Letters to the Rockville Centre Herald July 26, 2012

We can’t afford another Obama term

To the Editor:

As bad as the economy is today, citizens of all political persuasions should prepare for the likelihood that it would get much worse should President Obama secure a second term. The American Action Forum is predicting that more than 10 million jobs will be eliminated in 2013 as a result of the $16 trillion deficit anticipated by the end of 2012.

Compare President George W. Bush’s record of job growth with Obama’s. It’s not even close. The Bush tax cuts were enacted in June 2001. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, 132 million people were employed at that time. By January 2008, nearly 138 million people were employed, which suggests that nearly 6 million more people were employed as a result of his tax cuts. It’s important to understand that anywhere from 500,000 to 1 million jobs were lost from the 9/11 recession.

Under Bush’s watch, almost 6 million jobs were created; factor out the 9/11 recession and those numbers might have totaled 6.5 million to 7 million.

Obama and the Democrats like to spin the yarn that when he left office in January 2001, President Clinton left the U.S. with a surplus. The facts are that the deficit stood at $5.6 trillion when Bush was sworn in as president, and it grew to $10 trillion in January 2009, when Obama succeeded Bush. Bush allocated more than $800 billion to government-sponsored enterprises and investment banks in October 2008. In 2009, as Obama’s term began, the banks repaid more than $600 billion to the U.S. Treasury. If one was to credit $600 billion from the $4.4 trillion of debt accrued over Bush’s eight years, the total debt added would be $3.8 trillion, or $475 billion a year.

The credit crisis that ignited in September 2008 was largely a result of three decades of Democrats’ eviscerating the housing market, from the Community Reinvestment Act in 1979, under President Carter, to the Clinton administration’s support of the elimination of credit requirements for prospective home buyers. That crisis destroyed more than 8.8 million jobs, not the Bush tax cuts.

In February 2010, the Bureau of Labor Statistics estimated that only 129.2 million people were employed. Since Obama was sworn in, the U.S. has suffered a net loss of approximately 500,000 jobs while our U.S. deficit metastasizes at more than $1.5 trillion annually (three times faster than while Bush was in office), adding $6 trillion to the federal deficit in less than four years and resulting in our first sovereign credit downgrade.

We cannot afford another Obama stimulus!

Michael Mulhall

Rockville Centre