June 14, 2014

5 Disastrous Obama Policy Decisions That Have Already Blown Up In His Face

John Hawkins

6/14/2014 12:01:00 AM - John Hawkins

The only reason liberalism survives is because there's usually a good bit of lag between when a policy is being implemented and the time when the American people get to see the results. If Americans could somehow magically see what would happen in a decade or two after a liberal policy has passed, there would be no liberals left. Instead, back in the real world, liberals create or exacerbate disasters with their policies, blame everyone other than themselves, and then demand more government action to fix the problem they screwed up in the first place.
Barack Obama is a perfect example of how this works. This is a man who basically had carte blanche to do anything he wanted for the first two years of his presidency since Democrats controlled Congress by a large margin. Since then, Obama has probably gotten his way more than any President in modern history, even though he had to break and ignore so many laws that he created a constitutional crisis in the process.
So, how has all that unbridled liberalism worked out? Is Barack Obama wildly popular or is his popularity plunging? Are Americans congratulating Obama for all of his policy successes or are they baffled by how anyone could screw things up so badly? Are Democrats taking credit for all of Obama's wonderful policies or are they still trying to pass the blame to George W. Bush who left office 5 1/2 years ago?
Barack Obama may be good at campaigning and great at shifting the blame, but when it comes to governing, he can't do anything right. If you want to see what happens when a politician ALWAYS, ALWAYS, ALWAYS puts raw politics and ideology above what's good for the country, take a look at just some of the disasters Barack Obama has created for America.
1) Setting a Timeline And Not Getting a Status of Forces Agreement in Iraq: George W. Bush may have had a tough time in Iraq overall, but his surge was wildly successful and the country had largely been pacified when he left office. In other words, Barack Obama didn't have to "win" the war in Iraq because it had already been won. All he had to do was not screw up the peace. Instead, for purely political reasons, he set a timeline for when we were going to pull out. Then he didn't even bother to get a status of forces agreement with Iraq, which would have helped to stabilize the country and improve its training with very minimal risk to American forces. Keep in mind that we STILL have soldiers in Germany, Japan, and South Korea, but none in Iraq, which desperately needed our help and advice to keep the country stable. Now, the entire nation is in danger of devolving into civil war and/or falling to Isis/Al-Qaeda outright because Barack Obama wanted to be able to tell his base that he got us "out" of Iraq. Well, we are "out" of Iraq, but now ISIS/Al-Qaeda is in because of Obama. Great job squandering all the sacrifices our soldiers made in that country, Obama!
2) Obamacare: Barack Obama genuinely deserves to be impeached not just once, but twice for Obamacare. From top to bottom, the entire program was sold on lies. Obama claimed that if people liked their plans they could keep their plans. He claimed that if they liked their doctors, they could keep their doctors. He claimed that Obamacare would cut costs for the average family by $2,500. Obamacare could have never passed if the American people had known those promises were baldfaced lies. Since the bill became law, Obama has illegally altered it more than 20 times to try to delay the damaging political impact to the Democrat Party. Meanwhile, the law has cost millions of Americans their insurance and has driven medical costs into the stratosphere. Seldom has so much been promised to so many who've been so bitterly disappointed with what they received.
3) Breaking The Law To Give Amnesty To Young Illegals: We've already had a "one time" amnesty for illegal aliens in this country, but Barack Obama is willing to flagrantly break the law in order to have another one. So essentially, he has ordered the border patrol to stop deporting ANYONE other than SOME of the worst criminals and gang members. Contrary to the law on the books, younger illegal aliens are being flat out told they won't be deported and are being given work permits. Unsurprisingly, as word of this got out, it created a flood of illegal aliens at the border. In past years, roughly 6,500 unaccompanied children have crossed the border. This year, the number is projected to be around 90,000 and the Obama Administration STILL isn't deporting them, which will make our illegal immigration problem worse, spur even more children to come here and will lead to countless kids being robbed, raped and murdered on their way to the United States. This has been called "Cloward-Piven at the border" and that's exactly what it is: a deliberate attempt to subvert the law and hurt the country.
4) The Failed Stimulus: Including interest, Obama spent more than a TRILLION dollars "stimulating" the economy. "Stimulating" is in quotes because there's very little real evidence that frittering away all that money we borrowed actually did anything to help the economy. That's actually an even bigger deal than people might think since the CBO estimated that over the long haul, the "stimulus" would actually create so much new debt that it would REDUCE OUR ECONOMIC GROWTH. In other words, we didn't grow in the short term, we're going to grow less in the long term, and we added a TRILLION DOLLARS worth of debt. Do you know what we could have bought with 1.2 trillion dollars in stimulus?

Think of it like this: in today’s dollars, the stimulus bill will cost more than the war in Korea and the war in Iraq — combined! It will cost about the same amount as FDR’s New Deal AND the war in Vietnam combined! It’ll cost far more than the Marshall Plan, the Louisiana Purchase, and putting a man on the moon — combined!

Instead, we might as well have taken a trillion dollars, weighted it down and dumped it into an active volcano for all the good it did.
5) "Jobs, Jobs, Jobs" or "Jobs, Jobs, Jobs" lost? Barack Obama has put a number of policies in place which were supposed to create jobs. Rather famously, his stimulus bill was supposed to drop unemployment to 5.6% or below by 2012. Nancy Pelosi said Obamacare would create 4 million jobs. Obama has loaned (and lost) countless billions of dollars to Chrysler, GM, and green energy companies like Solyndra to create jobs. Obama has publicly "pivoted to jobs" 19 times since he was first elected. Liberals, including the Obama Administration tell us that Barack Obama has been FANTASTIC at creating jobs.
Yet, there are a MILLION LESS AMERICANS WORKING TODAY than there were the day Obama took office. If you go back to 2007, before the economic crash there are "3.2 million fewer full-time employed persons" working. On top of that, median household income is down by close to $2300 per family since Obama took office. Put another way, there are less people working than when Obama took charge and the people who are working are making less money on average. It's all well and good for Obama to keep encouraging as many people as possible to get welfare and disability, but he seems to have forgotten that we need to have some people left working to pay for that along with the rest of the big government programs he advocates.