Why we need to re-elect Barak Obama Part 2.

In Part One of "Why we need to re-elect Barak Obama"  I discussed legislation such as Voter I.D. Laws. Gerrymandering of Congressional Districts, "Personhood" Amendments, and Anti-Union Laws, all of which are issues that the Tea Party/GOP has been putting into place since they came to power in 2010.  I noted that these issues have nothing to do with fiscal responsibility, a smaller government or making America a better country, and how they support the claim that we should re-elect President Obama.

My last post also argued for re-electing our President, as it showed how historically the Democrats have performed better than the GOP in fiscal responsibility when they have been in the Oval Office.

This column will look at President Obama's performance in managing the economic recovery since he took office.

Among other claims, Presidential candidate Mitt Romney has been accusing the President of "failing", and of "making the economy worse".

Is he telling the truth?

How HAS President Obama done?

Has the economy improved since he took over from President Bush, or is it worse?

First, let's start by looking at the change in GDP from the last year of Bush's second term, compared to Obama's first three years

OK, so GDP is back on a positive track. That's growth. Perhaps it's not as high as we might like it, but as we will see in the next chart, the reason is that we have also been cutting government spending instead of investing in growth. This has been true for every recession in the past half-century, and is the proven response to recovery from a recession.  Here is a chart which illustrates the point, comparing spending during the 'Reagan Recovery' with government spending under Obama.

 

The blue line shows how spending went up right as President Obama took office, (a legacy of the Bush Administration's last budget)  and before Obama's budget went into effect. Once it did, spending started coming down.

 

From these two charts we can see that the economy IS improving,  and that the reason the improvement is slower than we might like is that the government is not investing money to stimulate the economy.

But what about the stimulus money we already spent? Did it work?  Here are three different analysts' opinions:

 So the answer appears to be yes, the stimulus worked as intended. Although it stopped us from falling into a full depression,  it was simply too small for the size of the problem to spur economic growth. 

But what about jobs? It seems like the unemployment rate is still too high. Are we creating any jobs?

So far as job creation goes, it appears that after a few months of 'reduced job losses' immediately after Obama took office, we moved into positive job creation in 2009 and we have since had 27 months of positive job growth.

The economic indicators presented here show that Mitt Romney is making false claims, that in fact President Obama is doing a good job bringing the U.S. economy back after the worst recession we have had since the Great Depression.

Along with the issues that the Tea Party Republicans have shown to be their top priorities, and the half-century of superior economic performance by Democratic Administrations in the White House,  the economic facts presented here clearly show that President Obama deserves a second term.