Presidential spokesperson Sarah Huckabee Sanders (full disclosure: my daughter) was asked to respond to Barack Obama’s attempt to take credit for the robust job creation numbers, suggesting it’s just part of the continuing streak that started on his watch. He actually attributes the boom in jobs (and I assume also the record-setting stock market, sky-high consumer confidence and GDP growth of 3.3% and rising) to the carbon regulations he imposed on industry and his focus on clean energy. Yes, nothing makes the economy boom like expensive, complicated government regulations and huge giveaways of tax money to crony companies like Solyndra. All those years of growth below 3% (well, it was an unprecedented accomplishment for a President) were just the economy’s way of gathering steam so that it could burst forth as soon as business owners and investors (purely coincidentally) learned that Hillary Clinton wasn’t going to be able to continue and expand Obama’s policies.
While this article declares that Sarah had the perfect response (personally, I thought her laughter alone would’ve been the perfect response), I wrote here recently about this trend of liberal Presidents trying to take credit for things accomplished after they were gone. There’s a revisionist movement that claims the boom under Reagan was really attributable to the decisions made by Jimmy Carter, and if he’d only gotten four more years, the economy would’ve boomed under him instead of Reagan. Uh-huh. (It was actually the tough choices made by Reagan, which were necessary to end stagflation but took a couple of years to take effect before the economy took off like a rocket. As Reagan joked, “You’ll notice our Democratic friends don’t call it ‘Reaganomics’ anymore now that it’s working.” For the record, nobody ever named anything that worked after Jimmy Carter.)
I wrote that you almost feel sorry for these poor liberal Presidents, always doing all the right things to make the economy boom (more government, taxes, regulations, etc.), only to have it stubbornly refuse to take off until after they leave. If only those companies that were sitting on capital to keep it from being taxed away had just used it to expand when they were in office! If only there had been more manufacturing jobs (as there are now) instead of just waiter and bartender jobs! If only Jimmy Carter had had eight years, and Obama had had 12, or 16, then things might have finally boomed under them! And maybe, just maybe, someday, the Great Pumpkin really will show up.
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