7 Reasons They Are Wrong!
By Samuel Warde
Anyone watching the recent Republican national convention got
to listen to “a dark
portrait of modern America – police officers being killed in the streets,
illegal immigrants crossing the border and murdering US citizens and
corrupt politicians enriching themselves at the expense of ordinary people.“
Speaker
after speaker took to the lectern, delivering tales of deep recession, rampant
unemployment, looming economic collapse from an ever-shrinking economy.
According
to the Republicans, foreign competitors are outpacing us, more people are
uninsured than ever before, Obamacare is bankrupting the country, World War III
is just around the corner.
Obama and the Democrats seized that message. “America is already great. America is already strong,” Obama declared. “Ronald Reagan called America ‘a shining city on a hill.’ Donald Trump calls it ‘a divided crime scene’ that only he can fix. It doesn’t matter to him that illegal immigration and the crime rate are as low as they’ve been in decades, because he’s not actually offering any real solutions to those issues. He’s just offering slogans, and he’s offering fear.”
However,
thanks to our sister site, Mindy Fischer,
Writer, we are able to understand the facts – that America
is doing great!
Here
are seven reason why Republicans are wrong about the current state of affairs
in America.
The Uninsured
In February of 2009, right after Obama took office, the
uninsured rate was at 16.1%. It was no secret that our health
care system was broken. And then came Obamacare.
Now, it is true that Obamacare
is not perfect….far from it actually. But many of the problems with Obamacare
are a direct result of compromises made to appease the Republicans in an effort
to make it a bipartisan bill.
As we now know, Obamacare is nowhere near the
single payer system that Liberals originally wanted. But even with all of the
flaws that still need to be addressed, it is definitely better than the broken
system that we had before.
According to Forbes, for the first time EVER the rate of
uninsured Americans is now below 10% (the latest figures released by the CDC put the rate at
9.1%).
The Unemployment
Rate
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics the
unemployment rate was 8.3% in February of 2009. But as you can see in this
graph there has been a steady decline under President Obama. Last month the
unemployment rate was down to 4.9%.
Beyond
the official unemployment rate we have other rates which factor in things like
discouraged workers and part time workers.
One of those other rates is know
as the U6 rate which adds on the workers who are
working part-time purely for economic reasons. That figure the righties love to
quote of nearly 10% is using the U6 numbers. But here’s the thing…even when you
use the U6 figures there has been a vast improvement.
In February of ’09 the U6
unemployment rate was 15.1%. It is now at 9.8%.
The Stock Market
Another
good indicator of economic growth is the stock market. With the market
continuing to hit new highs, it can sometimes be easy to forget just how bad
things were when Obama first took office. By the end of Bush’s presidency, we
had experienced two stock market crashes and watched the second worst market
decline in history, only exceeded by the Great Depression.
February 19th of 2009 the stock market closed at 7,365.
But after watching a steady growth of the market under Obama, it is now up over 18,000. On November 11, 2015 the DOW
closed at 17,702.
The Annual
Deficit
The
decline in the budget deficit is another strong indicator of the economic
growth under President Obama. In February of 2009 the annual deficit was -$1,400 Billion.
But according to the numbers put out by the Congressional Budget Office, the deficit has dropped
to -$534 Billion.
GDP Growth
The
change in the real Gross Domestic Product (GDP) is yet another area where we can see the effects of
Obama’s Hope and Change. In 2009 the GDP was at around -2.8% and now we are between 1% and 1.1%.
Consumer
Confidence
Consumer
confidence is another thing that has drastically improved under
Obama. In February of 2009 things looked economically bleak for most Americans.
TheConsumer Confidence Index was at a whopping 25.3. It is now at 118.3.
Combat Troops
Deployed
Another
big success for President Obama was ending the Iraq War and bringing home so
many of our troops. In 2009 we had 186,300 combat troops deployed.
But by 2015, between Iraq and Afghanistan that
number had fallen all the way to 9,937.
So
pretty much all I’m wondering now is how all of that “America is on the brink
of Armageddon” campaigning is going for the Clown Party?
Samuel Warde is a writer, social and
political activist, and all-around troublemaker.
