Why the economy is so bad

By Tom Quiner

The GDP is growing at a snail’s pace. There are worries we’re heading into a double-dip recession.

Unemployment is high. People are remaining on unemployment insurance for record lengths of time.

Job creation has been tepid.

Middle class incomes have plummeted.

Health insurance premiums, gasoline prices at the pump, and college tuitions continue to rise in price far faster than the inflation rate.

Barack Obama has assembled the best and brightest liberal minds in America in his administration to solve these problems. He confidently proclaimed he could make the oceans recede, so fixing an ailing economy should be a piece of cake. Right?

But Obama and his geniuses have made things worse. Their solution of more government entitlements, record deficit spending, and dramatically more complex government regulations have produced a malaise we haven’t seen since the days of Jimmy Carter and his band of liberal geniuses.

What is the difference between Barack Obama’s team and every other recent president’s? Lack of experience in the private business sector.

Let’s compare Obama’s cabinet to those of his predecessors in terms of the percentage that had any experience in the private business sector:

√ 50% for Truman

√ 47% for Johnson

√ 53% for Nixon

√ 42% for Ford

√ 32% for Carter

√ 86% for Reagan

√ 51% for GH Bush

√ 39% for Clinton

√ 55% for GW Bush

√ 8% for Obama

Barack Obama has an unprecedented underrepresentation of business expertise in his cabinet brain trust. No wonder business is so bad. No wonder our country is floundering. These geniuses are mucking up our capitalistic system by increasing the cost of conducting business through:

√ higher taxes

√ increased regulations

√ uncertainty

Jimmy Carter, with the next smallest percentage of business expertise in his cabinet, still had four times as much as Obama does. And you remember how bad things were with him at the helm.

Bill Clinton was light on business experience in his administration, but he had a secret weapon Jimmy Carter didn’t have: Newt Gingrich. Speaker Gingrich provided a formidable counterweight to the liberal impulses of Mr. Clinton’s cabinet and his wife.

Barack Obama came to power in a perfect storm of liberal excess. He put together a team of anti-business liberals who despise capitalism and success. He had an ultra liberal Congress with super majorities for his first two years. And he enjoyed, and still enjoys, a fawning media that covers his back and leads the charge against traditional American values.

We see and feel the results, although you have to dig a little to find them in the mainstream media (see above).

Mitt Romney was a business and organizational genius. A Romney cabinet would surely have a more balanced representation of the business community in its ranks.

For this reason alone, I’d vote for Mitt Romney. America’s middle class cannot withstand another four years of Barack Obama’s anti-business assault on America.