congressional politics than with economic realities. The $787 billion measure was the largest spending bill in American history, and unlike the auto bailout that followed, Obama’s stimulus plan was doomed to fail from the start. Conservatives complained that it spent too much. Liberals argued that it spent too little. But very few paid attention to the most important question: Where did the money go?
House members and senators who voted with the president were in no position to answer that question, because none of them actually read the bill before it passed.
Against that backdrop, one wonders why the Obama administration promised voters that if this muddled collection of legislative goop was signed into law, unemployment would never rise above 8 percent.
The president has clearly failed on the jobs front. But Republicans who were elected in 2010 by promising to focus on job creation have also done little to drive that agenda. Almost as depressing for small-government conservatives is the fact that spending continues to skyrocket under Republican leadership.
Rep. Paul Ryan’s plan, which the White House and the mainstream press deride as “radical,” would actually add $6 trillion to the national debt over the next decade.
And the budget deal that averted a government shutdown in April and was supposed to save Americans $38 billion has been revealed by the Congressional Budget Office to actually increase spending by $3.2 billion this year.
In 2011, Congress will spend more under Speaker John Boehner than it did in 2010 under Pelosi.
But as bad as Republicans have been on budget matters during the past decade, Democrats can always be counted upon to be worse. Even during the Clinton years, which liberals now highlight to prove that their side is superior on taming the deficit, every GOP budget proposal was met with a Democratic plan that spent more. And as bad as Bush 43 was on the debt, he always submitted budgets that spent less than the Democratic alternative.
These days, it’s more of the same. Domestic spending has gone up 24 percent on Obama’s watch. Spending is now equal to nearly 25 percent of gross domestic product, after hovering around 20 percent during the Bush years. Because of the growth in spending and a decrease in tax revenues caused by the recession, publicly held debt as a percentage of GDP has nearly doubled in the past four years, from 36 percent to 68 percent.
This statistic is especially frightening. Due to high spending and low revenues, publicly held debt may soon equal 90 percent of America’s GDP. If we enter a double-dip recession, some economists believe we could hit that number in as little as 12 months. Once debt is equal to 90 percent of GDP, bondholders will begin demanding higher interest rates that will put even more pressure on an already fragile economy. At some point, we’ll start borrowing just to pay back money that we’ve already borrowed, triggering an economic death spiral that will make Greece’s crisis look like a Mediterranean cruise.
Of course, Obama didn’t create the Bush tax cuts. He just extended them for two years. He did not start the wars in Afghanistan. He just tripled the number of troops in an endless war. And the president isn’t the first to demagogue Medicare. He’s just the one who is planning to exploit those fears to win reelection next year.
But regardless of whether he is reelected, Obama now owns the $1 trillion tax cut extension, three wars and a growing debt crisis.
Who knows? Maybe Obama can reverse the damage that he and Bush have done to America’s economy over the past decade. Maybe the president will get serious about saving Social Security and Medicare. Maybe the commander in chief will have the courage to end the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and finally bring our troops home. Maybe. But if so, the candidate of “hope” and “change” had better get moving soon. Time is running out.
A guest columnist for POLITICO, Joe Scarborough hosts “Morning Joe” on MSNBC and represented Florida’s 1st Congressional District in the House of Representatives from 1995 to 2001.
© 2011 Capitol News Company, LLC
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