Obama also gave us 42 consecutive months of 8% unemployment
This is where you are just flat out wrong. Obama never gave us 8% unemployment. Here is the kicker though, I'm not even going to blame it on Bush although the economic crash started before Obama even got into office. Presidents don't have enough power and authority to determine or radically change the outcome of the economy. Yes, sometimes, if government cuts taxes a bit or raises them, it might help or hurt a little, but in the big picture of things, the government is more affected by the economy than the economy is affected by government.
To prove my point, most of you say the stimulus was a massive failure, that things would have been better had we done nothing. Now I'm not sure things would have been better, but I doubt they would have been much worse. However, on the flipside, the bad economy has cost the federal government 30% of its revenues. Now that is a massive affect of the economy on government. Government couldn't do much to stop the recession or reverse it quickly enough. You think that Reagan really turned around the economy in the 80's? In 1980, unemployment was 7.1%. By 1982, it had jumped to 9.7% under Reagan. By 1984, it had dropped to 7.5% but was still higher than it was when Reagan took office. Only in Reagan's second term did unemployment drop. It took nearly six years to get it below the point it was when Reagan took office, and it had nothing to do with Reagan's policies. You may want to believe it did, but it didn't.
To prove my point again, look at tax revenues during the Reagan years. As a percentage of GDP, tax revenues actually dropped during the Reagan years. Of course as revenue dropped, deficits soared. Revenues dropped from 19.6% of GDP in 1981 to 18.4% of GDP in 1989, Reagan's last budget. Oh, and as far as lowering taxes increasing revenue, Reagan proved that didn't work either. Revenues decreased as a percentage of GDP as shown above at a time when unemployment dropped. By the end of Reagan's second term, unemployment had dropped from over 7% to just over 5%, yet revenue as a percentage of GDP dropped.
Anyway, for those of you who continue to believe the President can wave a magic wand and everything turns to gold, go ahead and vote for Romney. Nothing will change. Things might get a little better; they might get a little worse. If Romney cuts taxes, revenue will drop even more for the federal government just as it did under Reagan. Considering revenues currently are at least 20% less as a percentage of GDP than they were under Reagan, reducing them further really seems like committing suicide when at the same time the cost of SS and Medicare are skyrocketing. But hey, I think we should cut taxes some more anyway, because cutting taxes is such an easy sell compared to raising them.
