Obama Fails The Economy

Obama has been a failure all around. His foreign policy has been heavy on retreat and his domestic agenda sparked backlashes galore. But even worse has been his economic policies. His plan of high taxes, massive government spending, and corporate subsidies lengthened the recession and created a jobless recovery. Those “green jobs” he promised were all an illusion. And now it turns out, he’s made the biggest danger to the economy even worse.

Before we talk about how Obama “fixed” the “too big to fail” problem, you might be interested in a little data on those green jobs we’re all supposed to have now.

When Obama took office, he promised five million green jobs in the next ten years. He even spent $90 billion to make that happen. That works out to $18,000 per expected job. Of course, it’s actually higher because that $90 billion is just a baseline and will cause further federal spending, but still, that's not too bad.

So how has he done? According to the White House, rather than creating 5,000,000 jobs, this money now will create only “827,000 job years” over Obama’s four years in office. But a “job year” is not a job. It is instead the equivalent of one full-time position for one year. If we spread these job years out over the ten years Obama used for the five million claim, you come up with a total of 82,700 jobs. And that means the cost per job is $1.1 million. It also means, Obama still owes 4.9 million jobs.

And don’t forget that even beyond this, you have a variety of failures under the crony clean energy loan program out of the Department of Energy, such as Solyndra, Enerl, Beacon Power, Solar Trust for America, and others. Not to mention, the $2.4 billion flushed away on building fewer than 8,000 Chevy Volts no one wants.

Call me crazy, but Obama’s attempt to create a Mussolini-like industrial policy appears to have been a colossal failure.

Now we get word that Obama has made the “too big to fail” problem worse. Imagine that. When Obama came to power, he promised an end to “too big to fail” so that taxpayers would never again need to support failed banks. Then he signed the financial reform bill, Dodd-Frank, which supposedly did that. . . though Republicans claimed otherwise. Bloomberg News now reports that the five biggest banks, i.e. those that are too big to fail, increased their share of all banking assets from 43% in 2007 to 56% now. That’s right, those five banks absorbed an additional 13% of all the banking assets in the country under Obama. In total, these five banks (JPMorgan, Bank of America, Citicorp, Wells Fargo and Goldman Sachs) now control $8.5 trillion in assets. Moreover, the size of the banking sector compared to the rest of the economy has doubled in the past decade, making banks even more “too big to fail.” That means the problem is much, much worse than it was before the TARP bailouts.

Obama has flushed money down the toilet while squandering opportunity after opportunity to actually fix the economy and protect the country from another meltdown. His failure to act is shameful and dangerous. Let us hope the Republicans fix these problems when they finally gain control over the government.

As usual, don't forget it's Star Trek Tuesday at the film site!