The top concern of voters this year is the economy, with 40
percent of respondents in a recent New York Times/CBS News
poll rating the “economy and jobs” as their primary issue in the
election and another 15 percent ranking the economic issues of “gas
prices and energy policy” as their chief concern.
That combined total of 55 percent is more than double the 21
percent of respondents who ranked “terrorism and national security”
as their chief concern.
The bad news for Republicans is that these surveyed voters said
Barack Obama would be better than John McCain at handling the
economy.
“Sixty-five percent of those surveyed said they were confident
that Mr. Obama would make the right decisions on the economy,
compared with 54 percent who expressed confidence that Mr. McCain
would,” reported the Times.
“Voters are more negative about the condition of the nation’s
economy in this election year than they have been at any time since
1992, when Bill Clinton unseated an incumbent president by running
an ‘it’s the economy, stupid’ campaign,” reported the
Times.
Moreover, nearly half of the poll’s respondents said they
expected Sen. McCain to continue the policies of President George
Bush (while only 9 percent agreed that he should).
Obama, adding to the negativity about the economy in order to
sell “change,” regularly portrays the U.S. economy as in a state of
near-collapse. “Economic disaster is already here,” he declared at
a recent campaign stop in Virginia.
In fact, the economy is not in a state of “disaster,” and
“change” in the wrong direction would only make things worse.
With high gas prices, for instance, the most likely consequence
of Obama’s calls for restrictions on drilling and higher taxes on
oil companies would be less supply and even higher prices at the
pump.
KEITH MARSDEN PROVIDES a more accurate and less-politicized
description of the current condition of the American economy than
the picture Obama paints at his rallies.
On the global level, Marsden, a senior economist at the
International Labor Organization, a former economic adviser at the
World Bank and a fellow at the Centre for Policy Studies, reports
that “U.S. output has expanded faster than in most advanced
economies over the eight years of George Bush’s presidency.”
More precisely, the latest Eurostat report from the European
Commission regarding the change in economic growth in the second
quarter of 2008 compared to the first quarter shows that the U.S.
economy was up by 0.5 percent while the Euro zone taken as a whole
declined by 0.2 percent. “It marked the first time since the early
1990s that GDP has fallen overall in the 15 countries that use the
euro,” reported the Wall Street Journal.
Moving in the opposite direction of the increase in growth in
the U.S. economy, the percentage change in the growth rates in the
second quarter of this year in Italy, France, Germany and Japan
were universally negative at, respectively, -0.3, -0.3, -0.5, and
-0.6 percent.
On income, the World Development Indications 2008 report from
the World Bank shows national income per capita in the U.S. to now
be approximately a third higher than in England, Germany or
Japan.
Obama, arguing that the distribution of U.S. incomes is
increasingly “unfair,” is calling for redistribution by way of
higher taxes at the top and more government subsidies at the
bottom. In fact, the latest World Bank figures “show that the
richest 20 percent of U.S. households had a 45.8 percent share of
total income, similar to the levels in the U.K. (44.0 percent) and
Israel (44.9 percent),” reports Marsden, while in “65 other
countries the richest quintile had a larger share than in the
United States.”
With jobs, the U.S. unemployment rate averaged 4.7 percent from
2001 to 2007. “This compares with a 5.2 percent average rate during
President Clinton’s terms in office,” reports Marsden, “and is well
below the euro zone average of 8.3 percent since 2000.”
Obama, pursuing “social justice,” is calling for a euro-style
economic strategy of more taxes, more protectionism, more unionism,
and more regulations — the exact formula of community organizing
that’s produced slow economic growth and high unemployment
throughout Europe.
