Obama takes over executive branch in Jan. 2009.
Unemployment rate: 7.8%
GOP takes control of House in Jan. 2011.
Unemployment rate: 9.1%
At least you'll never again claim (not here anyway) that
"Republicans blocked these [Obama economic] plans and others, leading to higher unemployment."Just remember in the future to drop one prefix from that sentence -- not "leading to higher
unemployment" but rather "leading to higher
employment".
Unemployment rises to 9.4% in May 2009 within four months of his taking office. The economy hemorrhaged several hundred thousand jobs a month before anything he could do could take effect. He inherited an economy in complete free-fall and taking the oath of office on Jan. 20 does not magically stop that.
I have already shown in earlier comments why we should not consider that Obama "inherited" the economy in 2009. We've become accustomed to using that term only because four of the last five Presidents -- Carter, Reagan, Clinton, and Bush 43 -- came to D.C. as former governors in the hinterlands.
They really did "inherit" what they found in D.C.
Unlike them, Obama didn't need any street map of D.C. when
he became President. "Literally" is an oft-misused term but not here:
Upon becoming President, Obama literally just moved the contents of his desk from one end of Pennsylvania Avenue to the other.Moreover, Obama wasn't some obscure backbencher. He was a big-state U.S. Senator, including two years, 2007-09, as part of the ruling majority in Congress that sets U.S. fiscal policy. (Bush can be faulted for "making a bad bargain" in trading funding for his Surge that led to his second fabulous victory in Iraq in exchange for giving Obama and his friends a completely free hand with the budget of the U.S.)
In Oct. 1, 2007, the first of the Democratic budgets became law; nine days later the stock market began its long march to Obamaland (it probably took eight days for investors to read the budget). Inspired by the anti-Reaganesqe "Demandside Economics" that held that prosperity would "trickle up" if the government would just take lots of money from the middle classes and dump it on the poor, that first budget
tripled the federal deficit, which had been slowly declining, in one year, from 1.1% of GNP to 3.2% of GNP. The unemployment rate on that date?
4.7% (By the
end of the first Democratic budget in 13 years, the unemployment rate was
6.5%; after one more such budget, it was
10.0%.)
I could, and have in the past, go into greater depth about the horrors wrought on the economy by all the economics Obama learned in college and law school, but my father used to say "A word to the wise always suffices."
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