"It profits me but little that a vigilant authority always protects the tranquillity of my pleasures and constantly averts all dangers from my path, without my care or concern, if this same authority is the absolute master of my liberty and my life."

--Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America

Friday, July 6, 2012

Obama Must Go

Send these charts to everyone you know.

First, here's the only chart you need to think about when you think about the unemployment numbers that came out today (8.2%).   Those numbers reflect only people who are still in the work force; if the labor force participation rate were as high as it was in 2008, the number would be more like 11-12%.   So you can be fooled by the unemployment "rate" -- you have to look at the reality of how many people out of the whole population have jobs -- the employment/population ratio.   It doesn't look good, and it's not getting better:

If you have to look at the unemployment rate, you should compare it to what Obama promised it would be if we enacted his $800 billion stimulus plan in early 2009.   The failure of the plan is obvious:


And, it's also plain that Obama is doing a much worse job in combatting this recession than other Presidents have done in the past:



The Obama "recovery" is the red line... every other recovery from a recession since World War II has been much, much better, and much, much quicker.

Why has the Obama recovery been so slow?   Victor Davis Hanson gives a good summary of the job-killing, growth-killing policies Obama and the Left have pursued:

If one wanted to ensure permanent 8 percent to 9 percent unemployment, one might try the following:
1. Run up serial $1 trillion deficits
2. Add $5 trillion to the national debt in three and a half years
3. Impose a 2,400-page, trillion-dollar new federal takeover of health care, with layers of new taxation, much of it falling on the middle class and employers, even as favored concerns are given mass exemptions.
4. Scare employers with constant us/them class warfare rhetoric about a demonized one-percenter class and its undeserved profits; constantly talk about raising new taxes and imposing regulations, ensuring uncertainty and convincing employers of unpredictability in regulation and taxes. You cannot convince a country to go into permanent near-recession, but President Obama is doing his best to try.
5. Appoint a bipartisan committee to study the fiscal crisis and then neglect all its recommendations.
6. Subsidize failed green companies, while denigrating successful gas and oil concerns, as well as putting rich oil-and-gas federal leases off limits.
7. Vastly increase unemployment insurance, disability, and food-stamp constituencies, while promising all sorts of mortgage, credit-card, and student-loan bailouts.
8. Borrow hundreds of billions for stimulus programs that are not shovel ready, but are rather aimed to bail out state budgets, pensions, and unions.
9. Federalize elements of non-profitable private companies, while threatening to shut down profitable plants for supposed union or environmental incorrect behavior.
10. Do not address changing the above policies, but rather blame others for such self-induced stagnation.
Do the above and you can pretty much always ensure something like the present slow-down.



Obama.   Must.   Go.  

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