The Hill has a good piece today entitled “Christmas comes early for Obama”.
The gift was an amazing 5% expansion of the U.S. economy in the third quarter this year. Nobody expected that good news. It is especially significant compared to the dismal state of the rest of the world’s economies. We are truly a shining light.
Add to this good news the 300,000 jobs the nation added last month and record low gas prices that have dropped an astonishing 50 cents a gallon since a month ago. A friend just called to say that she paid only 1.79 a gallon in Spartanburg today.
So how did we achieve this remarkable improving economy and good news?
It wasn’t because we eliminated all regulations.
It wasn’t because we lowered corporate income tax.
It wasn’t because we repealed Obamacare.
It wasn’t because we built the Keystone XL pipeline.
It wasn’t because we dramatically cut federal government spending or balanced the budget.
We did none of these things that President Obama’s critics have said for years that we had to do in order to improve our economy. And if we do these things next year, they also won’t add to our economic gains.
Instead what the U.S. did right was not slashing government spending in hopes that austerity would somehow improve the economy. That is what most of the other industrial countries of the world did and they are paying the price and looking at us with envy.
We kept investing in our country and our people. That kept money flowing in our economy and set the stage for the private sector to pick back up. We took the correct path to a resilient national economy even though the President’s critics said that it would instead lead to job losses and another recession. They were wrong.
So when the new Congress takes over in January with Obama’s critics firmly in charge, remember the lesson of how we outshined the world’s economy. We didn’t do it with gimmicks that only served the purposes of big corporations (deregulating, cutting corporate taxes, repealing Obamacare, building the Keystone XL pipeline, and cutting government spending). We did it by investing and putting money on Main Street not Wall Street.
Merry Christmas!