How Much of This Hope & Change Disaster Can Americans Take?



Here is my latest column at American Issues Project:

How Much of This Hope & Change Disaster Can Americans Take?

It’s time to put down the Kool-Aid. It’s time to quit chasing unicorns. It’s time to stop the Hopey-Changey advertising campaigns. It’s time for reporters to quit bowing and for legs to stop tingling. Hope and Change may have made a good slogan but as policy it’s a disaster. Sadly, not everyone understands this. Rasmussen reports released their latest economic polling this past weekend. Rasmussen reported on Sunday that democrats actually believe the economy is better today than it was a year ago:

Over the past year, overall levels of consumer confidence have bounced around a lot but ended up with little change. For the full month June 2008, the Rasmussen Consumer Index was at 71.9. In June, 2009, that number was 72:0.

But underneath those stable topline numbers is a dramatic shift along party lines. A year ago, Republicans were far more confident than Democrats. Today, the reverse is true.

Among Democrats, the Rasmussen Consumer Index jumped from 53.7 a year ago to 79.5 in 2009.

Among Republicans, confidence was at 99.4 a year ago and it’s fallen to 68.6 today.

It’s hard to believe that anyone would think the economy is better today than it was a year ago. But, that’s what the polling is telling us. Democrat’s confidence in the economy jumped from 53.7 percent a year ago to 79.5 percent this year. This is really unbelievable. Granted it would be difficult to persuade these diehards otherwise, but let’s take a look at the economic numbers. These results should tell us a thing or two about these fanatics.

Unemployment:
The US lost over 2.5 million jobs in the first four months of this year under the Obama Administration. The US economy lost 598,000 jobs in January, 706,000 jobs in February, 742,000 jobs in March, 545,000 jobs in April, 485,000 jobs in May, and 473,000 jobs in June. That’s a total of 3,549,000 lost jobs since the beginning of this year. The US unemployment rate has risen from 7.6 percent to 9.5% percent under Obama, the highest rate in 26 years. The Bureau of Labor Statistics– via Sweetness and Light released a map of the unemployment rate over the last ten years. It’s not pretty. The US has lost 16,000 jobs each day since Democrats passed their non-Stimulus bill, the largest redistribution of wealth from the private sector to government officials in US history. President Obama promised that the unemployment rate would not rise above 8.0 percent with the Stimulus. Today, he says it will climb over 10 percent.

National Deficit:
Obama will more than quadruple the US budget deficit his first year in office. Obama inherited a 2008 budget deficit of 459 billion dollars. He voted for the 700 billion dollar bank rescue in the fall. He was left 350 billion from this spending bill when he took office. He then spent 787 billion dollars on a Stimulus Bill, 33 billion dollars on the SCHIP bill, and 410 billion dollars on his record-setting Omnibus Bill. The CBO estimated that the Obama budget deficit will total an astounding 13.1 percent of GDP this year. As a comparison, under George Bush, the federal deficit for 2008 was 3.2 percent of GDP. (See chart here) Obama says he loses sleep over his record spending but he still intends to spend trillions more for his nationalized health care program. Even Colin Powell and Der Spiegel understand that we can’t continue to spend like this.

There’s much more.
You can read the rest here. There is also a list of my recent columns on this page.

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Jim Hoft is the founder and editor of The Gateway Pundit, one of the top conservative news outlets in America. Jim was awarded the Reed Irvine Accuracy in Media Award in 2013 and is the proud recipient of the Breitbart Award for Excellence in Online Journalism from the Americans for Prosperity Foundation in May 2016. In 2023, The Gateway Pundit received the Most Trusted Print Media Award at the American Liberty Awards.

You can email Jim Hoft here, and read more of Jim Hoft's articles here.

 

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