Accomplishment; who did what, is always an important part of any political discussion. Bill Clinton is always thought of as a guy who got stuff done, but it was only because he held office between the two Bushes. What made him stand out was his job growth numbers, which topped both his predecessor and his follower by huge amounts. If you look at a jobs chart for all three of them you will see huge differences even if you don’t count the enormous plummet in Bush junior’s last year. Both the Bushes had years when they had job growth and years when they had job loss but every one of Clinton’s eight years in office showed job growth and nothing is as important to the American people, the American economy, as job growth, except possibly wage growth.
Now add in Barak Obama and we find that in the first year of his presidency the charts show a huge job loss due entirely to the legacy he was left by the bumbling incompetent who preceded him. Then, however, Obama turned it around and every year he has been in office we have had significant job growth and this year promises to be the best job growth since 1999. That’s the last 15 years, or since Clinton was in office.
More jobs have been created this year than in any year of either Bush administration. Even the most slow-witted among us must realize what those figures mean to trickle down economics or to the Republican lies about how they are good for job growth.
Let’s look at a small illustration of how the GOP misfires in the American economy. They have been fighting desperately for the Keystone Pipeline. That environmental abortion would bring the most poisonous substance yet taken from the earth and pump it across our most important plains aquifer where the pipe, as do all pipes, would leak this crap into a water system that feeds a good portion of the mid-west. For that we would get 35 permanent jobs. That’s right, count ‘em-35. That’s the Keystone estimate, not mine. All the oil would go from Canada to China so we wouldn’t make any money as a nation and we would create profits only for a few American refineries that already are overflowing with American oil, That’s how the Republicans who are fighting for that pipeline figure out what’s good for the American economy. That’s why both Bushes lost jobs for America. That’s why all future Republican Presidents will lose jobs for working Americans. That’s why all future Republican Presidents will be bad for the American economy. They’re not bad guys, they just have a bad philosophy. It says, taking money from the oil barons and doing their will is good for America. It is totally bullshit.
In November we added 321,000 jobs and that is job growth of over 200,00 jobs per month for the last ten months. That hasn’t happened since 1995, almost a generation ago. This is a growth spurt that is identified by AP as the US outperforming all other economies throughout the world. In the last four years we have put more people back to work than Europe, Japan and all other industrialized countries on the planet. This has all happened on Barak Obama’s watch. This all happened on the watch of the guy Republicans would have you think has done nothing for the country.
This unprecedented job growth is currently accompanied by a drop in gas prices; in some areas down to under two dollars a gallon. This means that the average auto owning family can add almost $600 per year to their pockets, if it stays where it is now. This is not great news if you have stock in environmental destroyers, but it is really great news if you have a family to raise.
And now, finally, wages, the only indicator of a growing economy that has not been moving in the right direction, has finally begun to break out. More and more states are pushing for higher minimum wages and generally, across the country job growth, as it always does is beginning to drive up the cost of labor.
Then too, there is the stock market. When Obama took office, it was hovering at 7,949. A while back it reached 17,959, the highest it has ever been. That should please the 1%, so it looks like things are looking up for everybody right now. So why was there all that negative Obama noise at the election last month? Why did even Democrats abandon him and speak against him? It’s really kind of hard to figure out because it isn’t just on the economic front that this country is better off than it has been in many years. It’s all over the board.
So let’s take a look at what Obama has actually done or not done in his six years in office.
He started out by bailing out a ruptured auto industry. For that he was virulently attacked by the Right; but because of that, he saved millions of jobs and saved the nation from a worse depression than 1929.
Healthcare costs rose last year at a lower rate than any time in the last 50 years. That’s because of Obamacare, and so is the fact that the number of uninsured adults dropped by about 10.6 million between 9/13 and 9/14, a drop of 30.1%. Where do you get better numbers than these?
Just since the election Obama negotiated a deal with China to start the push to limit the carbon in the atmosphere, something that no one had even come close to doing before. Then he sent his man to North Korea to successfully negotiate the release of the last American prisoner in that, heretofore intransient, nation.
Not impressed with that? Okay, let’s take a look at the mess in the Middle East where the right led by John (Let’s go to war) McCain had been screaming about Obama’s failure to arm the Syrian rebels to fight Assad. Of course those same Syrian rebels that McCain wanted to arm, turned out to be ISIS and the result of that failure is that we have fewer weapons in enemy hands. Bad Move? I think not.
Then there’s the Benghazi scandal, which fell apart when a Republican committee verified what everyone else who had investigated it had already said. Nothing happened there that had anything to do with Obama, Rice, Clinton or the White House, thereby exposing for the lie that it is, the attacks by Daryl Issa and Ted Cruz and the rest of their degenerate sycophants.
Now, finally Obama has stepped up and moved to implement his goals on the immigration issue. The warnings about the catastrophe that would be caused by his instituting changes in the law, was shown to be just more phony bullshit by a party that doesn’t have a plan or a clue and doesn’t seem to want one. After threatening impeachment, legal action and the closing down of the government, the Right has backed off all threats and hollow promises but is now faced by inter party chaos that might end up shutting down the government anyway, simply because they can’t get their act together to fund it.
In ten years when we look back on all this strun unt drang we will realize that Barak Obama, despite all the treacherous opposition against him, has been one of the three most functional presidents in the last hundred years. He has accomplished more, despite overwhelming Republican opposition, than Eisenhower, Truman, Clinton, Reagan, you name it; all except Roosevelt and Johnson and all with stronger opposition than anyone except possibly FDR.
And we have already taken that to the bank.