This is the biggest issue of the campaign

By Tom Quiner

Here’s what the president says:

“Yes, foreign policy matters. Social issues matter. But more than anything else, this election presents a choice between two fundamentally different visions of how to create strong, sustained growth.”

So, is the economy the biggest issue of this campaign? It’s not to me.

Life issues, free speech issues, religious liberty issues, are all bigger to me and millions of other voters.

We’d rather be poor and free than rich and in chains.

I admit that the majority of voters do not agree with me. For them the economy is the issue.

Fair enough. It IS a huge issue. So how is the president doing?

By any measure, the economy stinks. Mr. Obama doesn’t know what to do. His premise seems to be that we need to tax producers more to increase the number of government employees, from firemen to teachers, all of whom, of course, are unionized.

Even more, he has taken billions of dollars from you and me to create “green energy jobs.” And we just didn’t have enough money for him to pay for these jobs, so he had to borrow the rest from China.

For example, he took $9 Billion of the economic stimulus funds from 2009 to 2011 and poured it into solar and wind projects. Guess how many direct jobs that created? Try 910 jobs.

wow (please note cynicism here).

That cost us $9.8 million per job. Impressed?

In fairness, supporters of this initiative are quick to remind us that these funds created another 4,600 indirect jobs.

So when you add the 910 direct jobs together with the 4,600 indirect jobs, we end up with 5,510 new jobs created at a “modest” cost of $1.63 million per job.

This is the essence of Obamanomics: big government that revels in its inefficiency.

As Quiner’s Diner has pointed out in previous posts, Ronald Reagan inherited a worse economy when he became president than Barack Obama did. Mr. Reagan had the economy humming along by his third year with GDP growth that ranged from 5 to 8% per quarter! Mr. Obama is lucky if GDP hits 2%.

And, of course, with Obama, everything is STILL George W. Bush’s fault.

So if the economy is THE issue of the campaign, you and I know what we’re going to get from Barack Obama and his party: more stagnation; more decline; more excuses.

Big government doesn’t work, or have I missed something these past three years?