Milt Shook's post on Politics | Latest updates on Sulia

Martin O'Malley is wrong. We ARE better off than we were 4 years ago...

...and everyone with a memory knows this. You won't hear me say Martin O'Malley is wrong very often, but on this one, he's way off. When President Obama took office, we were losing nearly 800,000 jobs per month, so the odds are, even if you had a job at the time, you wouldn't have had it long. Our retirement accounts had lost upwards of half their value, in part because the stock market had lost half its value, which is why the economy was shedding so many jobs. By the way, that was the second time in eight Bush years that GOP policies led to a major stock market tumble. And as bad as the deficit is, it's roughly 20% smaller than it was at the end of the Bush years. Just as importantly, imagine the hole we would have had to crawl out of, had it not been for quick action by the Democrats and President Obama. Those who claim the stimulus didn't work are messing with you. On its own it either created or saved about 3-4 million jobs, directly. But it also stopped the downward slide, which is very important. We would have had to crawl back from 15% unemployment or more, and the entire US auto industry would have been owned by foreign entities. Even though the economy lags behind where it should be right now, the real problem is the Republicans fake outrage over the deficit. Job growth in the private sector is steady; what's causing the unemployment rate to stay so high is the nearly 700,000 public sector workers who have lost their jobs due to GOP budget cuts. If those people were working, the unemployment rate would be below 8%, and the economic activity provided by those people would drop the rate closer to 7% and, perhaps ironically, the deficit would be smaller. We are better off now than we were 4 years ago, and we'll be better off if we stop handing pieces of the government to the current, radicalized version of the GOP. Make it all Democratic Party for a while, and watch things shine.