Wednesday, September 9, 2015

Obama's Persistent Economic Malaise: An economy worse than any of his predecessors since FDR!

American Thinker ^ | 09/09/2015 | Jeffrey Folks 


The August jobs report was hardly reassuring.  On Friday, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported net job creation of 173,000, far below estimates.  There's no way to sugar-coat it, though White House officials attempted to do just that.  They pointed out that the unemployment rate had fallen to 5.1%.  But that was because another 200,000 workers had simply given up trying to find a good job.

Good jobs are not being created because economic expansion has stalled.  And expansion has stalled because Obama has presided over the greatest assault on free enterprise in our nation's history.  

It didn't have to be this way.  Obama's punitive tax and regulatory policies have caused businesses to rein in capital investment and have all but killed small business creation.  As two major economists recently pointed out, capital investment is "historically weak."  In fact, capital investment net of depreciation for 2013 was just 60% of what it was in 2006.  A recent survey found that only 35% of small business owners were optimistic about the U.S. economy.  American businesses are choosing not to invest because they have no confidence in Obama's policies, and barring new investment, the economy does not grow.

By contrast, Ronald Reagan cut taxes and reduced regulations, and the economy expanded at an annualized rate of 3.37% over eight years.  At the end of Reagan's second term, the U.S. economy had expanded by a cumulative 33%.  During the first six years of his presidency, Obama has generated a growth rate of 1.8%.  That amounts to cumulative growth of 15% over 8 years.  The Reagan economy was growing more than twice as fast.


(Excerpt) Read more at americanthinker.com ...

T-Shirt