The Numbers Don’t Lie: Look at America Before and After President
Obama,
1/20/17, by Mark Patricks, League of
Power
Compared with the situation eight years ago before
President Obama took office, America is much
worse off now in any number of ways. Here is a
brief enumeration of several of them:
The Economy
For many people, the economic numbers for the
U.S. tell most of the story of the Obama
administration: the national debt increased
while wages fell and the country's gross
domestic product (GDP) tanked.
Indeed, Obama nearly doubled the national
debt from $10.6 trillion in 2009 to $20 trillion
as of the end of 2016. So, in essence,
Obama was responsible for almost half the
entire national debt while effectively doubling
it in dollar terms.
In fact, he increased the national debt more than
all previous U.S. presidents combined.Partially
as a result, Standard & Poor's downgraded the
U.S.'s credit rating, and there were multiple
debt ceiling crises in Congress, including a two-week
shutdown of the government in 2013.
At the same time, the
U.S. economy as a whole grew at a dismal average of 2.1 percent during Obama's
tenure, and the highest growth Obama could boast during his two terms as
president was 2.6 percent in 2015.
Obama didn't have a
single year where the economy grew by at least three percent, whereas from 1790
to 2000, U.S. GDP grew an average of 3.79 percent per year. The longest
previous similar downturn only lasted four years, and that was in the Great
Depression. These figures are dreadful for a modern
administration and represent the fourth-worst GDP numbers for any president in
U.S. history so far.
And finally, American
median household income still has not recovered to pre-2008 levels of
approximately $57,500, adjusted for inflation. This means that the multi-decade
trend of most Americans' incomes stagnating or falling has simply continued.
The above numbers, along
with the amount of deaths from foreign conflicts (see below), are one of the
Obama presidency's worst legacies.
Trade
In some senses, U.S.
citizens dodged a bullet on trade. Obama was trying his darndest to pass the
Transpacific Partnership (TPP), the Transatlantic Trade and Investment
Partnership (TTIP), the Trade in Services Agreement (TISA) and other free-trade
agreements before his term was up. In the time since Bill Clinton was president
and signed the
North American Free
Trade Agreement (NAFTA), nearly one-third of all American manufacturing jobs
have disappeared.
If any of the above deals
went through, even more jobs would have left the country, and a few select
billionaires would have gotten richer while more Americans would be out of
work. In addition, U.S. citizens would be forced to accept lower quality
standards for food, drugs and consumer goods imported from other countries.
Obama got as far as
passing fast-track authority for TPP in Congress, but wasn't able to corral the
votes for getting the actual agreement itself passed after Trump won the
election. Thank goodness; Trump announced that the TPP would be killed on his
first day in office.
Jobs
After the financial
crisis of 2008, the economy tanked and millions of Americans lost their jobs.
According to Obama's own first Secretary of Labor, as many as one in three
American men (out of approximately 96 million people total not participating in
the workforce) is still out of work due to the greatly diminished recovery that
Obama's administration
has tried to portray as
fully fledged.
In fact, Obama's nearly
endless trumpeting of rosy job numbers in the last four years of his presidency
(when official unemployment fell from 8 percent to under 5 percent) was based
on fudged numbers given by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). When one looks
at official data and
charts, there are asterisks
next to the most recent years due to changes in the way the BLS calculates its
figures.
Another issue is that
even if people have gotten jobs, as many as 94 percent of them are from
part-time work in what many euphemistically call "the gig economy"
(read: low-paying service-sector jobs). If one becomes a waiter when one used
to be a union card-carrying factory worker, almost surely a pay cut is
involved.
Immigration
One of the reasons why
job numbers and wages were so bad was because of illegal immigration during
Obama's two terms. Throughout Obama's time in office, the number of illegal
immigrants in the country remained roughly 11 million, or 3.5 percent of the
country's population.
But the number of
illegals in the nation's workforce is roughly 8 million, or 5 percent of those
working or looking for work; the laws regarding employers hiring these people
are not strict enough. Even with legal immigration, quotas on foreign-born H1-B
visa laborers (currently at 85,000 per year) allow many transplants from other
countries to grab
high-tech jobs that
could otherwise go to American workers.
In the very worst cases,
employers such as Disney and Toys R Us laid off Americans who had to train
their less-well-paid foreign-born replacements. And to make matters worse,
before the presidential election, both Hillary Clinton and Obama were promising
to boost H1-B visa numbers even higher, which would have resulted in yet more
job losses. This was likely due to billionaires such as Mark Zuckerberg and Larry
Page donating millions of dollars to Democratic campaigns, such as the one for
Hillary Clinton.
Not only were immigrants
a threat on the job front, they were and still are a threat on the security
front. High-profile shootings in San Bernardino, California; Orlando, Florida
and elsewhere left dozens of Americans dead from Islamic radicals who were
followers of ISIS. Despite the obvious danger, Obama and Clinton wanted to
vastly increase the
number of Middle Eastern
and other dangerous refugees into a system that has extremely poor vetting.
Foreign Conflicts
Why were all these
immigrants leaving these Middle Eastern countries? It could very well be
because the United States was bombing them. At least in the case of Iraq,
Libya, Yemen, Somalia, Syria, Afghanistan and Pakistan, this was the case. In
Syria alone, U.S. support for the "moderate rebel" opposition helped
result in more than 400,000 civilian
deaths, while tens of
thousands more innocent people along with U.S. troops died in at least six
other countries while Obama was in office. U.S. Special Forces are currently
deployed in 134 countries globally, a 123 percent increase under Obama.
Of course, the Obama
administration claims we were on the right side in all these conflicts, but
foreign policy has not been Obama's strong suit. Many analysts attribute the
formation of ISIS to Obama's pulling out of Iraq too early. Obama also released
and transferred hundreds of prisoners from the U.S. facilities at Guantanamo
Bay. At least a few of
these prisoners have rejoined
jihad movements to once again threaten the lives of U.S. soldiers.
Race Relations
Obama loves to talk
about race and how the country needs to improve race relations. But under
Obama's policies and encouragement of social justice protesting by groups like
Black Lives Matter, this improvement is not happening. Actually, in most cases,
it's just making matters worse.
In fact, it's arguable
that race relations now are rougher than they've been at any point in the last
20 to 30 years, as high-profile police brutality and murder cases have been
covered seemingly nonstop by the media. From the death of Trayvon Martin in
2012 to the deaths of Eric Garner and Michael Brown in 2014 to the death in
custody of Sandra Bland in 2015, protests and anti-police violence have claimed
the lives of brave police officers.
With each case, Obama
has reminded Americans of how deep the divide is rather than attempting to heal
the fissures that exist. He also has sought to undermine people's faith in
local police forces and said that protesting police action is a positive step.
This ties in with:
Crime and Murder Rates
Something not spoken
about much regarding the Obama administration is how much crime especially the
murder rate has gone up during this time. The murder rate in the 25 largest
cities across the nation went up by 11 percent from 2015 to 2016 and is set to
rise again for 2016.
In Obama's hometown of
Chicago, the data is even worse. For 2016, the homicide rate was 715 deaths,
with 4379 people shot last year, an increase of 59 percent from 2015 when 2996
people were shot and 447 died. Whether one can point the finger at the outgoing
president specifically for this surge is admittedly debatable, but certainly,
the dreadful economy played a part in this new crime trend, which Obama has grudgingly
agreed with, mentioning "pockets of poverty that are highly segregated"
in a recent interview.
Regards, Mark Patricks
Source:
League of Power
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