Let me begin with my penance. All hail the Gods of the Third Party. Hail to thee, hail to thee, hail to thee. Forgive me my transgression of mentioning elections and wining them without touting you as the sole way forward for humanity’s best hope. Now that this is out of the way, on with the reason for the post.
It’s the start of another midterm campaign season, and the stupidity from the left is already in full bloom. It’s bloomed early this year, and the leftist arguments concerning economics are no exception to that. “Barack Obama brought us back from the brink of collapse.” “it would have been worse had McCain or Romney won.” “the economy is just starting to recover and is running on all cylinders,” will be heralded from the roof tops and accepted by a compliant and completely incurious media. Those statements and more are just a taste of what we’re about to hear as we crawl our way towards that first Tuesday in November, that next opportunity to mitigate the damage done by two Barack Obama terms in the Oval Office.
I realize that many in our nation, especially those who claim that America was perched on the brink of the proverbial abyss in January of 2009, will not remember the middle to late 1970’s, most specifically the state of our economy during those halcyon days. Jimmy Carter had managed to disprove the theory that a correlation betwixt unemployment and Inflation existed. Inflation was so high that banks were beginning to flat out refuse to loan even a single thin dime, unless the borrower agreed to an interest rate that made loan sharks scratch their heads and cry WTF. Gas lines were miles long, and rationing had begun. During the winter months, the nightly news dutifully reported how many days of coal for heating were left in stockpiles, and took the extra step of comparing that estimation with the number of days left in the winter season. Those are just some of the reasons why you hear a derisive laughter when stating that the George W. Bush economy was the worst since WWII.
When Ronald Reagan took over from Jimmy Carter in ’81, things were actually worse economically compared to when Obama took over from George W. Bush in ’08.
Consider these three important comparisons of economic indicators, then and now:– Unemployment was at 10.8% versus 7.7%
– Inflation (Consumer Price Index) was at 13.5% versus 2.7%
– Interest rates (prime rate) was at 21.5% versus 3.25%
What the above graph shows is the net new jobs created in proportion to the population growth. During the upcoming election cycle, be prepared for the baloney. They’ll bandy about some highly suspect and nebulous figure for how many jobs, Barack Obama, created. It’ll be in the millions, and we’re supposed to be amazed by it’s size, never actually comparing it to the size of our population, the size of our population’s growth, let alone how many of those jobs were additions to the tax paying public’s burden for all of this, or how many jobs were lost or disappeared during the same time frame.
I have said this many times before, but it bears saying again. We, meaning those of us who believe in small government limited in scope and authority by the consent of those governed, in free market economic principles, in the rule of law as codified in our Constitution’s original intent, must get our collective crap together and begin winning elections. Our problems run much deeper than Barack Obama or any of his small band of incompetent minions. Our collective pain has been achieved politically, and politically is the only way we will be able to remedy that pain.
You’ve probably all seen this before. I first saw this quote in March of 2009, but that does not change the fact that it is spot on, eloquent, and quite possibly the best description of the state of America today.
