Obama’s Mantra

The central mantra of President Obama’s campaign is false. That mantra is: “The Republicans tried their plan for the economy and it failed. I tried a new plan and it worked.”

As I pointed out on National Review Online yesterday, the facts are otherwise. Closing out his fourth year in office, President Obama has an 8.3 percent unemployment rate. He also boasts the lowest rate of participation in the labor force in 30 years (63.7 percent). More Americans are out of work than at any time in the preceding 30 years. There are 7 million more persons in poverty than when he took office, a jump from 39.8 million to 47 million. When pressed to explain these figures, the president points his finger at the state of the economy when he took office. That’s his excuse.
But the reasons for the 2008 economic calamity were set forth at least eight years before its onset by colleagues of mine at the American Enterprise Institute, led by the prescient, intrepid, and persistent Peter Wallison.
Wallison and the others did their best to strip the disguises off the darling ideas about housing held by Democrats Barney Frank in the House and Christopher Dodd in the Senate. Through Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, those two and other Democrats (with a minority of Republicans) were force-feeding government-guaranteed mortgages to borrowers who had no reasonable chance to keep up with monthly payments. Such borrowers would never before have been approved for mortgages. These empty-headed, thoughtless (albeit well-intentioned) approvals undermined the whole U.S. (and world) financial sector.

Read more: http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/314009/obama-s-mantra-michael-novak