Ryan Price's Soapbox

I am the kind of citizen who votes on the issues not party lines. I don’t vote based on the candidates good smile, or his excellent speaking ability, or if they are a specific faith. I vote based on where they stand on issues that will directly affect myself and my family. Would I have voted for Obama in 2008? Likely not, because the candidate I supported was actually Hillary Clinton based on her experience and her beliefs during the primaries were not as far left as Obama. Closing in on 2012, let’s see what Obama has done in his presidency and the problems we still face as a country, call it …transparency if you will.

Obama set the bar too high for himself, maybe  it’s an inflated ego but it has caused him to fail by his own standards. It’s the Obama administration, not the Republicans, that said if his stimulus package was passed unemployment would not exceed 8 percent. Obama joked there weren’t as many “shovel-ready” jobs as he thought. In such hard times, now isn’t the time to joke.

It’s Obama who promised to cut the deficit in half. It’s Obama who said if we passed the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, the health care cost curve would go down rather than up. It’s Obama who promised us recovery and prosperity, hope and change. What we’ve gotten instead is the opposite.

• Under Obama’s stewardship, we have lost 2.2 million jobs (and 900,000 full-time jobs in the last four months alone). He is now on track to have the worst jobs record of any president in the modern era.
• The unemployment rate stands at 9.1 percent v. 7.8 percent the month Obama took office.
• July marked the 30th consecutive month in which the unemployment rate was above the 8 percent level, the highest since the Great Depression.
• Since May 2009 — roughly 14 weeks into the Obama administration — the unemployment rate has been above 10 percent during three months, above 9 percent during 22 months, and above 8 percent during two months.
• Chronic unemployment is worse than during the Great Depression.
• The youth employment rate is at the lowest level since records were first kept in 1948.
• The share of the eligible population holding a job has declined to the lowest level since the early 1980s.
• The housing crisis is worse than in the Great Depression. (Home values are worth roughly one-third less than they were five years ago.)
• The rate of economic growth under Obama has been only slightly higher than the 1930s, the decade of the Great Depression. From the first quarter of 2010 through the first quarter of 2011, we experienced five consecutive quarters of slowing growth. America’s GDP for the second quarter of this year was a sickly 1.0 percent; in the first quarter, it was 0.4 percent.
• Fiscal year 2011 will mark the third straight year with deficits in excess of $1 trillion. Prior to the Obama presidency, we had never experienced a deficit in excess of $1 trillion.
• During the Obama presidency, America has increased its debt by $4 trillion. That is to say, Obama has achieved in two-and-a-half years what it took George W. Bush two full terms in office to achieve — and Obama, when he was running for president, slammed Bush’s record as being “unpatriotic.”
• America saw its credit rating downgraded for the first time in history under the Obama presidency.
• Consumer confidence has plunged to the lowest level since the Carter presidency.
• The number of people in the U.S. who are in poverty is on track for a record increase on President Obama’s watch, with the ranks of working-age poor approaching 1960s levels that led to the national war on poverty.
• A record number of Americans now rely on the federal government’s food stamps program. More than 44.5 million Americans received Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits, a 12 percent increase from one year ago.

So…based on these facts. I ask you this has Obama earned a 2nd term? In my eyes. No.

So i figured I’d post a double whammy tonight. Aside from the problems I see in the health care bill as well as the other 58% of America who are opposed to it. I find the more i comb through the news that one thing has been absent since Friday of last week and that is everyone has conveniently forgotten that our unemployment rate has shot up to the dreaded 10.2% mark. For those of you who grew up in the 90’s ; i was born in 1982 and in 1983 the US was going through a pretty bad recession then, I was only 1 and although i do not remember it I often reflect on what my parents had to endure during that time when we moved from Indiana to Arkansas.

Yea the news sucks and no one wants to continue to sulk over it but it’s not something that we can just ignore. This issue is that big purple elephant in the corner that everyone pretends isn’t there. Anyways, back on point, the more you hear about the health care reform going on in this country you hear less and less about an even bigger issue, unemployment. Now 10.2% is the number that are currently out of work but this number does not reflect those who quit looking or recently got laid off.

Our representatives are doing nothing to fix this and haven’t since it slowly began its ascension to the rate its at now. While people continue to lose jobs and their homes as a result of their job loss we are worried about passing a 1.030 Trillion dollar health care bill. While much of the stimulus money still sits unused.

Obama to be quoted: “The Stimulus Package has saved or created 650,000 jobs”

Real numbers being released every month show a steady loss of jobs between 300,000-500,000 jobs. The package was said to have stopped it from climbing over 8% ..and as you can see it failed in doing so. Auto Industries that failed to run their companies efficiently and hence asked for a bailout, banks who lent money to people who couldn’t pay it back went under and asked for a bailout too.

As it stands right now over 8.3 MILLION people have lost their jobs in the Unemployment report by the Department of Labor – Economic Report for October 2009. Kind of makes that supposedly 650,000 seem like a drop in the bucket. Essentially the government got a blank check from the American people and are now trying to spend their way to recovery while people day in and day out lose their livelihoods, their homes, and everything they have worked their entire life for? So my question is this Congress, when are you going to quit playing with the American peoples hard earned money and actually get us out of this mess, or will we have to find a group who will?

Ryan Price –