Many leftists are crying “Don’t go!” to President Barack Obama as he only has one day left in office. Those cries should actually be “Please leave!” because Obama’s presidency was a major disaster.
Here are Obama’s nine worst domestic policy blunders.
1. Obamacare. Obama’s massive health care law has completely turned America’s health care system upside down. The endless maze of regulations and mandates stemming from the law has resulted in higher premiums, higher deductibles, higher waiting times in the emergency room, less insurance options, and a shortage of primary care doctors, as the Daily Wire has chronicled here.
2. Dodd-Frank. Dodd-Frank is the Obamacare of the financial sector. It was sold to the public as Wall Street regulation needed to prevent another 2008 collapse, which was absurd from the get-go since the bill’s authors, former Sen. Chris Dodd (D-CT) and former Rep. Barney Frank (R-MA), are two of the people that were chiefly responsible for the 2008 recession. Dodd-Frank’s massive regulations have been squeezing small community banks and spawned the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which has unbridled power to run roughshod over the financial industry.
3. The stimulus bill. One of the first things Obama did while in office was to ram through his stimulus bill that he hailed as necessary to deal with the economic calamity facing the country. In reality, the stimulus was $825 billion in tax dollars wasted on ridiculous projects that were essentially payoffs to Democrat donors. The stimulus bill was based on the Keynesian fallacy that government spending will inject a positive multiplier to stimulate demand, but typically such government spending results in negative multipliers, and the stimulus bill was no different. Despite what Obama and his sycophantic supporters say, the economy is still stagnant and sluggish, so clearly the stimulus failed.
4. Nationalizing the student loan program. A provision in Obamacare granted the federal government essentially a monopoly over the student loan program, and in doing so created a massive bubble akin to the housing bubble that lead to the 2008 economic crash. The federal government’s initiative of making student loans widely available has resulted in higher tuition costs and numerous college graduates drowning in student loan debt.
5. Common Core. As Michelle Malkin has explained, Common Core has further federalized education and co-opted schools into dumbed-down standards, revisionist left-wing history and ridiculous math problems that are more complicated than they need to be while setting back children’s progress in this crucial subject compared to other countries. It is also a massive data mining scheme that collects “information on every student’s personality, attitudes, values, beliefs, and disposition, a psychological profile called Interpersonal Skills Standards and anchors” that the federal government uses as part of a “decision making model,” according to Fox News.
6. The bailout of General Motors (GM) and Chrysler. Obama used $80 billion in taxpayer money to bailout GM and Chrysler, which “lawlessly divested secured creditors of their rightful place in line to be paid, in favor of his unsecured union buddies, whom he bumped to the front of the line for preferential payment,” according to David Limbaugh. As a whole, taxpayers lost an estimated $9.3 billion on the GM and Chrysler and bailout. This may have been less than the government had expected in 2009, but Obama has claimed that “the auto companies have now repaid taxpayers every dime and more of what my administration invested in,” a statement that earned a “Mostly False” rating from the left-leaning PolitiFact. The bailout was also unnecessary, according to The Balance:
If there had been no bailout, Ford, Toyota, and Honda would have picked up market share. That would have increased U.S. factories and jobs once the recession was over. The loss of GM would be like the loss of Pan Am, TWA, and other companies that had a strong American heritage, but lost their competitiveness. That was perhaps a tug on the heartstrings of America, but not really bad for the economy. As a result, the auto industry bailout was not critical to the U.S. economy, like the rescue of AIG or the banking system.
7. Net neutrality. As the Daily Wire has previously explained:
The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) decided to regulate the Internet under Title II of the 1934 Communications Act, subjecting the previously unregulated industry to a wide swaths of regulations, including one that “allows the FCC to prevent any practice by an Internet access provider that the FCC believes will ‘unreasonably disadvantage’ an Internet user, application, or content provider,” according to National Review. Net neutrality will also enable the FCC to becoming the sole authority on “which tradeoffs and business models are acceptable.”
“So when providers are unsure about whether a new technology or business model ‘unreasonably’ harms some Internet constituency, they can submit those prospective plans to the Commission and pray for an affirmative (and timely) advisory opinion,” writes George Mason University research fellow Brent Skorup. “These advisory opinions border on Kafkaesque. The FCC can decline the request for an opinion, can permit the innovation, or can require more information from the submitting party. These opaque determinations cannot be appealed, and affirmative decisions can be reversed at the agency’s whim.”
8. Skyrocketing the national debt. Here are some sobering statistics about the debt, per Conservative Review‘s Daniel Horowitz:
- Obama has increased the fiscal operating debt by $9.3 trillion, which “took from our nation’s founding until 2008” to accomplish.
- The gross national debt was 74 percent of the country’s economy in 2009. Today, that number has been raised to 107 percent.
- The public’s share of the national debt has increased from 44 percent in 2009 to 77.4 percent in 2017.
Horowitz also points to a Government Accountability Office report that calls the growing debt “unsustainable.”
“These are not merely abstract numbers on a balance sheet that only affect the budget of the federal government,” writes Horowitz. “Aside from the fact that taxpayers will ultimately bear the cost of this debt, the crushing debt and misallocation of resources is already hurting the family budget. As the report observes, ‘high levels of national debt may contribute to higher interest rates leading to lower investment and a smaller capital stock to assist economic growth.'”
9. Undermining separation of powers. One of the most damaging aspects of Obama’s domestic policy agenda has been his blatant disregard for the Constitution’s separation of powers. Time and again, Obama has used his pen and phone to bypass Congress and use executive orders as a substitute for legislation while empowering the executive branch with a myriad of onerous regulations that have the force of law. The danger of Obama’s actions in this regard is that it sets a dangerous precedent where future presidents can wield the executive branch to impose their will on the American people if Congress refuses to cooperate.
Don’t let the door hit you on the way out, Obama.
Follow Aaron Bandler on Twitter @bandlersbanter.
