It’s fashionable among many conservatives to claim that Obama is destroying the economy. Some even claim he’s doing it on purpose. But there are a number of reasons conservatives should actually be happy about what’s happened to the economy since Obama was elected.
1. Taxes are down.
Taxes have not gone up despite all the fears that Obama and the Democrats would try to raise them. The only change to federal tax rates (correct me if I’m forgetting something) during the two years of Democratic control from 2009-2011 was a decrease in the Social Security payroll tax. Obama signed an extension of Bush’s tax cuts last year, along with another extension of his payroll tax holiday. I’m pretty sure there are some sort of taxes tucked into Obamacare, pending the Supreme Court decision, but for now anyway, overall federal taxes are lower than they were under Bush.
Now, combined with record spending levels, that may actually be bad news for the overall health of the government budget. But if you’re a conservative who believes lower taxes always stimulate more job growth, it sure doesn’t look like Obama is trying to get in the way.
2. Oil production is up.
Many conservatives feared that Obama would attack oil and work to replace it with greener things that would lead to skyrocketing energy costs and massive job loss. Obama’s administration has certainly tried to help the greens (see Solyndra), but it has been no enemy of oil. US oil production declined while Bush was president, but that decline was reversed soon after Obama was inaugurated. US oil production is now at a 14-year high and still rising, thanks largely to technology improvements that opened up new fields in the Midwest.
Conservatives can argue that production would be even higher if Obama had approved more permits or opened up more areas to drilling, but the fact remains that the United States under Obama is now producing more oil than it did every year Bush was president! This increased production is adding downward pressure on prices and decreasing our “dependence on foreign oil,” buying time as demand falls due to demographic changes and more efficient technology.
3. Natural gas production is up.
Oil isn’t the only traditional energy source enjoying a renaissance under Obama. Natural gas production has continued the rise that began during Bush and is still hitting new records, thanks largely to technology improvements related to shale gas. In fact, production has increased so much that prices have plummeted and it is beginning to replace coal as a source of electricity (and that’s not just good news for conservatives – the cleaner fuel has helped the US lead the world in carbon dioxide reductions since 2006.)
4. Private jobs are up and public jobs are down.
There are now more private sector jobs than there were when Obama became President. That’s good news for anyone, but it gets even better for conservatives. Unlike previous recoveries, including under Bush, jobs in the public sector have dropped and are still dropping. Almost a million government jobs were added in Bush’s first three years; over 600,000 have been lost in Obama’s, even as private sector jobs are slowly increasing. In other words, this is the most “conservative” trend in jobs we’ve ever seen.
We could certainly argue that Obama had little to do with a lot of this (for example, the severe recession hit local government revenues very hard even as pension costs began to balloon). But at best the President is doing very little to stop these trends. Taxes are down, private sector jobs are up, and oil and gas production is growing. If this is how Obama is “destroying the economy,” I’ll take more of it.
This doesn’t mean the economy is soaring; unemployment is still very high. It doesn’t mean the Obama administration isn’t hurting the economy with its churn of regulations, and spending is still irresponsibly high. It doesn’t mean there aren’t plenty of other terrible things the Obama administration has done. But it does mean there are several metrics by which the economy under Obama is looking even more conservative than it did under Bush, and if anyone tells you Obama is destroying the economy but Romney will save it, they’re probably just blinded partisans.
#1: Saying taxes are lower ‘for now’ is kind of a nonsense concept. Taxes have a future profile and that future profile actually matters to our wealth to all sorts of decisions. The “Bush tax cuts” will expire (raising taxes) and if not overruled, the Obamacare taxes will kick in a couple years. You only get the result that taxes are lower if you are somehow ‘not allowed’ to count taxes that are scheduled to hit in the future. That is perhaps indeed Congress/DC style accounting but I don’t see why the rest of us must play along.
#2/3: I would dispute that an important conservative goal is to maximize the production of oil/gas per se, or to minimize our ‘dependence on foreign oil’, which is a somewhat bogus concept. I would think conservatives would want overall energy price incidence to be low (however that is attained) – which hasn’t happened, e.g. look at gasoline, the main driver here – and for (what they see as) wasteful government barriers to production/harvest to be removed – which you can’t credibly claim has happened either. The actual amount produced at any given time is not an end in itself, and is subject to global-commodity forces anyway. As for natural gas prices in particular, surely this is an artifact of distorting government pressure on coal etc., so even though it looks like a good outcome in isolation, it is a symptom of distortion that (one would assume) is wasteful and costly overall.
#4: Undoing Bush’s public-jobs bubble is perhaps a good outcome to be celebrated, but of course it is coming over Obama’s strident objections. This isn’t a reason to prefer Obama.
None of which means Romney will ‘save’ anything, of course.
All valid points… I’m not even necessarily saying these things are absolutely good for the economy (that’s why I put “dependence on foreign oil” in quotes, for instance), just remarking that they’re interesting things that are probably the opposite of what was predicted by some conservatives who thought (and still think) Obama was going to destroy the economy. Bush’s tax cuts will probably expire, but they were going to do that anyway. It’s still true that Obama extended them and I’m paying a lower rate this year than I would have otherwise. Etc.
Also, while I’m no energy expert, I’m fairly confident 2/3 is absolutely good for the nation. It’s creating lots of jobs (ND has the lowest unemployment rate) and lowering the cost of energy through increased supply. If we’re pumping it and using it, then it’s gotta be cheaper than whatever we’d be using in place of that new 1m bpd or whatever if we didn’t have it right? I’d also guess fewer imports also makes it cheaper to ship to gas stations. I don’t know how much government is hurting coal production (though I hear lots of fretting about EPA rules) but I’m pretty sure I read that heating costs have dropped across the US due partly to the nat gas boom. MJ Perry posts a lot (perhaps with too much of a bias) about the benefits of these production booms.
If the conservatives were smart they’d pack it in and let the democrats do the work for them. That said, I think the future American political landscape will see Greens and a Labour Party appear.