2016 Postmortem
In reply to the discussion: How stupid are the Democrats for falling for... [View all]ProgressiveEconomist
(5,818 posts)because George W Bush allowed Wall Street to regulate itself. The resulting gambling with depositors' money led to a financial crash that threatened another Great Depression, and brought down businesses and 8 million jobs on Main Street.
President Obama's and Ben Bernanke's dramatic actions since then have brought us back from the brink of anther Great Depression. Now we are GAINING over 100,000 private sector jobs a month. In the past 29 months we have gained over 4 million jobs.
The unemployment rate, a "lagging economic indicator", remains stubbornly high, as people who had given up looking for work decide it's no longer hopeless to re-enter the labor market. But Mark Zandi of Moody's Investments, who was John McCain's chief campaign economist, forecasts 12 million new jobs over the next four years if President Obama's policies are continued. The same Republican source estimates the unemployment rate would now be 1.5 percentage points lower had Congressional Republicans not cynically blocked President Obama's American Jobs Acto over the past year.
In short, President Obama has turned the economy around, and the next four years promise new prosperity, as long as we do not return to Republican policies of reckless Wall Street deregulation and top-down regressive tax reform that brought us to the brink of another Great Depression.