OBAMA'S BIG ECONOMY SPEECH: NO HOPE, NO CHANGE

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Breitbart:

 

President Obama’s campaign speech on the economy today was an utter disaster for him. It was a bromide of tired old arguments, pathetic blame-placing, and shopworn con tricks. And even liberals like Jonathan Alter had to admit that it was, overall, a dramatic failure.

He began where he always does: with blame. “We’ve been wrestling with these issues for a long time,” he said. “The problems we’re facing right now have been more than a decade in the making …. For more than a decade, it had become harder to find a job that paid the bills, harder to save, harder to retire, harder to keep up with rising costs of gas and health care and college tuitions.” Translation: Blame Bush.

The Blame Bush nonsense continued apace:

We were told that huge tax cuts, especially for the wealthiest Americans, would lead to faster job growth. We were told that fewer regulations, especially for big financial institutions and corporations, would bring about widespread prosperity. We were told that it was OK to put two wars on the nation’s credit card; that tax cuts would create a enough growth to pay for themselves.

Fact: huge tax cuts did lead to greater job growth. Bush oversaw 52 consecutive months of job growth under his watch, beginning in September 2003 and December 2007.

Fact: tax cuts did begin to pay for themselves. The deficit began to shrink under President Bush between 2005 and 2007 thanks to increased tax revenue generated from economic growth.

Fact: fewer regulations did create widespread prosperity. What led to the economic meltdown was government pressure on private institutions to make shoddy loans to subprime borrowers.

Later in his speech, Obama rewrote history to turn this into malfeasance solely by Wall Street: “Without strong enough regulations, families were enticed and sometimes tricked into buying homes they couldn’t afford. Banks and investors were allowed to package and sell risky mortgages. Huge reckless bets were made with other people’s money on the line. And too many, from Wall Street to Washington, simply looked the other way.” Nobody was suckered into buying a home they couldn’t afford. They simply made bad decisions, incentivized to do so by the federal government.

But Obama wasn’t close to done. He suggested that the Bush economic policies only helped the top 1 percent – even though as Robert Reich has pointed out, “The top 1 percent got 45 percent of Clinton-era economic growth, and 65 percent of the economic growth during the Bush era. According to an analysis of tax returns by Emmanuel Saez and Thomas Piketty, the top 1 percent pocketed 93 percent of the gains in 2010. 37 percent of the gains went to the top one-tenth of one percent. No one below the richest 10 percent saw any gain at all.” It is Obama’s economic policies that have benefitted the top 1 percent at the expense of everyone else.

Obama capped off the Blame Bush campaign point by stating that “this was not your normal recession.” That was true. What followed was not.

“Throughout history it has typically taken countries up to 10 years to recover from financial crises of this magnitude. Today the economies of many European countries still aren’t growing and their unemployment rate averages around 11 percent.” This was not a point in Obama’s favor, though his shoddy knowledge of history didn’t allow him to see that. The fact is that every recession in American history ever fought with tax cuts and less regulation led to quick recovery; every recession in American and European history fought with broader government spending and more regulation has led to prolonged misery.