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AP worried Obama won’t gain politically from ‘recovery’


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By —— Bio and Archives April 30, 2013

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They get right to what really matters - to them, and to the rest of the political class. The issue is not whether you will benefit from whatever positive economic developments there may be. Screw you. It's all about whether our favorite celebrity politicians will stay fat and happy.
Of course, the AP realizes it has to do its part, so reporter Tom Raum tries his best to persuade you of what a great job Obama has done, while also providing a propaganda road map Democrats can use to parlay the "recovery" into political victories.
What steps can Obama rightfully claim that have helped spur economic improvement? His $830 billion stimulus program of 2009, for one. The White House also cites two other major emergency programs - the auto and financial industry bailouts. Both were started under President George W. Bush and expanded by Obama.
The White House suggests Obama's anti-recessionary programs helped nurture the creation of more than 6 million new jobs since the economy bottomed in 2010. Republicans voice skepticism but mainstream economists generally cite substantial gains from the federal efforts in the range of 3 million or more jobs. The bank bailout, or Troubled Asset Relief Program, turned out to be politically radioactive for many who supported it. But economists generally agree it helped avert a national financial meltdown. And it wound up yielding investment returns to taxpayers of most of the original $700 billion-plus cost. Obama can't claim credit for some of the biggest contributors to walking the economy back from the brink: actions by the semi-autonomous Federal Reserve, under Chairman Ben Bernanke, to hold down interest rates and lubricate the financial system by injecting around $3 trillion in newly printed money over the past five years.
Remember when the AP was a just-the-facts source of news reporting? Yeah, well, those were the days. Raum so helpfully informs us that Obama can "rightfully claim" his spending blowout improved the economy, which comes as news to anyone who recognizes this is the most sluggish economic recovery in a century. (At this point in the Reagan recovery, we'd had twice the GDP growth we've had in this one, and Reagan didn't use Keynesian "stimulus" to do any of it.) The auto bailout was really a rescue of the United Auto Workers at the expense of legitimate bondholders, and while the automakers are currently making a profit, it is far from certain in the long term that gigantic companies operating in the high-wage, high-cost, high-overhead manufacturing models of the past are going to be anything but the sources of economic instability they have been for decades now. TARP was a Bush policy, pure and simple. I supported it - didn't like it, but believed then and do now that it was necessary - but it would take some chutzpah for Obama to claim it as his own. And I'm sure Ben Bernanke will be glad to know the AP has given its blessing to his priming of the monetary printing presses. Who needs a strong currency when you can manipulate interest rates to depress people's returns on their savings? And the big problem in all this, of course, is that the economy is not strong, and unemployment is not low. We have yet to see even 3 percent annualized GDP growth in any year of Obama's presidency. Unemployment remains at nearly 8 percent. And we're running such massive budget deficits that when this year's came in just under $800 billion, Washington acted like it was actually good news. But don't tell that to the AP, which is so determined to spin economic news as good for Obama, they're presuming to tell us exactly how and why we should be thanking him - for a "recovery" that continues to fail in producing prosperity. Because the real news, as we all know, is not how you and I are doing, but how our perception of things will affect Johnny Lawmaker's career 18 months from now.



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Dan Calabrese’s column is distributed by HermanCain.com, which can be found at HermanCain

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