According to Politifact.com, Obama, made some 500 promises as a Candidate for President. That's a lot of promises to keep and whether or not Politifact.com interpreted every single promise correctly, the aggregate Promised Kept -vs- Promises Broken by the President according to Politifact.com, pretty much tells the story in general about this President's tenure in office during his first term.
Hyper-Partisan Politics in the Political Blogosphere being what it is on the net these days and the Main Stream Media attempt to keep "hot stories" smoldering for as long as they possibly can, even when the fire has long since burned out, will often times result in skewed or slanted readings of history. However, genuine facts are not up for revision and real history cannot be changed. They are the immutable objects that intellectually honest people can refer to in order to obtain proper framework for understanding and to be consistently on the right side of history when all the political fighting dust has long settled back down to earth. So, let's take a look inside Politifact.com evaluation of this current President of the United States.
Politifact.com claims that President Obama, has he's kept 162 promises and broke 56 promises, with 218 either compromised, stalled or still pending. That's 218 combined Presidential Actions (according to Politifact.com) from Obama, as President, that went to the heart of his campaign pledges. That's an 11.2% dynamic failure rate with a 32.4% dynamic success rate, and 282 or 56.4% either compromised, stalled or still pending.
Those are simply the facts of this Administration success and failure. No matter how much the President's rivals attempt to add to his failures, and no matter how much the President's supporters attempt to add to his successes, the history and the facts about what this President has promised and what he's actually accomplished with respect to his campaign promises, cannot be overridden and/or written off as if not to exist. This applies to the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly. Three outcomes that all Presidents have seen since the down of our Democratic Republic, and the birth of George Washington, as the United States very first Commander in Chief.
This particular President has had critics that have said that his entire Presidency was a failure, even before the end of his first year in office. Those statements are etched in history and can never be omitted, re-written and/or taken away. This particular President, has also had opposition in the United States Congress, who have publicly stated that their only task as legislators, was to make sure that Obama, was a a one term President.
Others in Congress, standing in opposition to the President, have publicly stated that their task is to make sure that the President's agenda for the country fails, despite whether or not the President's policies were good or bad for the country. Yet, others who stand in current opposition to the President's re-election efforts claim that the President has failed in all things, has achieved absolutely no thing of value and has corrupted the very seat of the Office of the Presidency by his merely existence in the White House.
However, if one were to observe actual history, in lieu of actual hyper-partisan rhetoric about the President, then one would have to conclude that a massive amount of accomplishment has indeed been overlooked by many of the President's political adversaries. President Obama's political adversaries, who predicate their arguments on hyper-partisan rhetoric design to win elections, almost never speak about the President's real record from 2008 through 2012.
Despite two (2) ongoing Wars and the nation reaching the point of a Great Economic Recession prior to coming to office, after his inauguration, President Obama, went to work and was able to lead the country through many key levels of accomplishment - some of then were so significant, that historians are already proclaiming them to be Landmark Achievements in the history of the United States of America:
- Created A National Healthcare Framework after 100+ years of Failure
- The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act
- Prevented Economic Depression and put a floor under very weak economy
- Cleaned-up TARP I Re-Payments Problems
- Instantiated TARP II and Prevented a Core Financial Institution Meltdown
- Prevented the U.S. Auto Industry from Collapsing and Forced its Restructuring
- Expanded Children's Health Insurance
- Signed the Mathew Sheppard Hate Crimes Act, Senate S.909
- Repealed DADT
- Signed Financial Regulatory Reform
- Signed Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act
- Signed The New Post-911 G.I. Bill
- Signed Credit Card Accountability, Responsibility, and Disclosure (CARD) Act
- Signed 2010 Hire Act: Tax Breaks for Small Businesses (16 Tax Cuts for Small Businesses)
- Signed 2010 START Treaty & Protocol with Russia
- Ended the War in Iraq
- Ending the War in Afghanistan
- Dealt with Osama Bin Laden in his own home
- Worked with Congress and signed the Transportation & Student Loan Interest Rate Bill, HR 4348
These are some of the major highlights and accomplishments of President Obama, during his first term in office. Whether his self-proclaimed political adversaries wish to accept this reality, this history and these facts or not, is irrelevant when it comes to the facts that history must record. By any definition, this President's first term in office has been nothing short of a miracle and nothing less than a resounding success, given the massive negativity that he had to deal with in the Economy and in a Congress that was publicly committed to seeing him fail. Despite all of that negativity, this President went on to accomplish some fairly amazing things as the nations Executive Officer.
Still, critics of the President will counter by using negative or slow economic data and never once account for the fact that under any President, the economy would have needed time to reach its maximum point of negative inflection at the bottom of a U-Shaped recovery, given the damage that had already been done to the economy, long before President Obama took office.
Other critics lay false blame for the lack of spirited job creation at the door step of Healthcare legislation that has not even been fully implemented and that was tied up in the court system long before it could have an impact on the small businesses they claim would be adversely affected by its existence. These critics of the President claim that National Healthcare, which is partly designed to lower overall costs to the system once fully implemented, thereby helping to reduce the national debt and deficits, was the "cause" for the sluggish recovery. And, they never once tell you that this recovery would be this sluggish, no matter who sat in the White House, simply because of the serious infrastructural damage that was done to our liquidity based economy.
While President Obama's specific Executive accomplishments have been outstanding for a President with or without the harsh realities of a broken economy in need of repair, the President's specific Economic Record related to the Recovery, has been perceptibly slow since 2008. However, much of this slowness in the job recovery is due to the fallout from the instantiation of the 2008 economic implosion that took place, before President Obama came to office:
Research at The United States Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that:
BLS
- The Private Sector has added jobs for 32 consecutive months
- More than 5,000,000 new jobs were created (under Obama's Presidency - note added)
- The Unemployment rate went down to 7.8% in September 2012
- Latest Household Survey shows that 873,000 people found employment
- Metropolitan Area Reporting shows a decline in the number of higher unemployment areas surveyed (2011 through Sept 2012)
- Metropolitan Area Reporting shows a decline in the rate of unemployment per area surveyed (2011 through Sept 2012)
Clearly, there is much more that need to be accomplished on the jobs front and like it or not, President Obama, now owns the United States Economy. However, that in no way diminishes the fact that he took on a patient that was on life-support, and gave that patient a second chance at life through prompt and immediate Executive level decisions that no serious economist is now claiming to have been unnecessary.
The facts should be clear. To conclude as many of the President's detractors have concluded, that an economy as massive as our own ($13.3 trillion), would be able to turn on a dime and pivot into a V-Shaped recovery, after having seen Real GDP drop to below -3.0% before the President took office and then below -8.0% shortly after the President assumed office, is simply unrealistic no matter which fiction novel you base the storyline upon. A Real GDP economy that large, throwing of negative growth spike that large, is going to see real tight compression in continue GDP growth for quite some time, before enough jobs are added back to the economy that lost them.
Millions of jobs had been lost by the time President Obama, got to office and hundreds of thousands per month were being lost before he could put any plans for a recovery into place, or do anything to halt the financial industry melt-down, or to restrain the banking crisis, or the foreclosure crisis, or the real threat that the auto industry would be severely damaged and possibly lost forever. During that same time period, an economy as large as ours, had to have room to bottom out before finding a floor upon which is could establish a recovery.
Source:
BEA | Gross Domestic Product (GDP) Graph
The Real Problem with the United States Jobs Recovery: American Companies Hoarding Over $5 Trillion in Cash
The real problem with the slowness of the jobs recovery is that many American companies simply refuse to Invest in America and Hire American Workers - Source:
The $5 Trillion Stash.
Once again, the United States Mainstream Media has failed to accurately report the problem, as vociferously as it does hyper-partisan political stories that dominate each so-called news cycle. These facts have been known about ever since 2009, and back then the "cash held" in the aggregate figure was estimated at over $5 Trillion. This marks the final quarter of 2012, so one can only guess that the this $5 trillion "cash held" figure has grown substantially. Why? A very significant recovery in the Stock Market took place between 2009 and 2012. The U.S. stock market is now trading once again above the 13,400+ level. So, the post-Great Recession Recovery has worked out tremendously well for Corporations and their respective earnings per share ratios.
So, what happened to the Re-Investment in America - why is real job growth so slow?
The $5 trillion estimated to be held by American Companies, is a figure reported by Reuters (above) but is actually a composite report containing data from the Internal Revenue Service, U.S. Census Bureau and the United States Bureau of Labor Statistics in the year 2009. These reports are from Non-Financial Companies. So, these were not the companies allegedly involved in the TARP I and TARP II rescue. However, it is extremely doubtful that all of them can claim that they did not benefit at least indirectly from TARP I and TARP II, as well as the President's Stimulus Plan.
In either case, these are American Companies for the most part and should be interested in the full recovery of the United States Recovery. If these companies had spend a fraction of their total hoarded cash holdings, the United States would experience near full recovery virtually over night, as the unemployment rates would plummet across the board, consumer confidence would soar and more money would be circulated throughout the entire economy from the the Supply Chain through Retail Point of Sale.
This story has been under-reported, hardly discussed by many and overlooked by most as being the primary causation for holding the economy back into a sluggish recovery profile, when unleashing the power of Investment Capital internally, would do more to solve our economic problems than nearly anything that any President could ever do at this point.
That's a huge component to the back-story that has not been adequately told about President Obama's Record and one that needs to be fully understood in its proper context. Recovery could be over and done with by now, had American Companies simply participated in that recovery, without coming anywhere near depleting all of their cash reserves.
