Ken Berwitz

Barack Obama, yesterday, explaining why there are about 15 million more people on food stamps now than the day he took office:

"First of all, I don't put people on food stamps. People become eligible for food stamps. Second of all, the initial expansion of food-stamp eligibility happened under my Republican predecessor, not under me. Number three, when you have a disastrous economic crash that results in 8 million people losing their jobs, more people are going to need more support from government."

Ok, let's take these one at a time.

It is, of course, true that a President does not put people on food stamps, within the narrow context that he does not personally sign them up.  But the economy that the President and congress oversees does put people on (or take people off) food stamps.  And, as you can see from the chart below, the huge surge in food stamps coincided with Democrats taking over both houses of congress in 2007, then President Obama taking office in 2009:

While it is true that the initial part of this surge occurred while President Bush was still in office, a) it took place after Democrats gained control of congress, thus wrote the budgets , and b) it continued, unabated, through three years of the Obama administration - the first two of which had a virtually veto-proof Democrat house and senate which could have done pretty much anything it wanted legislatively.

Now I have a question; a very basic one: when does Barack Obama take responsibility for this? 

Yes, there was a period of slightly under a year during which 8 million people lost their jobs.  But Mr. Obama has been President for 2 /2 years AFTER that period, most of it with a Democrat congress to back him up.  What did HE and THEY do about it?  

Well, let's see what happened.

Currently, we have something like two million fewer job-holders in this country than the day Barack Obama took office.  Obviously that is not good.

But let's give Mr. Obama a free pass and blame President Bush, and President Bush alone - not the Democrat congress - for the period of greatest job loss during the Obama presidency - about 4,000,000 - which occurred from January through June of 2009.  

So what happened after that?

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, since July, 2009 - i.e. after the loss of all those jobs, and months into implementation of the so-called "stimulus package" (I'm not even going to start on ObamaCare) - we have gained back all of 1,407,000 jobs. 

This is supposed to be the good news? 

Mr. Obama has given us the worst recovery from a recession in my lifetime.   And he gave it to us at a cost of 5 TRILLION dollars in additional debt. 

Again:  this is supposed to be the good news? 

Simply stated, Barack Obama has been disastrous for the economy of this country.  Not President Bush, not Republicans, not Waldo, not Dora the Explorer, not JoJo the Dogfaced Boy, not anyone else.  Barack Obama.  Period.

And all his whining, all his excuses, and all his blaming of everyone else, does not change this.  Not one bit.

The 2012 elections cannot come fast enough.