Obama Explains Bad Economy, Vice President's "Terrorist" Slur

The economy? "Bad luck."

"We had reversed the recession, avoided a depression, gotten the economy moving again," Obama told a crowd in Decorah, Iowa. "But over the last six months we've had a run of bad luck." Obama listed three events overseas -- the Arab Spring uprisings, the tsunami in Japan, and the European debt crises -- which set the economy back.

"All those things have been headwinds for our economy," Obama said. "Now, those are things that we can't completely control. The question is, how do we manage these challenging times and do the right things when it comes to those things that we can control?"

"The problem," Obama continued, "is that we've got the kind of partisan brinksmanship that is willing to put party ahead of country, that is more interested in seeing their political opponents lose than seeing the country win. Nowhere was that more evident than in this recent debt ceiling debacle."

Several things. Obama spent like a drunken sailor and got a very weak "recovery" for it. Typical recoveries feature early growth rates of 5%, 6%, even 10% sometimes. The best he got I think was 4.5%, which was immediately followed by lame rates of 3.5% and 3.2%. (Lame for a recovery, I mean, when you're growing from a diminished base, and so you generally expect bigger growth rates when you pull out from them, as you recover what was just recently lost. Those 3.5% type rates are okay for an economy it its normal expansion/decent economy phase -- but not for the actual recovery part of it.)

Why was his "recovery" so stunted and weak? Partly maybe because "this time it's different," as many people seem to think, but largely because he spent his trillion dollars on the wrong things, stuff that offered a very feeble short-term boost but did not actually spur an economy capable of growing on its own without that boost.

Part of it is ObamaCare and the EPA and all the rest of the regulatory regime he's established -- even when he's not imposing higher taxes on business, he's imposing stealth taxes (which the government doesn't even get the benefit of) in the form of simply making business less profitable. He seems to almost take a perverse pride in the fact that he's made it difficult for businessmen to make any money (social justice!), without realizing that it's these same businessmen he currently needs to hire more people.

How do you hire more people when you're actually losing money?

In addition to the jackass regulations and mandates he's already imposed, everyone knows his next move is more of that, so investors look out and see a very unpredictable business environment. (Well, it can be predicted the environment will be bad, but they can't figure out in what concrete way it will be bad.)

They can't define the risk, so they avoid it.

This is what the smartest man in the world calls "bad luck" -- the natural consequences of his own Leftwing Social Justice Avenger punitive economic policies.

Good luck is the product of good design. Bad luck is the product of bad design.

Another point here is that Obama again blames the Republicans' "brinksmanship" for the slowdown and downgrade. Despite the fact that slowdown started months before the debt ceiling debate, and despite the fact that the debt ceiling debate was already over, and had been for almost a week, when S&P dropped us to AA+.

Obama threatened to veto perfectly sound policies like Cut Cap and Trade, and the Majority Leader of the Senate was fond of labeling such workable initiatives "dead on arrival."

And yet only one party dabbled in "brinksmanship"?

Obama was also confronted by a Tea Partier who wanted to know why his Vice President had branded Tea Partiers "terrorists." Obama's defense? You did it first.

After calling another person, Obama circled back to address Rhodes' question: "First of all, in fairness to this gentleman who raised a question, I absolutely agree that everybody needs to try to tone down the rhetoric."

Obama added: "Now, in fairness, since I've been called a socialist who wasn't born in this country, who is destroying America and taking away its freedoms because I passed a health care bill, I'm all for lowering the rhetoric."

After the event, Obama came up to speak with Rhodes and another Tea Party.

It's hard to quote their conversation exactly, because of the music, but Rhodes again raised "the terrorist" comment and Obama defended his vice president, Joe Biden.

It's all about him.

posted by Ace at 11:22 AM

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