Most of the coverage of this, especially on conservative sites, has focused on Obama's claim that the media were unfair to Hillary during the election. Yeah. I don't even know what to say about that one other than to shake my head and give the man back-handed props for his willingness to say absolutely anything, no matter how self-evidently absurd.
But I think there are two far more substantive points to deal with here. Actually there are surely more than two. The claim that the U.S. is more respected abroad today than before Obama took office is astonishing on its face, for example. But let's deal with these two:
That despite the predictions of his critics, economic growth has not been hampered by Obama's policies.
That Obama has "cut the deficit."
With regard to the first claim, here are the economic growth rates for every quarter of the Obama presidency, starting with the first quarter of 2011 (and I leave out the first two years so as to bend over backward in fairness, since the mortgage market meltdown of 2008 - which impacted those rates to a significant degree - happened before Obama was elected:
2011-1-- -1.5
2011-2--2.9
2011-3--0.8
2011-4--4.6
2012-1--2.7
2012-2--1.9
2012-3--0.5
2012-4--0.1
2013-1--1.9
2013-2--1.1
2013-3--3.0
2013-4--3.8
2014-1-- -0.9
2014-2--4.6
2014-3--4.3
2014-4--2.1
2015-1--0.6
2015-2--3.9
2015-3 --1.5
2015-4--0.8
2016-1--0.8
2016-2--1.4
2016-3--3.1
Obama defends his economic record by pointing out that we've had consistent growth, which is true but completely irrelevant.
This has been the pattern of the entire Obama presidency. Occasionally you'll see a strong quarter with growth above 3 percent, but it's always an aberration, and we always return to growth rates below 2 percent - and often below 1 percent or even below 0 percent. Economic growth throughout this period has averaged less than 2 percent, which is the worst post-recession growth rate in U.S. history.
Obama defends his economic record by pointing out that we've had consistent growth, which is true but completely irrelevant. That you have growth should be a given. It's the rate of growth that matters, and the rate of growth since he's been in office has been abysmal. And yes, that is directly related to his anti-growth, anti-business policies.
Now, about the deficit claim, let's start with a little context: Deficits during the Bush years tended to range around the $400-to-$500 billion mark, but in 2007, the deficit was reduced to $192 billion. It exploded, however, in 2008 because of the cost of the Toxic Asset Relief Program (TARP), which the Bush Administration undertook in response to the aforementioned mortgage market meltdown. Because of TARP, the deficit rose during the single year to more than $1 trillion. That was very bad, but it should have been a one-time thing.
Obama made sure it would not be a one-time thing. In 2009, Obama and the Democrats rammed through the $862 billion "stimulus" that they claimed was a one-time, emergency measure. It was not. They quietly baked the spending increase into the ongoing budget baseline, and stopped passing annual budgets so as to make it harder for anyone to catch on. But we continued running $1 trillion-plus deficits all the way through 2012.
Support Canada Free Press
Fake News: When the media report these claims by Obama without challenging them, it's the definition of fake news
Since then, deficits went back down, although we're looking at one this year going back up close to $600 billion.
But even to the extent the deficit was "reduced" for a few years, it was only reduced from the elevated level Obama and the Democrats willingly gave us for five years previous to that.
When the media report these claims by Obama without challenging them, it's the definition of fake news. And it's what they've been doing for the past eight years. It appears that as of November 8, the public had stopped buying it. I guess Obama will keep trying to sell it anyway, since he doesn't have anything else to sell.
