Obama's Re-Election Case Rests On 5 Phony Claims

[Conservative]

Obama's Re-Election Case Rests On 5 Phony Claims - Investors.com

Bush tax cuts and deregulation caused the recession.
It's a standard Obama talking point. But it's not true. Bush's tax cuts did not cause the last recession.

In fact, once they were fully in effect in 2003, they sparked stronger growth — generating more than 8 million new jobs over the next four years, and GDP growth averaging close to 3%.

Those tax cuts didn't explode the deficit, either, as Obama frequently claims. Deficits steadily declined after 2003, until the recession hit.

I stopped a second Great Depression.
Another frequent Obama claim is that "we did all the right things to prevent a Great Depression." But this, too, is false.

What's more, the recovery officially started less than four months after Obama signed the stimulus into effect, when only a small fraction of the stimulus money was actually in the economy. Plus, other Obama economic interventions came either after the recession had ended — including his GM (GM) bailout — or have been widely judged to be failures.

My policies are working.
In his recent two-minute campaign ad, Obama claimed that "as a nation we are moving forward again." But while the overall economy has grown somewhat since Obama's recovery started more than three years ago, several other important indicators have actually gone backward.

• Median household incomes, for example, have dropped $3,000 — a 5.7% decline — since the Obama recovery started.
• There are 659,000 more long-term unemployed than there were in June 2009, and the share of people working has dropped to levels not seen in 30 years, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
• Meanwhile, there are 11.8 million more people on food stamps and nearly 2.7 million more in poverty than when the Obama recovery started.

A slow recovery was inevitable.
Obama dismisses the slow and painful recovery by saying that he knew the road would be long. "I always believed that this was a long-term project (and) that it was going to take more than a year," he has said. "It was going to take more than two years. It was going to take more than one term."

While some economists make that claim, others dispute it. A November 2011 paper by economists at Rutgers University and the Cleveland Fed, for example, concluded that "recessions associated with financial crises are generally followed by rapid recoveries."

Nobody could have done any better.
One of Bill Clinton's biggest applause lines at the Democratic convention was when he said that "no president — not me or any of my predecessors — could have repaired all the damage in just four years."

But historically, deeper recessions have been followed by faster recoveries.

In fact, what has been noteworthy about Obama's recovery is how frequently it has "unexpectedly" underperformed economists' projections.

To get a sense of how dismal Obama's recovery has been, consider this: Since World War II, there have been 10 recoveries before Obama's. Had Obama's merely performed as well the average of all those recoveries, the nation's GDP would be a staggering $1.2 trillion bigger than it is today, and 7.9 million more people would have jobs.

Anyone who votes for 4 more years of this shit is a complete, utter moron.