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Saturday, October 6, 2018

Moving On From Kavanaugh

Now that they lost the battle over the Kavanaugh nomination, the Democrats and the media are moving on to other topics.  This afternoon, when I looked at my screen, I was facing an article that asked whether Obama or Trump should get credit for the strong economy.  Seriously, the article actually thought there was a question there to discuss.  Consider this:

1.  For eight years, Obama presided over a stagnant economy.  During the Obama years, the economy never once had a year in which it grew at even the average rate of the last 80 years which is 3.5%.  In fact, Obama and his people told us that 2% growth was all we could ever expect.  It was the new normal; 3.5% would never be back.

2.  From the day Trump took office, the economy started growing more quickly.  Trump has never presided over a quarter in which growth was at or below Obama "new normal" of 2%.  Since the tax cuts went through (which the Dems told us would destroy the economy) growth has zoomed past 4%.  The combination of tax cuts and reduction in needless regulations has unleashed the economy to grow in ways not seen under Obama.

So why would anyone credit Obama with the current economic good times?  Even the response to the crash in 2008 is not something that Obama gets to claim.  The major moves in response to the financial crisis happened under George W Bush.  TARP and the bailouts of the car companies were done by Bush; Obama just came into office a few months later.  All that Obama did was to put forward his stimulus bill and that turned out to be a huge failure.  All those shovel ready jobs that were going to rush ahead turned out not to be there.  The bulk of the money went to state and local governments who just delayed cutting spending for a year.  OH, and America got an additional trillion dollars of debt.

 

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