Obama: Americans MUCH better off than when I took office: They’re just too stupid to know it

Obama: Americans MUCH better off than when I took office: They’re just too stupid to know it

Along with his admission that he dropped the ball in Syria and Iraq, President Obama’s “60 Minutes” interview yesterday included the claim that Americans are better off than they were before he took office, but that they just don’t realize it.

When I came into office, our economy was in crisis. We had unemployment up at 10 percent. It’s now down to 6.1. We’ve had the longest run of uninterrupted private sector job growth in our history. We have seen deficits cut by more than half. Corporate balance sheets are probably the best they’ve been in the last several decades.

Actually, Obama is either misinformed or lying. Unemployment in February 2009 was at 8.1%. And while he did cut the deficit in half, he first doubled it, adding $7 trillion to the national debt.

He had more to boast about:

We are producing more energy than we had before. We are producing more clean energy than we ever had before. I can put my record against any leader around the world in terms of digging ourselves out of a terrible, almost unprecedented financial crisis.

It’s not clear what financial crisis his energy policy dug us out of. His EPA has passed more job-crippling regulations than any previous iteration of that agency. He seems to forget moreover having squandered some $80 billion on failed green energy initiatives. The one project that could produce jobs and make the country genuinely energy-independent for is the Keystone pipeline, which he refuses to green light.

Finally, there was this:

Ronald Reagan used to ask the question, “Are you better off than you were four years ago?” In this case, are you better off than you were in six? And the answer is, the country is definitely better off than we were when I came into office.

When asked if the president thought the American people could feel that economic success, Obama said, “They don’t feel it,” adding interestingly, “the reason they don’t feel it is because incomes and wages are not going up.”

Which is precisely the point: Six years worth of Obama’s progressive policies have failed to improve wages and incomes. Americans do understand that. Maybe Americans are not a stupid as Obama thinks.

Reagan would be horrified at Obama’s comparison, especially the fact that he blames the American people for not understanding they are better off.

Cross-posted at The Lid

Howard Portnoy contributed to this report.

Jeff Dunetz

Jeff Dunetz

Jeff Dunetz is editor and publisher of the The Lid, and a weekly political columnist for the Jewish Star and TruthRevolt. He has also contributed to Breitbart.com, HotAir, and PJ Media’s Tattler.

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