The primaries — where Democrats debate over who loves African-Americans the most, and Republicans who loves Jesus more — are over.
Now they must sell us on who will be best for the economy.
Hillary Clinton said that when she was elected she would put Bill Clinton in charge of the economy. Yes, the feminist icon is letting the man handle the checkbook.
Maybe Bill Clinton’s first move to reduce costs at the White House will be to fire the older salaried employees and hire interns.
In reality, while Obama grasps at taking credit for an economy that will go down in history as the weakest of any president's, he’s only spinning it. Obama will be the only president ever to preside over an eight-year period without a single year of at least 3 percent GDP growth. Oh, and he doubled our federal debt, adding more debt (about $10 trillion) than all 43 presidents before him.
He says he led us out of the recession with all his community organizing skills. He was inaugurated in January, 2009, and the recession ended months later, in June of 2009.
Obama acted like that was such a major accomplishment, but the reality is that we have had 47 recessions since records have been kept in the United States dating back to 1790. Recessions come along every five years or so, and we come out of every one of them.
His right-hand hatchet man, Rahm Emanuel, said it best: “Never let a good crisis go to waste.” Obama preyed on the economic fears of the country to load on big-government regulations and taxes that have, in fact, slowed the economy. Per the Wall Street Journal, “Mr. Obama will likely go down as having the worst economic-growth record of any president since the trough of the Great Depression in 1933 — over eight decades spanning 13 administrations, Mr. Obama thus far has overseen 1.7 percent average annual economic growth.”
Big recessions are historically followed by robust recoveries. This didn’t happen under Obama because he decided to grow government, not jobs and the economy. Reagan inherited a recession from Jimmy Carter in 1981, but he grew the economy an average of 4.6 percent a year afterward by getting government out of the way and cutting taxes.
Obama touts the 5 percent unemployment rate, but that number’s misleading. New unemployment claims slow seven years after a recession ended. Workers can’t claim but about 99 weeks of unemployment. The real number to watch is the dismal labor participation rate, down to 62 percent from 66 percent when Obama took office. The latest bad jobs numbers tell us that 94 million Americans are not in the labor force.
Our country’s safety net has become a hammock. Eighten percent of unmarried males and 23 percent of unmarried women ages 25 to 54 are not in the labor force. It is now cool to be a layabout; Obama blames everyone else, but the mooch.
No wonder Hillary Clinton is distancing herself from Obama’s economic record. He has created costly government, not jobs. He has picked industries he doesn’t like, including coal, for-profit colleges, payday lending, etc., and instructed his goons to regulate them out of business.
Trump is resonating with the American people because this supposed recovery has not helped the middle class, as Democrats had promised.
The average family makes $53,700 per year now, down from about $56,000 when Obama started working his "magic" on the economy.
And now it is estimated that the average family pays $15,000 a year in regulatory costs. The Competitive Enterprise Institute says this hidden tax, in the form of 3,600 new regulations and 175,000 pages in the "Code of Federal Regulations," includes more than 1 million regulatory restrictions that burden every family.
They just don’t see it.
Obama had no business experience. Ditto for other liberal “stewards of our economy,” Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid.
Ron Hart, a libertarian op-ed humorist and award-winning author, is a frequent guest on CNN. Contact him at Ron@RonaldHart.com or tweet@RonaldHart.
This article originally appeared on Crestview News Bulletin: HART: Here's why Democrats fail on the economy