Ferguson Cleans House

[Geee]

PJMedia:

It’s the text, I hasten to add, not the photograph, which I found so appealing: “Hit the Road, Barack.” It has a jaunty foot-tapping rhythm, not unlike the song about Jack it’s mean to recall.

 

The accompanying story, by the intermittently conservative Niall Ferguson, is a damning litany of failure. At least, I found it damning. Some data points:

– The total number of private-sector jobs is still 4.3 million below the January 2008 peak.

– Since 2008, 3.6 million Americans have been added to Social Security’s disability insurance program.

– Growth in 2011 was an anemic 1.8%. Obama had predicted it would be 4%.

– Without the the stimulus, the Obama administration predicted unemployment would be 6% by now. With the stimulus, it was supposed to be 5.6%. In reality, “official” unemployment is 8.3%, but that doesn’t count the millions who have simply given up looking for work.

– Real median annual household income has dropped more than 5 percent since June 2009.

Ferguson writes:

Welcome to Obama’s America … nearly half the population is not represented on a taxable return — almost exactly the same proportion that lives in a household where at least one member receives some type of government benefit. We are becoming the 50–50 nation — half of us paying the taxes, the other half receiving the benefits.

We are fast becoming a two-tier nation, a small band of makers and an increasingly large band of takers.

This is just the beginning of the bad news which Ferguson has assembled. He goes on to marshal the facts about Obama’s profligate spending, U.S. debt, the true cost of ObamaCare, and more. What Ferguson has to say about Obama’s handling of the foreign policy challenges facing America is especially sobering:

Far from developing a coherent strategy, he believed — perhaps encouraged by the premature award of the Nobel Peace Prize — that all he needed to do was to make touchy-feely speeches around the world explaining to foreigners that he was not George W. Bush.

Bottom line on the foreign policy front: “America under this president is a superpower in retreat, if not retirement.”