Obama’s Calculated Deception

A graph titled 'Private Sector Job Creation' on the Obama-Biden campaign website… announces proudly that 4.4 million private sector jobs have been created over the past 28 months.

But at the same point during the Reagan recovery, the economy had created 9.5 million new jobs.     Contrary to the Obama campaign's misleading claim of 4.4 million new jobs created, total jobs today are still half a million less than in January 2009 when Obama entered office.    The unemployment rate, which we were told would not exceed 8% if we enacted Mr. Obama's stimulus package…has never fallen below 8% during his presidency. The rate has averaged 9.2% since February 2009.

After Bush's tax rate cuts were all fully implemented in 2003, the economy created 7.8 million new jobs over the next 4 years and the unemployment rate fell from over 6% to 4.4%.

President Obama and his chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors, Alan Krueger, brag that private sector jobs have now grown for "28 straight months." But job growth is the norm -- in the 62 years from January 1946, after World War II, until January 2008, jobs grew in 86% of the months, or 640 out of 744. Reagan's recovery produced job growth in 81 out of its first 82 months, with 20 million new jobs created over those 7 years, increasing the civilian workforce at the time by 20%. Even George W. Bush oversaw 52 consecutive months of job growth, including nearly 8 million new jobs created after his 2003 capital gains and dividends tax rate cuts became effective.

Obama is campaigning as if he were certain that a majority of Americans do not know that all recessions end and that labor markets recover eventually.Obama's tragic jobs record reflects the dismal economic growth under his administration's throwback, Keynesian economic policies. For all of last year, the economy grew by a paltry real rate of 1.7%, only about half America's long-term trend. The average so far this year has been no better. That dismal growth is further reflected in the Census Bureau reports of falling real wages under Obama, kicking median family income back over 10 years, with more Americans in poverty today than at any time in the more than 50 years that Census has been tracking poverty.

In the second year of Reagan's recovery, the economy boomed by a real rate of 6.8%, the highest in 50 years. Real per capita disposable income increased by 18% from 1982 to 1989, meaning the American standard of living increased by almost 20% in those first 7 years of the Reagan boom alone. The poverty rate, which had started increasing during the Carter years, declined every year from 1984 to 1989, dropping by one-sixth from its peak. That is the proper comparison for Obama's economic performance.

Obama also attacks the wealthy with his "fair share" mantra. "The Distribution of Household Income and Federal Taxes, 2008 and 2009," issued by CBO on July 10, reports that the top 1% of income earners paid 39% of federal individual income taxes in 2009, while earning 13% of the income. That means their share of federal income taxes was three times their share of income. And that is down from 2007, before President Obama was even elected. In that year, after 25 years of Reagan Republican tax policies, the top 1% paid 40% of federal individual income taxes. CBO further reported that in 2009 the top 20% of income earners, those earning more than $74,000, paid 94% of federal individual income taxes, virtually all of the net total. That was 85% more than the share of national income they earned.

The Obama campaign continues its calculated deception in saturating the Internet with advertising alleging that Mitt Romney's "tax plan" would raise taxes on the middle class and working families. Not only has Romney proposed no such thing, House Republicans have already voted for Rep. Paul Ryan's tax reform plan that would cut the federal income tax rate for all families earning less than $100,000 to 10%, and Romney has endorsed that as well.

Obama's lying allegation regarding Romney flies in the face of that reality. Rather, it is Obama who has raised taxes on the middle class, in gross violation of his 2008 campaign pledge not to do so. That has been held, in fact, by the United States Supreme Court, which ruled that the individual mandate in Obamacare is constitutional precisely because it is a tax. And that individual mandate tax applies to the middle class, and working people.

It is a classically abusive Saul Alinsky trick to accuse your opponent of planning to do exactly what you have done, as Obama does in continually accusing Romney of proposing to raise taxes on the middle class. Only an idiot can fail to see that the entire Democrat party's spending plans require sweeping tax increases on the middle class!

The entire Democrat party needs to be held responsible for Obama, the abusive dishonesty of his campaign operation, and the accelerating downward spiral of America his neo-Marxist policies are producing.