After being constantly lambasted for their approach to our current economic situation, the GOP is now putting their face in a tried and true strategy - blame it on the guy in charge. But is it fair to blame our continued economic recession on a President who has been in office for less than two months?
In a recent Wall Street Journal opinion piece, the writer asks a very pointed question: for how long can the Democrats blame the current state of our economy on Republicans?
Here is a the central claim of the article (emphasis added):
The Democrats who now run Washington don't want to hear this, because they benefit from blaming all bad economic news on President Bush. And Mr. Obama has inherited an unusual recession deepened by credit problems, both of which will take time to climb out of. But it's also true that the economy has fallen far enough, and long enough, that much of the excess that led to recession is being worked off. Already 15 months old, the current recession will soon match the average length -- and average job loss -- of the last three postwar downturns. What goes down will come up -- unless destructive policies interfere with the sources of potential recovery.
The aforementioned article goes further to argue that Obama's approach to fixing the economy is all wrong and too focused on social issues rather than public works (emphasis added):
What is new is the unveiling of Mr. Obama's agenda and his approach to governance. Every new President has a finite stock of capital -- financial and political -- to deploy, and amid recession Mr. Obama has more than most. But one negative revelation has been the way he has chosen to spend his scarce resources on income transfers rather than growth promotion. Most of his "stimulus" spending was devoted to social programs, rather than public works, and nearly all of the tax cuts were devoted to income maintenance rather than to improving incentives to work or invest.
The GOP is doing whatever they can to make the country forget about the inadequacies of the Bush Administration - even if it means disregarding 8 years of spending and regulatory inaction as a cause or our economic downfal to instead blame the past 43 days of action from the Obama Admin.
Cross-Posted at The New Argument