Obama’s Economic Quagmire

While I’m writing this, I’m watching the President give a press conference on his budget this morning. You’ve already seen the high points of it, like the sky-high interest we’ll be paying on just the debt for many years, vacuuming up the needed capital for expansion of the private sector.

I am not encouraged by his words.

This budget is so bloated, so engorged as to risk a genuine explosion. The damage from the blast will obliterate the American economy that is already reeling from four years of progressive control of the purse strings in Congress. That orgy of spending, particularly in the two years since Obama was coronated, has done an unprecedented amount of damage to the economy.

Of course, this is viewed as a feature, not a bug, by this administration. All is proceeding according to plan.

Early on during the Reign of Obama the Terrible, we were patient. We knew he was new to the job and we were willing to cut him some slack while he became acclimated to his position as leader of the free world. Any gaffs or missteps were attributed to his freshness.

Wait, it’s time to drink a shot: Obama just blamed George Bush for the deficit.

It’s still morning, you say? OK, I’ll do two.

OK, where was I? Oh yeah, our forgiving nature. Those of us who actually did a bit of digging in order to educate ourselves knew that he was woefully unprepared for such a position of power. He even said so himself. His years spent as a community organizer and in the pew of Jeremiah Wright’s church prepared him well, just not for the presidency.

We were willing to wait and see if he was naive, or was purposely inflating the federal budget and the deficit along with it, kinda like the Cloward-Piven Strategy writ large. Well, thanks to the results, we can now say with a fair amount of certainty…

This is being done on purpose.

Need proof? It just so happens that I have some, courtesy of the good folks over at Innocent Bystanders. In a post entitled The Record, Mike has accumulated a handy list of economic indicators from the past two years.

Here are a few of the dismal figures:


January 2009                                                        TODAY          % chg
Avg. retail price/gallon gas in U.S.      $1.83            $3.104            69.6% 1

Crude oil, European Brent                  $43.48           $99.02           127.7%

Crude oil, West TX Inter.                   $38.74           $91.38           135.9%

Gold: London                                    $853.25         $1,369.50       60.5%

Corn, No.2 yellow                              $3.56             $6.33            78.1%

Soybeans, No. 1 yellow                       $9.66            $13.75          42.3%
Sugar, cane, raw                                 $13.37           $35.39          164.7%

Unemployment rate, overall                  7.6%             9.4%            23.7%

Unemployment rate, blacks                  12.6%            15.8%          25.4%

Number of unemployed                 11,616,000       14,485,000        24.7%
Number of fed. employees, ex. military 2,779,000   2,840,000          2.2%

Real median household income         $50,112           $49,777           -0.7%

Food stamp recipients                      31,983,716       43,200,878         35.1%

Unemployment benefit recipients    7,526,598        9,193,838           22.2%

Long-term unemployed                  2,600,000          6,400,000         146.2%

Poverty rate, (2008 v 2009)                 13.2%             14.3%               8.3%

People in poverty in U.S. (08 v 09) 39,800,000        43,600,000       9.5%

The footnotes are in the post and apologies for the bad cut/paste fu.


Ready for that shot yet?