“The fact that we are here today to debate raising America ‘s debt limit is a sign of leadership failure. it is a sign that the US government cannot pay its own bills. It is a sign that we now depend on ongoing financial assistance from foreign countries to finance our government’s reckless fiscal policies. Increasing America ‘s debt weakens us domestically and internationally. Leadership means that, “the buck stops here.’ Instead, Washington is shifting the burden of bad choices today onto the backs of our children and grandchildren. America has a debt problem and a failure of leadership. Americans deserve better.” ~ Senator Barack H. Obama, March 2006
Obama’s government unemployment figures are a joke. Real unemployment is 14.3 percent. The government’s fake unemployment numbers totally ignore the people who want to work but have given up trying to find a full time job while counting part-time workers as employed.
The real figure is the U-6 that the government prefers you ignore. It includes those workers who can’t find a job, people the government calls “marginally attached” to the work force. America’s unemployment is actually worse than Italy and Ireland and at least 3% higher than the EU’s unemployment rate.
While the US population has grown by 12.4 million since 2007, the labor force has only increased by 1.9 million. The number of those that have given up trying to find a job has increased by 10.1 million while the number of part-time workers has doubled since Obama took office.
Homeownership, which soared to a record high 69% in 2004, is back where it was two decades ago, before the housing bubble inflated, busted and ripped more than 7 million Americans from their homes.
Steve Forbes says that the “Fed has destroyed the credit markets for small and medium-sized businesses or certainly warped it in a very major way. A stable dollar and unfettered interest rates would lead “credit to flow more freely. Bank loans have begun a modest rebound, “but this is in the fifth year of a recovery, and this is pathetic. So, on the litany of things [that need to change], after we get rid of Obamacare, how about throwing out Dodd-Frank and starting over on that one and give community banks a chance to compete again?”
David Levy, chairman of the Jerome Levy Forecasting Center says that the U.S. economy will eventually fall into a recession, smothered by an excessive debt load. “We are still in a disinflationary and balance-sheet adjusting phase in the U.S. and globally, and that is going to bring, at some point, another recession. It could be sooner rather than later, and when that happens, we’ll probably get a little bit of deflation. At some point, we’ll see the 10-year Treasury yielding well under 1%, much as we have seen in Japan. The big picture is that we still have way too much debt relative to income.”
Mark Faber, publisher of the Gloom, Boom & Doom Report, predicted on a CNBC interview that the stock market will drop 20% in the last half of 2013.
Total venture capital invested in the US fell nearly 10% last year and is still below its prerecession peak, according to PricewaterhouseCoopers. American workers need the U.S. to be as entrepreneurial and innovative as possible, as does the global economy. But right now we are taxing capital, educating kids, regulating banks, and managing cities in ways that are crippling America’s greatest economic asset.
The bleak reality is that the Obama economy, which was growing at a snail’s-pace in his first term, is slowing down even more in his second. Economic growth, as measured by our gross domestic product, grew at a barely breathing 1.4 percent annualized rate in the first six months of this year. That’s down from 2.5 percent over the same period in 2012. This isn’t just a statistic: It’s the falling pulse rate of the U.S. economy.
All those “phony” scandals, the authorization of military dentention without due process and drone assassination of U.S. citizens; violation of the first amendment through seizure of your personal phone calls, emails; using government agencies to harass political opposition; the war against Christianity and the Catholic Church, the attempted confiscation of firearms through legislation and the UN Small Arms Treaty; the takeover of our health care system; – there isn’t much that Obama hasn’t tried to control through intimidation, legislation and executive order.
The buck no longer stops at the White House – it’s having a hard time finding his latest vacation spot.
