Stop Golfing Already: America Losing Patience with President, Even Obama’s Supporters, About the Economy — Prez Approval Index at Minus 16
Posted By Vicki McClure Davidson on June 12, 2011
America is losing patience, Mr. President. Get off the golf course.
Country Club President: In just 2 years, Barack Obama has beaten all records for presidents golfing
From Yahoo News, With Obama doing little on jobs, allies grow frustrated:
In the wake of last week’s disastrous jobs report, allies of the Obama administration are expressing extreme frustration at what they see as the White House’s inaction on the issue. But there’s little evidence that Team Obama is listening.
The economy added just 54,000 jobs in May, and long-term joblessness is at a record high. Federal Reserve chair Ben Bernanke admitted this week that the recovery has been “frustratingly slow.”
That bleak news has prompted harsh criticism of the White House from many of the administration’s friends, who view the focus on deficit reduction rather than job creation as badly misplaced, and who want more government stimulus to jolt the economy.
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A Washington Post profile of Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner from earlier this week reported that he has used his growing influence in the administration to “to press President Obama to curb the nation’s soaring debt even at the expense of spending that might more directly spur employment.”
On Sunday, Austan Goolsbee, the chair of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, downplayed the importance of the May jobs report, and added: “Government is not the central driver of recovery.”
The president’s approval index has dropped substantially since the Navy SEALs brought down al Qaeda terrorist Osama bin Laden last month — the index is at negative 16, as of today:
Rasmussen Reports, June 12, 2011: Obama's presidential approval index is at minus 16
Economic optimism is the lowest it has been in two years. From Rasmussen Reports:
When President Obama first took office, 39% of voters nationwide expected the economy to be stronger in a year. By July 2009, confidence that the economy would be stronger peaked at 45%. By the middle of 2010, just 37% expected the economy to be stronger in a year. Now, just 31% hold such optimism.
From Fox News, Obama Pleads for Patience on Economic Recovery:
President Obama on Saturday continued to make his case for patience about the economic recovery following a spate of disappointing news last week that suggested a turnaround wasn’t as close as expected.
Job growth slowed sharply in May, unemployment inched up to 9.1 percent and housing prices dropped to a new low. Economic indicators also showed that manufacturers cut 5,000 jobs last month. Those were the first job losses in that sector in seven months.
In his weekly radio and online address, Obama said people need to be patient about the economic recovery and that training workers for manufacturing jobs will help with the turnaround.
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No president since World War II has won a second term with a jobless rate above 7.2 percent, and Obama’s options for achieving faster economic growth before the November 2012 election appear limited.
From Gateway Pundit, Fail Alert: With Unemployment at 9.1% Obama Promises to Stimulate Economy With Job-Killing Green Projects:
Once a die-hard socialist… Always a die-hard socialist.
In his Weekly Address this week Barack Obama continued to push his job-killing green energy agenda.
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Let’s face it, Obama is a committed radical who puts leftist doctrine before reality.
His plan will kill even more jobs.
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…for every green job created by the Obama EPA, four jobs are lost in the economy. But Obama doesn’t care. He promised that his plan would cause electricity rates to skyrocket before he moved into office and he meant it… The economy be damned.
But what about those auto industry bailout claims the president recently made? When Obama said on June 4, and I quote, “Chrysler has repaid every dime and more of what it owes American taxpayers for their support during my presidency.”
Not wholly true. There was a significant amount of devious wordsmithing and chicanery involved in making that claim — reported by Washington Post, President Obama’s phony accounting on the auto industry bailout:
We take no view on whether the administration’s efforts on behalf of the automobile industry were a good or bad thing; that’s a matter for the editorial pages and eventually the historians. But we are interested in the facts the president cited to make his case.
What we found is one of the most misleading collections of assertions we have seen in a short presidential speech. Virtually every claim by the president regarding the auto industry needs an asterisk, just like the fine print in that too-good-to-be-true car loan.
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Wow, “every dime and more” sounds like such a bargain. Not only did Chrysler pay back the loan, with interest — but the company paid back even more than they owed. Isn’t America great or what?
Not so fast. The president snuck in the weasel words “during my presidency” in his statement. What does that mean?
According to the White House, Obama is counting only the $8.5 billion loan that he made to Chrysler, not the $4 billion that President George W. Bush extended in his last month in office. However, Obama was not a disinterested observer at the time. According to The Washington Post article on the Bush loan, the incoming president called Bush’s action a “necessary step . . . to help avoid a collapse of our auto industry that would have had devastating consequences for our economy and our workers.”
Under the administration’s math, the U.S. government will receive $11.2 billion back from Chrysler, far more than the $8.5 billion Obama extended.
Through this sleight-of-hand accounting, the White House can conveniently ignore Bush’s loan, but even the Treasury Department admits that U.S. taxpayers will not recoup about $1.3 billion of the entire $12.5 billion investment when all is said and done.
The White House justifies not counting the Bush money because, it says, that money was completely spent when Obama was making a tough political decision on whether to extend another loan. In other words, a decision to do nothing at the time would have resulted in the immediate loss of the $4 billion that Bush had extended.
This is chicanery. Under the president’s math, Chrysler paid back 100 percent of Obama’s loan and less than 70 percent of Bush’s loan. A more honest presentation would combine the two figures to say U.S. taxpayers got back 90 percent of what they invested. In fact, that is how the Treasury and other administration officials frequently portray it; it is just when Obama speaks that the numbers get so squishy.
There’s more… click here for the rest.
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