The Obama Legacy: Debt of $50,000 per Second

By Claude Sandroff —— Bio and Archives August 29, 2011

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Barack Obama is three times the man George W. Bush was, at least as measured by the rate at which each was able to pile on to America’s debt. In the first 945 days of his presidency Obama has amassed the debt it took Bush his full two terms to accumulate. Behold, the profligate son!

Tripling down on Bush’s legacy was no easy task for the community organizer from Illinois whose predecessor spent with abandon because he was assaulted by foreign attacks on the homeland, opened two theaters of war, created a brand new federal entitlement and never vetoed a spending bill. But Obama has shown that, “Yes we can”, do worse than Bush, through failed Keynesian stimulus, unfettered environment regulation, drilling moratoriums, healthcare takeovers, nationalization of industry and anti-business hatred that suffocates the animal spirits that alone can cure high unemployment by unleashing our legion of risk takers. No president in history has burdened us so massively, so quickly. Never have so many owed so much to so few creditors. And we have so little to show for it. Unlike the situation in 1945, when we last owed this much, Americans don’t sit solidly astride a numb, defeated world, full of confidence while reigning as the most powerful and benevolent nation in human history. Though their country is still unrivaled as a global military power and force for stability, Americans now are somewhat shaken and insecure given how much they owe.

Americans are deeply despondent, many on the verge of economic surrender, having given up looking for full time employment. Those Americans who remain working are increasing furious at being forced to generously support the untaxed masses yearning to collect unending unemployment checks and food stamps. The most successful Americans, defined by Obama as earning $200,000 per year are subjected to special scorn. They must have come into that money dishonestly, through theft or unearned inheritance, because Obama is insisting that they pay back their fair share of it. As it is virtually impossible to recall a memorable phrase uttered by our ever blabbering president it is equally difficult to attach a favorable economic statistic or policy to his time in office. His Keynesian experiment in stimulus cost us roughly $1 trillion and left us with even higher unemployment after its implementation. The rogue gallery of economic incompetents that crafted and defended Obama’s current economic disaster-Christine Romer, Jared Bernstein, Larry Summers and Austin Goolsbee-have skulked away from Obama’s orbit to the previous safety of their sinecures as tenured university professors and think tanks grandees. Only Timothy Geithner remains whose most recent laughable economic pronouncement was his guarantee that America’s credit rating would never suffer a downgrade. Like their reality-challenged boss most of these left-wing true-believers are convinced that their economic plan actually worked and would have been even more effective if only the politicians had the courage to allow the original 2009 stimulus to be even bigger. The Obama crew resembles the plague of unapologetic socialists who claimed that socialism was never a failure. It was rather its specific, imperfect versions concretized as Russian Leninism, Chinese Maoism and Eastern Bloc communism that were at fault. Obama and his cadre of committed collectivists apparently dare not look at economic policies that demonstrably and effectively worked to increase economic growth and lower unemployment, year after year with low inflation. Such policies last belonged to Ronald Reagan. It was common in the 1980’s to savage Reagan’s budget deficits of 4-5% of GDP as immorally excessive spending that would bankrupt our children. Those children are now grown up and they voted for Obama in large numbers only to see him double those deficits, not only for today but as far into the future as the Office of Management and Budget can see. The difference is that Reagan’s manageable deficits led to GDP growth as high as 8% while economic growth accompanying Obama’s crippling deficits was only 0.7% for the first six months of 2011. Thus while Obama’s mythmakers create economic statistics out of thin air (“jobs created or saved”) in hopes of salvaging a flailing administration, objective reality paints a very clear picture. Under Reagan’s policies promoting low tax rates, reduced regulation and a strong dollar the American economy grew ten times faster than it does now under Obama. Can Obama fathom that indebting us three times faster than Bush and lauding policies leading to ten times slower economic growth than under Reagan should hint at some kind of a policy change? Even Ben Bernanke, in his recent speech in Jackson Hole, has at least temporarily given up on his policy of endless stimulus, offering the markets no new promise of an extra round of quantitative easing. Bernanke did nothing and the market was relieved and rallied. Obama, on the other hand, brimming with inexperience and arrogance, and completely divorced from reality simply cannot grasp how valuable his doing nothing would be for all of us.