Wednesday, March 4, 2009
Hundreds of billions in spending in less than a month in office, rivaling the total spending of the entire run of the Iraq War and reconstruction, tax increases, billions in new entitlements that never go away, more anti-business taxes and regulations based on climate hysteria (not pollution...climate), continuation of the same (Democrat protected) bad lending policies that started this thing in the first place, a President every bit as left-wing as his critics during the campaign said he was, a complete naif on international issues, an administration preoccupied with going to war with radio talk show hosts and dissenting press, showing their main concern is maintaining power, including instigating a looming Constitutional crisis over their seizing control of the census...
Is it any wonder the market continues to tank? What businesses would you invest in in this economy? Bankruptcy attorneys? WSJ: The Obama Economy - As the Dow keeps dropping, the President is running out of people to blame
As 2009 opened, three weeks before Barack Obama took office, the Dow Jones Industrial Average closed at 9034 on January 2, its highest level since the autumn panic. Yesterday the Dow fell another 4.24% to 6763, for an overall decline of 25% in two months and to its lowest level since 1997. The dismaying message here is that President Obama's policies have become part of the economy's problem.
Americans have welcomed the Obama era in the same spirit of hope the President campaigned on. But after five weeks in office, it's become clear that Mr. Obama's policies are slowing, if not stopping, what would otherwise be the normal process of economic recovery. From punishing business to squandering scarce national public resources, Team Obama is creating more uncertainty and less confidence -- and thus a longer period of recession or subpar growth.
The Democrats who now run Washington don't want to hear this, because they benefit from blaming all bad economic news on President Bush. And Mr. Obama has inherited an unusual recession deepened by credit problems, both of which will take time to climb out of. But it's also true that the economy has fallen far enough, and long enough, that much of the excess that led to recession is being worked off. Already 15 months old, the current recession will soon match the average length -- and average job loss -- of the last three postwar downturns. What goes down will come up -- unless destructive policies interfere with the sources of potential recovery...
...What is new is the unveiling of Mr. Obama's agenda and his approach to governance. Every new President has a finite stock of capital -- financial and political -- to deploy, and amid recession Mr. Obama has more than most. But one negative revelation has been the way he has chosen to spend his scarce resources on income transfers rather than growth promotion. Most of his "stimulus" spending was devoted to social programs, rather than public works, and nearly all of the tax cuts were devoted to income maintenance rather than to improving incentives to work or invest...
...The market has notably plunged since Mr. Obama introduced his budget last week, and that should be no surprise. The document was a declaration of hostility toward capitalists across the economy. Health-care stocks have dived on fears of new government mandates and price controls. Private lenders to students have been told they're no longer wanted. Anyone who uses carbon energy has been warned to expect a huge tax increase from cap and trade. And every risk-taker and investor now knows that another tax increase will slam the economy in 2011, unless Mr. Obama lets Speaker Nancy Pelosi impose one even earlier...
Update: He doesn't pay attention to the day-to-day gyrations of the stock market? We heard a lot of inarticulate stuff from George Bush over the years, but this just takes the cake for dumb. This is NOT like a day to day opinion poll. Under ordinary circumstances, Obama might have a point, but that's not the case right now. John McCain got hammered during the campaign for not seeming to get it on the economy, but if people had heard this sort of cavalier write-off during the campaign (in other words, if Obama had been honest), we'd have a President McCain right now.
