On Monday (10/1/12) Special Report, Brit Hume delivered a commentary called Fact and Fiction of Obama Presidency. In it, he discounted the role of President Obama’s stimulus package in reversing the economic decline and suggested that George W. Bush deserved the credit instead.
Hume said:
A central premise of the Obama campaign is that he inherited an economy in freefall, pulled it back from the brink and set it on the right path. But consider this: the economy fell into recession more than a year before Mr. Obama took office. By the time he was inaugurated, the worst of it was over. The economy was still shrinking but the steepest decline had occurred in the final quarter of 2008. It shrank less in the first quarter of 09, and by June of 09, it began to grow again, marking the official end of the recession. Mind you, this occurred before almost any of the massive stimulus spending Mr. Obama signed into law had taken effect.
Yes, you might say, that in terms of job losses, the worst was still to come when Mr. Obama came in. But that’s not so either. More than half the 8.7 million jobs lost as a result of the recession had been lost by inauguration day. The President inherited an economy still in recession all right, but its recovery came before his policies took effect. And remember this: deep recessions, including those involving a financial crisis, normally lead to strong, sharp recoveries. But this has been the weakest recovery since World War II.
Hume should have pointed out that more people would be unemployed if not for the stimulus. It created or saved somewhere between 1.4 and 3.3 million jobs.
The right wing seems to need to wear larger and larger blinders to block out the ugly truths that their policies and their political champions have done serious harm to the USA. This must be why a ‘journalist’ such as Hume can give credit to Bush for economic recovery, but no blame for causing the economic disaster in the first place. Those blinders are getting tight. Soon he’ll need a seeing-eye dog.
Off-topic, but it’s been bugging me and Brian may be able to provide the answer. When the foxies put up the numbers on the evolution of the national debt under Obama and GWB, do those numbers take account of the fact that Clinton had left a sizeable surplus? If not, GWB had to drawdown that surplus before starting to borrow, and might not part of the remaining difference be attributable to inflation?
Big difference between the two presidencies is, however, that rises in spending under GWB were for a war decided and waged entirely on HIS watch while Obama was trying to deal with a financial meltdown that had started before he even took office and that essentially provoked a world-wide crisis.
Oh, brother — next thing, Hummus will suggest that George Dumbya Bush deserves credit for the killing of Osama bin Laden . . .
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