Do you think Osama bin Laden’s death should be raised now as a campaign issue?

GOP running things with a democratic congress 2006-2007, it isnt about hat they report its hat they use the real unemployment numbers under bush wee stilll less than under Obama and you can quit with "what Obama inherited'' it doesn't wash with the realities of the last three years

January 3, 2007 was the day that Democrats took control of both houses of Congress. Let's take a factual look at what they inherited.

The DOW Jones closed at 12,621.77

The unemployment rate was 4.6%

The GDP for the previous quarter was 3.5%

The economy had just set a record of 52 straight months of job creation

26 million Americans were on food stamps

47 banks were on the FDIC problem list

The Social Security program took in the neighborhood of 100 billion more than it paid out

The national debt was approaching 9 trillion dollars

Barney Frank took over the House Financial Services Committee and Chris Dodd took over the Senate Banking Committee

Obama became a Senator from Illinois

Bush was on record requesting restraint on Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae 17 times

Since then, it was Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae that dumped trillions of dollars of toxic assets on taxpayers. It was Obama who got the third highest pay-out from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. It was the Democratic Congress that defended them along the way.

So since it was the Democrats that were really driving the car, I think they get the DUI even though they insisted Bush was driving. I think the evidence speaks for itself.

WE ALL KNOW THE REST OF THE STORY!

“Clinton Surplus” were projections and did not at all reflect the bursting dot com bubble which peaked in April 2000 and burst a month before Bush took office. The “bursting bubble” was from 2000 – 2001, the midpoint of which was AOL/Time-Warner deal happening one week before Bush was inaugurated. The “bursting bubble” cost our economy $5 trillion in value a deep recession had already begun. In the years before Bush took office, Clinton had drastically reduced defense spending because after all, the cold-war was over. I will not say there was a cause/effect, but in 2001 Bush was challenged with 9/11, a deep recession and a $5.1 Trillion hole in the economy. And sure, he initiated 2 wars but, did anyone disagree with war on the Taliban & AQ? Iraq didn’t have the same support of the public but, both Afghanistan and Iraq had the support of bi-partisan majorities in the House and Senate as well as dozens of allies.

Bush tax cuts:
Tax rates were lowered across-the-board in mid-2003 within 3 months the effect kicked in to jump-start the economy
• Over the next four and a half years, 8.2 million jobs were created
• Jobs rose for fifty-four consecutive months – that’s 4-1/2 years of job growth.
• Non-farm payrolls rose from 130 million to 138.2 million – yep, 8.2 million new jobs.
• Government took in more revenue. As a share of GDP, revenues rose from 16.2 % to 18.5 %. In 2003 receipts were $1.78 trillion, and in 2009 they had grown to $2.7 trillion. The tax cuts raised annual revenue to the treasury drastically. The tax cuts worked after “inheriting” a bubble, a loss of $5 trillion in the economy, a recession and 9/11, the tax cuts facilitated job growth for 4-1/2 years straight and huge increases in government revenue. The highest budget deficit in Bush’s 8 years was about 25% of revenue . . . Obama’s lowest is about 50%.

Conjecture; hardly

In a typical month, millions of Americans switch jobs or find work, and millions quit their jobs or are let go. The net of these millions is the change in total employment, usually a few hundred thousand jobs, while the ratio of those who are involuntarily unemployed to the total workforce provides the unemployment rate, typically around 5 percent at full employment. This remarkably dynamic process of job creation and destruction, hiring and layoffs, reflects the great labor mobility that is one of the abiding strengths of the American economy and allows the unemployment rate to dip so low.

During the 2008–2009 recession, the unemployment rate nearly doubled from its norm of about 5 percent to 9.8 percent, and it remains around 9 percent heading into 2012. Layoffs increased during this recession as one would expect, but they were not the primary cause of the nearly 10 percent unemployment rate. In fact, layoffs have been surprisingly mild, especially given the depth of the recession. In the 2000–2001 recession, for example, employers shed 2.6 million more jobs six quarters after the recession began.

The main factor driving the unem­ployment rate so high during the past recession and slow recovery was and con­tinues to be the sharp drop in hiring. First the credit crunch and the collapse of the housing bubble dampened job creation, and then a procession of harmful economic policies so dampened business confidence and elevated uncertainty that the economy became and remains far less hospitable to growth-inducing, job-creating entrepreneurial activity.

The basic strengths of the American economy remain undiminished and undamaged by recent events. What is lacking is not smarter nostrums from Washington, but a chance to breathe, a little clarity, a respite from the flurry of petty policies targeting the latest politicized shortcoming. The vital missing ingredient in our economy is confidence; the essential debilitation is an excess of uncertainty. Many of President Barack Obama’s policies sap confidence while heightening uncertainty.

The simplest examples of such misguided policies are President Obama’s failed fiscal stimulus and many other efforts to boost federal spending to “create demand” in the economy. More deficit spending cannot boost the economy or reduce unemployment, because deficit spending means more borrowing, which means less money in the private sector to spend. If that were all, at least fiscal stimulus would not weaken the economy, but as federal deficits have soared, uncertainty about the future of the economy has also grown.
This extra, government-spawned uncertainty discourages businesses from making the kinds of investments today that can produce a stronger economy tomorrow. The key to adopting true pro-growth federal policies that can lead to strong job growth is to reorient the government toward a policy of “do less harm.”