In advance of tonight’s State of the Union address, the editors at National Review Online examine the track record of President Obama’s “investments”:
If we must endure the rhetoric of investment, it is fair to ask: How is Obama?s portfolio doing?
Compared to its slick prospectus, the Obama Fund is a dog, and its metrics ? unemployment and growth ? are stagnant and anemic, respectively. The Democrats promised that the $787 billion stimulus package would keep unemployment levels low ? the best guaranteed return we?ve heard of since Bernie Madoff ? but instead joblessness climbed from less than 8 percent to nearly 10 percent: a return of about negative 25 percent. And those shovel-ready stimulus projects turned out to be a lot like Madoff?s assets: fictional. After nearly a trillion bucks in ?investment,? the most visible infrastructure improvement we have to show for it is a bunch of signs advertising the wonderfulness of the stimulus. If Obama were a rookie investment banker, would you give him a bonus for that performance? Probably not. Meanwhile, two years of unified Democratic management under Obama-Pelosi-Reid have left our national leverage ratio severely out of whack.
Perhaps the president’s banking friends could give him a little coaching.
