2012 has been quite the ride. The economy has been in the tank for the past four year and half the country didn’t notice, or they didn’t care. Zero Hedge has compiled a list of 75 reasons Barack Obama didn’t deserve your vote. Here are a few:
#1 In December 2008, 31.6 million Americans were on food stamps. Today, a new all-time record of 47.7 million Americans are on food stamps. That number has increased by more than 50 percent over the past four years, and yet the mainstream media still has the gall to insist that “things are getting better”.
#3 According to one calculation, the number of Americans on food stamps now exceeds the combined populations of “Alaska, Arkansas, Connecticut, Delaware, District of Columbia, Hawaii, Idaho, Iowa, Kansas, Maine, Mississippi, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Mexico, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Oregon, Rhode Island, South Dakota, Utah, Vermont, West Virginia, and Wyoming.”
#6 Median household income in the U.S. has fallen for four consecutive years. Overall, it has declined by over $4000 during that time span.
#20 Right now, approximately 48 percent of all Americans are either considered to be “low income” or are living in poverty.
#28 When you account for all government transfer payments and all forms of government employment, more than half of all Americans are now at least partially financially dependent on the government.
#68 During fiscal year 2012, 62 percent of the federal budget was spent on entitlements.
Read the rest HERE.
Sifting Reality 
I am surprised that “Making conservatives whine and incessantly complain about going the way of the dinosaurs” didn’t make the list.
Nash
I’ve noticed you don’t often offer anything but nonsense.
Let me ask you this, why don’t you see the things on the list as bad?
They are bad. It’s your nonsensical and non stop subjective divisiveness that needs to be called out. This blog is just you and your “club” of cheerleaders. Nothing about what you present here, except your personal trials and tribulations can be considered seriously because it is so absurdly one sided. I mean this culture war, red vs. blue bs is a perfect way for the machinations of control to keep you and us in perpetual state of gridlock by only viewing the world through a specific lens. I mean if this blog is the result of 25 years of this right vs. left, then we all lose. We can do better.
I did not vote for Obama the 1st or 2nd time. He was ill qualified the first time around and showed us all 4 years of failure the next time around. But limiting the dialogue by presenting it as a versus ideology gets none of us anywhere. Your almost maniacal addiction to mass generalizations of any one who disagrees with your world view also gets you nowhere. I mean how many people had to vote for Obama because the only other idiot on the chopping block was Romney. This was the best the GOP could come up with after 4 years of Obama? He was unelectable by any stretch of the imagination. The majority put obama into office….twice. Lets move on. Try to find better solutions than the ones forced down our collective throats that make everyone think the world can be made better via such black and white thinking.
Here’s what Obama has done (rated PG for your comfort):
http://whattheheckhasobamadonesofar.com/
A list of why Obama deserved our vote. Easy to make lists isn’t it?
The real question was whether Obama (and the DNC) was better than Romney (and the RNC / Tea Party). The answer is that of course Obama was better, assuming you care about human rights, which is, hopefully, more important than the economy. The economy is arguable, but I vastly support the DNC plan to tax the rich, be easier on the middle class, and provide support to the destitute. I find that better than paying tribute to the rich and forgetting about the rest of the country. That’s how I see it.
But all things considered, I hope people realize that 1) money isn’t everything and 2) it’s a choice between candidates. The DNC has the better plan for the economy and human rights, so it’s a no-brainer. We’ll see if the RNC sends the Tea Party packing after this fiscal cliff debacle..
You know, I did a post on the election, one of my last, that speaks to stupidity being a major factor in the re-election of Obama. Messrs. Nash and Torpy seem to justify that interpretation.
For Nash, the unfortunate fact is that this IS a matter of “versus” ideology. Good, proven ideas versus stupid and failed ideas. The only other “idiot” was Romney? The question upon which the vote rested was then a matter of which was the bigger idiot with the more idiotic plan. Clearly, that was and continues to be Obama. While some of my like minded bloggers found Romney to be less than ideal, so did I. But I found the alternative to him already a proven road to hell in a handbag.
For Jason, I haven’t read you link yet (or John’s, for that matter), but plan to. In the meantime, your following comment does little to assure me it isn’t any more credible than your own words. Going only by what John has highlighted in the post, it is clear that there is no support from the left for the destitute, unless increasing their numbers counts as doing so. And like so many of the addled left, you presume to state that the right is all about “paying tribute” to the rich and blowing off the rest. This is such absolute nonsense and fantasy. The wealthy are being attacked by the true purveyors of “versus ideology”, the left-wing. They are not responsible for the fiscal mess in which we find ourselves, yet they are being expected to give even more to alleviate it. This does not result in anything akin to an improved situation and never has.
The economic numbers are not good, but it is a general consensus that the economy began to tank severely before Obama came into office. This had to do with the crisis that precipitated an unprecedented Wall Street bail out initiated in the previous administration. Now we must ask the question: does the financial crisis of 2007 have anything to do with the current economic mess as reflected in your statistics? If so, then you might begin to understand why people voted for Obama over Romney. Romney was going to return the economy to where it was under the previous Republican president, and people did not want to go there.
It is a fair question to ask: has Obama prolonged the economic malaise that started under Bush? Obviously, you think so. However, the statistics you quote do not clarify this question. Several of the statistics are out of context. E.g. #68, entitlements. There has been an entitlement crisis growing for many years due to Social Security and Medicare (yes, Medicare is considered an entitlement). The Republicans did not solve this problem when they governed all three branches of the government. For reasons I still don’t understand, why wasn’t Social Security privatized then? The entitlement problem remains to this day. Many people believe the problem would remain had Romney been re-elected.
Let’s hope the economy gets better over the next four years. If not, I think the right Republican candidate has a good chance of winning the White House. I would like to see Republicans propose realistic pro-growth policies that do not increase the deficit. (Please, no proposals that only cut taxes without cutting spending. That is not realistic in my view). I, and many Democrats agree, that this country is long overdue for sustainable economic growth.
The financial crisis began in 2008 when the housing market crashed. That can be undeniably linked to democrats I the house and senate who refused to regulate Fanny and Freddy on the record. McCain and Bush tried a total of 17 times I believe to do so warning of a collapse but were called racists because more regulation meant minorities would be denied more loans.
The wall St bail out wasn’t a bail out, it was a loan, and the banks have already paid back TARP funds plus interest. So its difficult to see how that could be a problem now huh.
No, this economy is Obama’s, he owns it.
Why did the government need to intervene into the affairs of the private sector on such a massive scale? Why did Lehmann Brothers collapse? Why were the private credit agencies so wildly off base in rating the risks? It is hard to understand how Fanny and Freddy alone caused the problem, although that certainly contributed.
Whatever the cause, I think you are implicitly agreeing that the current financial crisis was not created by Obama (as you say, it started in 2008). Given the magnitude of that crisis, Americans gave Obama the pass for two reasons: 1) he did not cause it (which you agree with) and 2) the economy is improving now, although slowly. Had the economy not turned around at all, I think we would have had a different result.
I agree with you that it’s not clear Obama knows how to use Government policy to move the economy forward. I for one was not a fan of his stimulus program, which is a major reason Republicans gained control of the House in 2010.
If you want to understand my economic perspective, visit my economics blog at http://mannucci.wordpress.com. I welcome your comments!