Erick Erickson
RedState
8/8/2011
You know, Barack Obama not only inherited a receding economy from George W. Bush, but he inherited a triple A credit rating too. Maybe we should call him Lemony Snicket, given the series of unfortunate events that have taken place on his watch.
There was the BP Oil spill and a terribly bungled Presidential response complete with a disastrous White House address. The Gulf Coast is still reeling from the loss of jobs the President’s policies then caused.
There was and is the botched debacle in Libya where we may or may not be involved while we ignore the same thing happening in Syria. We are, after all, “leading from behind.”
Then there was, going all the way back to the beginning, his bungled diplomatic support for the communist sympathizers in Honduras against that nation’s own constitutional, democratic processes.Along the way, federal spending has gone up 76% from the time we got our last tax cuts, tax revenue has gone down due to economic conditions (not the Bush tax cuts), the number of people who have given up on searching for unemployment is the most it has been since 1983 and the number of people on food stamps is more than ever.
In fact, during this President’s tenure, we’ve reached benchmarks not seen since the Great Depression in terms of negative economic news. His is a food stamp Presidency.
Now the stock market has gone down due a series of unfortunate events in a daily succession not seen since Jimmy Carter. But that’s all because of the Arab Spring, mother nature, George W. Bush, and those damned Europeans. Please ignore all this about it being his economy.
“Give it to me,” he said of the economy. We did and on Friday we lost our credit rating…
Read the rest at RedState.com
Also at RedState, Leaders Solve Problems. Cowards Affix Blame :
…At no time did President Obama’s OMB ever present a coherently scoreable plan to the CBO that did anything other than hike the National Debt up to $25Tr after ten years. The US Senate rejected his proposal 97-0. Without a CBO score and coherent network of revenues and expenditures, the $4.7Tr Obama Plan was vaporware…
…Senator McCain then explained these things to Senator Kerry. He did so in the manner of a man who had made decisions regarding these issues and understood a thing or two more than what his handlers put on notecards for him to recite. McCain expounds upon John F. Kerry’s vastly ineluctable stupidity below.
Well, I agree that there is dysfunction in our system and a lot of it has to do with the failure of the president of the United States to lead. I would remind you that Republicans control one-third of the government. The Senate and the presidency are controlled by the Democrats. And the fact is that the president never came forward with a plan. Now, I was gratified to hear that he had plans, but there was never a specific plan. (My bolding) There was always the so-called “leading from behind.”…
…”Now, look, we could have reached an agreement a lot earlier, but the members of the House of Representatives had a mandate, had a mandate last November, and it was jobs and the economy and spending. And for them to then agree to tax increases and spending increases, which was obviously a repudiation of the mandate that they felt they had from last November”…
Where was this John McCain in 2008?…
Related: After Grueling Weekend Doing Nothing, President Downgrade to Hold Fundraisers Tonight at JammieWearingFool who writes:
…I recall August 8 was the date Nixon announced he would resign (he left office August 9, 1974). Would be nice to see history repeat itself…
Update: S&P: Unimaginable for US to be 10 hours away from major cash flow problem
John Chambers, Managing Director of S&P, said this morning that all the countries that regained their AAA credit rating after being downgraded took on fiscal reforms to reduce their debt to GDP. It certainly took time but that’s the bottom line on what we need to do as well, which is exactly the mandate that brought the Tea Party to Washington…
CAJ note: The Democrats have controlled the government since 2006, when Republicans were spending too much and were voted out of office. For more than 820 days, the Dems offered no budget at all and spent at will. For anyone to believe the Tea Party was the cause of this downgrade would require a complete breakdown of all reasoning ability, or the willingness to lie, whatever the cost. This morning’s newsletter from The Heritage Foundation is titled, “It’s the Spending.”:
On Friday evening, Standard & Poor’s (S&P) downgraded the U.S. credit rating from AAA to AA+. As we and other conservatives warned, the spending reductions in the deal negotiated by President Obama to raise the debt ceiling were inadequate, and S&P reacted as we predicted but sooner. Neither Moody’s nor Fitch, two other rating agencies, have downgraded federal debt yet, but they are not providing much rosier outlooks.
Decades of over-spending and over-borrowing by the federal government have damaged America’s creditworthiness. Congress after Congress, President after President, the federal government spent every penny it took in—and borrowed over $14 trillion on top of that—to try to keep happy the voters to whom the government made promises it could not afford. The government kept shifting the burden of paying the bills forward onto future generations.
Well, the future has arrived, and it is bleak…
