Obama's miserable economy

By Jack Hellner

In the Democratic debate all the candidates said the economy wasn't doing well but gave Obama and Democratic policies a pass. Instead they blamed Bush's policy of letting people keep more of their own money. Hillary absurdly said that the economy always does better under Democratic Administrations.

Both Presidents inherited a recession and collapsing stock prices. The recession Obama inherited ended in June 2009, five months after he took office and the recession of 2001 ended in November 2001, 10 months after Bush took office.

Here are several economic statistics showing the results of vastly different economic policies:

	9/30/07	9/30/15
Population of the U.S	301 million	322 million
Car sales	16.5 million	17.4 million
Housing starts	1.398 million	1.046 million
Existing Home Sales	5.662 million	5.3 million

Car Sales and Existing home Sales are annualized estimates for 2015 based on 9/30/15 results. Housing starts for 9/30/15 are actually 2014 numbers.

Home ownership

89%

64%

The Home ownership rate in 2015 is the lowest in almost 50 years despite extremely low interest rates

2 Yr Treasury bond rate	4.02%	0.57%
10 Yr Treasury bond rate	4.53%	2.00%
Highest Individual Income tax rate	35%	43.4%
Highest capital gains tax rate	15%	23.8%
Budget deficit	$161 billion	$400 billion-plus
Total US debt	$9 trillion	$18 trillion

It should be noted that the annual deficit and total debt would be much higher if interest rates weren’t artificially being held to around zero percent.

Unemployment rate	4.7%	5.1%
Age 16 to 19 unemployment rate	4.7%	5.1%
Black unemployment rate	8.0%	9.2%
Labor force participation	66.0%	62.4%

The labor force participation rate is at a 37 year low, which means that the actual unemployment rate in all categories would be much higher if so many hadn’t dropped out of the work force.

GDP growth

4.9%

1.5% (est.)

Median family income has decreased 8% from 2007 to 2014.

Any normal reading of these economic statistics would show that lower tax rates yielded better results than more government spending. Economists believe the artificially low interest rates during the last seven years have contributed greatly to the economic results, which means more government spending actually contributed little.

The Democrats were very dismissive of Capitalism even though Capitalism allowed the United States to become the greatest economy in the World in a very short time. Capitalism lifts people out of poverty and allows people to move up or down the economic ladder. Socialism holds people in classes and makes more people dependent on government.

I truly hope for future generations that the American people do not allow the United States to devolve further into socialism by electing the wrong people.