After reading the response column by UF alumnus William Deich maintaining that President Obama was not responsible for the state of the economy, I wanted to make a few things clear.
First, I didn’t accuse Obama of causing every problem he faces — I accused him of making things worse through his utter incompetence at his job. There is a distinct difference.
Next, Deich asserts that the economy is actually the fault of Speaker of the House John Boehner, who ascended to the Speakership after the 2010 midterm elections.
To address this claim, consider the fact that Obama’s stimulus plan was projected by his own White House Council of Economic Advisers to have brought the unemployment rate below 6 percent by now. This same body also projected that by simply doing nothing and allowing markets to absorb their losses, the unemployment number would likewise have fallen below 6 percent.
Instead, unemployment continued to skyrocket. Despite entering office with a bulletproof Democratic supermajority, Democratic possession of both houses of Congress and colossal personal popularity ratings, the economy still managed to nosedive beyond expectations under Obama’s stewardship.
Boehner actually became the speaker of the house in a historic sweep as a direct result of the American people’s displeasure at the failure of Obama’s policies. The fact that the president was lampooned for sheepishly joking that his stimulus jobs “weren’t so shovel-ready after all” speaks volumes in this regard.
The notion that the president can institute better employment through “jobs bills” is a political sleight of hand fooling only the naïve. His bill, the American Jobs Act, requires supporters to be willfully blind to the economic realities of small business ownership.
For instance, the provisions in sections 101 and 102, which provide temporary tax breaks and temporary tax credits to employers in exchange for permanently hiring new workers, are laughable. No employer can afford to invest permanently on the basis of temporary incentives. Employment will take place only when the gains from doing so exceed the costs of the taxes and regulations of the deal. Still, Obama seems clueless as to how this actually makes the situation more tenuous for employers and actually discourages more hiring.
And what about the Simpson-Bowles Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform, the bipartisan panel instituted by the president himself to find economic solutions and whose recommendations were all rejected by the president out of hand? Why form the commission at all? Under Obama, our national debt has increased by $5 trillion. To put this into perspective, supposing Christ was born in 3 B.C., and that year you began spending $1 million daily, you still wouldn’t reach $1 trillion until the year 2736. How is this responsible?
Finally, there is the matter of campaign and fundraising travel expenses. Deich asserts that Obama has reimbursed more for campaign travel than Bush did. This is highly misleading. Although the Obama campaign has reimbursed the taxpayers to the tune of $1.5 million for some campaign-related travel, the White House has made an end run around Government Accountability Office complaints by stating that if one leg of a trip is official business, then making campaign stops in three additional states along the way is perfectly acceptable, as recorded in USA Today on April 26.
For a president who likes to wag his finger in the faces of CEOs, he is certainly eager to mobilize apologists to protect him from responsibility for his own pathetic executive performance. I, for one, am getting pretty tired of hearing how “the buck stops … uh, over there.” Aren’t you?
Joshua Fonzi is a microbiology and cell science and entomology and nematology senior at UF. You can contact him at opinions@alligator.org.
