As an economist, I can honestly say I am not happy with much of what the Obama administration has done, although not for the same reasons Republicans do not like it.
More important, however, is the much publicized and much manipulated outrage of the American people over the state of the economy.
In the middle of that outrage is the daily Republican reminder that this is Obama’s economy; that the Democrats own it because Obama and the Democrats have been in charge for about eighteen months.
That seems fair. Of course, if that is true, then it is also true that Bush and the Republicans owned the economy before Obama and the Democrats.
As such, the question is: What is it exactly that the Democrats now own and what is it exactly that the Republicans owned?
That is an important question, because America’s voters are getting ready to choose who they want to “own” the future economy.
As they mull over their choices, it should not be forgotten that Republicans did whatever they could to block everything the Democrats wanted to do to help the economy. And as they did so, they kept telling voters that this is Obama’s economy.
But the Democrats kept pushing, and they saved the economy. They gave us an economic recovery.
Of course, Republicans want the voters to think there is no recovery. Republicans also want voters to forget that what we are trying to recover from is the mess they made. And that brings us to the economy the Bush administration and the Republicans owned.
Remember how every day the media was reporting on major bankruptcies, millions of jobs lost, and the potential demise of America? The auto industry was on its deathbed. Major chains were disappearing. And the stock market looked as though it was finished. You could have bought stock in Ford for $1.50 a share. AIG for $.35 a share. And you could follow GM’s bankruptcy proceedings. That is the economy that the Republicans owned.
What do we have today? What is it that the Democrats own? A whole new world.
General Motors is back in business. Ford stock is selling for around $12 a share. AIG is making money. Wall Street bonuses at companies taxpayers bailed out are in the hundreds of millions of dollars again.
And we are no longer losing millions of jobs each month.
By any real measure, the recovery is real. The only shortfall is jobs. And although everyone would like to see faster job creation, there is a huge difference between watching jobs being created at a slower than hoped for rate versus watching millions of jobs being lost.
There is also a big difference between reading about major bankruptcies and reading about American corporations earning profits of billions of dollars a year.
And now the guys that made the mess want voters to put them back in office.
What for? So they can come back and do it all over again?
The Republican Party is the Party of addiction and denial. They are addicted to policies that caused the recession—tax cuts for the rich and deregulation for business—and they are in denial when faced with the fact that those policies were failures.
The conclusion, based on facts, rather than political rhetoric, is that there is a real recovery under way. Which is why it makes no sense to turn the economy back over to the Republicans that first made the mess and then refused to help fix it.
What is the Republic argument to voters?
It is that even though they spent eight years destroying the American economy, voters should believe it is all Obama's fault, because, in less than two years, the Obama administration has been unable to bring the economy back to where it was when Bush and the Republicans took over.
As such, the ongoing, and escalating, Republican bashing of the economic recovery is a wonderful example of political rhetoric based on the long-standing maxim that you can fool some of the people all of the time. Of course, as the elections draw near, it is beginning to look as though this may be the year when Americans live up to the dictum that you can fool all the people some of the time.
The truth is that voters have to choose between those who know how to lose millions of jobs each month and force corporations into bankruptcy, and those who saved the American economy. Because that is what the Democrats did. They saved the American economy. And as the Republicans keep reminding us, this is Obama’s economy. Which is why Democrats should be standing up and taking all the credit for saving the economy and, possibly, America.
