Barack Obama had plenty of economic successes
In response to Ray Kolander’s recent letter to the Review-Journal:
Mr. Kolander states that Obama’s accomplishments were almost universally negative. Does he include the change in unemployment from more than 9 percent to just more than 4 percent? Is that a negative?
Mr. Kolander also complains about the national debt. Is he aware that the last year of the Bush presidency gave us a annual deficit of $1.3 trillion? That had gone down to $587 billion in 2016 and $666 billion in 2017. That is, President Obama oversaw a 50 percent reduction in annual deficits. But Mr. Kolander says that this is somehow bad.
While the deficit under the first year of Donald Trump in 2018 is expected to be about $1 trillion — or an increase of more than 50 percent. That deficit is in a booming economy, not the train wreck left to us by the last Republican president. Oh, and the increase in debt under Obama was not $9 trillion, but $7.6 trillion, so we are well on our way to breaking that record.
One more thing. Under Mr. Obama, the economy grew every year for his entire two terms, which is a very rare. But Mr. Kolander thinks that this is negative. The last time we had such a long period of growth was under Bill Clinton. And we know what Mr. Bush did to that.
