Joseph Lawler of the Washington Examiner assesses the economic impact of more than seven years of Barack Obama in the White House.
None of President Obama’s seven years in office has seen economic growth above 3 percent, and his final year will probably fall short, too.
Lame growth will be Obama’s clearest and most damaging legacy, as far as business is concerned.
The recovery is already about 50 percent longer than the average since 1945, the stock market is at record highs and there will be near full employment when Obama leaves office. Businesses have created more than 15.1 million jobs during the Obama years.
Yet these data, about which the administration boasts, are actually shortcomings, say critics. Obama and his policies have gotten in the way of economic progress and growth. The gains were in spite of Washington, not because of it, according to business groups.
“What’s going to be remembered is that we’ve had the longest prolonged slow-growth period since the Hoover administration,” said John Engler, former governor of Michigan who is the president of the Business Roundtable, a group of CEOs of major corporations. “And that has an impact on everything.”
Slow growth damages the federal balance sheet. A smaller economy means tax revenues are lower and debt becomes larger as a share of output, making it harder to service over time. On Obama’s watch, the federal debt has nearly doubled from 44 percent to 76 percent of the economy, and is now projected to rise indefinitely.
“His legacy will be that he managed to increase the federal debt almost more than every [other] president combined,” said Gary Shapiro, head of the Consumer Technology Association. “Basically, he stole from the next generation to make his presidency look good, and he clearly did not care.”
