It Was Worse Than We Thought!

The economy has not fully recovered because the Democrats misjudged how bad things were when they took office. Bill Clinton said, "No president—not me or any of my predecessors—no one could have fully repaired all the damage in just four years." The Democrats held the Presidency, the Senate and the House of Representatives in January 2009. Republicans only took back the House in January 2011. The Democrats passed a stimulus bill in 2009 of $800 Billion promising a recovery which would keep unemployment less than 8%. In the spring of 2010, they passed one of the largest entitlement programs in history with PPACA (Obamacare). In 2010 they passed Dodd-Frank (named for the two most responsible for the bad legislation which caused the problem). The size of government and its regulations increased dramatically. Businesses are still reluctant to hire.

From the day Obama took office (January 20, 2009) to today, the national debt rose from $10.627 trillion to $16.016 trillion—an increase of $5.389 trillion. Unemployment has remained above 8% for Obama's term. If spending more than you take in causes the economy to recover, then where is the recovery? Only 96,000 jobs were created in August, but 368,000 gave up looking for work. The “unemployment rate” went down to 8.1% because fewer people are working. Is this progress? If massive wealth transfer is the goal, then I guess that it is progress!

The Federal Reserve has been printing an excess of money in order to buy Treasury Notes. This has temporarily kept interest rates low and allowed the government to operate on borrowed money. Printing more money than necessary causes inflation. We saw the first signs this summer as gold, silver and other commodities started to rise rapidly in price. Silver has risen about 23% since July. Americans are myopic. They will say that gas prices are rising; food prices are rising; rent prices are rising;car prices are rising;etc. It can't be that the dollar that we are using to pay for these things has been intentionally devalued by our government! It must be greedy oil companies, greedy food stores, greedy landlords, greedy corporations, etc. Maybe the financial experts know something about the money supply!