Romney Lying About Obama’s Economic Record Again
Mitt Romney is supposedly the 'economics guy' in the Republican Presidential field, and he has made much noise about President Obama's economic record. Romney recently stated that “He [Obama] did not cause this recession, but he made it worse.”
Greg Sargent points out that this demonstrably false:
Romney’s claim — which is now central to his sales pitch — has been repeatedly knocked down. After Romney made the assertion his announcement speech, fact checkers demolished it.
As Post fact checker Glenn Kessler noted, the National Bureau of Economic Research said the recession ended in June of 2009. Kessler concluded: “with NBER saying the economy is now out of a recession, it is difficult to see how Romney can claim that Obama made it worse.”
The Associated Press, meanwhile, pointed out that the gross domestic product, the prime measure of economic strength, picked up modestly after he took office, adding that while unemployment is still very high, the “recession officially ended six months into his presidency.”
“Obama did not, as Romney alleged, make the economy worse than it was when he took office,” the AP concluded.
Mitt Romney is running on a right wing economic platform and must try to convince the electorate that 8 years of conservative economics under George Bush were beneficial to the economy. This is of course completely ridiculous, but in American politics, you just have to keep lying in order to create a new reality. Romney is banking on people buying in to this new reality – a paradigm where tax cuts and deregulation creates wealth and money trickles down from the rich to the poor. Obama and the Democrats must relentlessly counter this PR campaign with facts (real ones), because Romney has almost 18 months to hammer home his message.
This is not to say that Obama could not have done a far better job on the economy, but compared to what a Mitt Romney or a John McCain would have done, we've had it pretty good.
