Reward the foolish, punish the frugal:
President Barack Obama walked into the Oval Office in January 2009 during a severe economic downturn led by a meltdown in housing prices — and promptly made things worse.
By bailing out banks, insurance companies and auto firms — done to a lesser extent by the previous administration — Obama rewarded poor performers and punished their better-managed competitors. Prevented from pouncing on wounded rivals and thus increasing market share or buying the assets of the wounded at fire sale prices, Ford, for example, watched GM and Chrysler get a cash infusion from taxpayers. Despite GM’s recent “successful” public offering, taxpayers lost billions of dollars.
Obama and the Democratic congressional supermajorities passed a nearly trillion-dollar economic “stimulus” package and then proceeded to award fiscally irresponsible states with “stimulus” funds, helping postpone the day of reckoning when states must meet their budgets by reducing spending and cutting the size of government. Stimulus supposedly “saved or created” 3.5 million jobs, but it merely succeeded in transferring money from the pockets of producer taxpayers into the pockets of others.
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