A Good Short Analysis of Why Obama's Policies are Such a FAILURE!

Editorial: Now Can We Say Obama Economic Plan Fails?

Posted 07/08/2011 07:02 PM ET

Economy: With unemployment now at 9.2% and job growth at a standstill, is there anyone not blinded by ideology or rank partisanship who can't see that Obama's spend-and-regulate economic plan has been an utter failure?

When Obama was running for office, he likened himself to Ronald Reagan. Not because he liked Reagan's policies — he despised them — but because he saw Reagan as a transformative figure worthy of emulation.

"I think Ronald Reagan changed the trajectory of America in a way that Richard Nixon did not and in a way that Bill Clinton did not," he said during the campaign. He's since talked endlessly about the need to "remake" the economy, and "do big things."

Well, Obama's been transformative all right. While Reagan rescued a country mired in hopelessness, stagflation and fear, Obama has managed, by reversing Rea-ganomics, to bring it all back again. Consider:

• The unemployment rate has never been under 8% since Obama took office, and it has dipped below 9% in only five of Obama's 29 months in the White House. No president since the Great Depression can match that record of failure.

• At 40 weeks, the average length of unemployment is almost twice the previous post-World War II peak.

• Inflation is once again on the rise — climbing in each of the past six months.

• And by almost every measure available, including GDP growth, the Obama recovery is the worst since the Great Depression.

Subscribe to the IBD Editorials Podcast Now, thanks to Obama's grand economic failures, hopelessness is again sweeping the land. An astounding four in 10 say the economy is in a "permanent decline," according to a New York Times/CBS poll, and an equally eye-opening 48% told CNN that another Great Depression is likely to occur in the next year, the highest level ever in the CNN survey.

More than half — 54% — say their personal finances are getting worse, according to a Rasmussen survey.

Yet, rather than admit failure, Obama's only response is to try to shift blame and convince us to lower our expectations. "The economic challenges that we face weren't created overnight," he said on Friday, "and they're not going to be solved overnight."

Translation: How can you expect anything more, when everything was so messed up when I got into town? Poppycock.

After the long, painful and equally deep recession in the early 1980s, the economy roared back to life, powered by Reagan's mix of tax cuts and deregulation. By this point in the Reagan recovery, growth was so fast and furious it slashed unemployment by a third.

Obama also expects us to believe that "head winds" are to blame for the economy's lousy performance. But the only head winds holding the economy back are his own "transformative" policies — massive new government spending and debt, ObamaCare and Dodd-Frank, endless talk of tax hikes on the "rich" and corporations, and a job-killing regulatory beast unleashed against every productive corner of the economy.

Obamanomics has been weighed, measured and found wanting. Time now to get back on course.