On Feb. 2, 2009, President Barack Obama explained his chance to fix the economy to host Matt Lauer on NBC's "Today": "I will be held accountable. I've got four years. ... If I don't have this done in three years, then there's going to be a one-term proposition."
Here are the top 10 reasons I believe President Obama shouldn't sit a single day beyond his one term in the Oval Office:
10) Obama's economic actions have failed to lower the unemployment rate in the U.S. to less than 8 percent for the past 42 months, which is a record.
Nearly four years into his presidency, Obama's economic progress was reported on Aug. 3 by Reuters: "Details of the household survey, from which the unemployment rate is drawn, gave a downbeat assessment of the labor market, with the share of the population that has a job falling to near cycle lows. In addition, the labor force participation rate, or the percentage of Americans who either have a job or are looking for one, fell to 63.7 percent last month from 63.8 percent. That is a sign of low confidence in the labor market. Data last week showed the economy grew at an annual pace of 1.5 percent in the second quarter, also far short of the 2.5 percent rate needed to keep the unemployment rate stable."
9) The Obama administration's out-of-control spending has led America to the economic brink and destroyed our country's credit rating.
In 2009, Obama spoke out of one side of his mouth when giving financial advice to the people in New Hampshire: "When times are tough, you tighten your belts. You don't go buying a boat when you can barely pay your mortgage. You don't blow a bunch of cash (in) Vegas when you're trying to save for college."
But he then spoke out of the other side of his mouth when he informed the American public that he was proposing a record-breaking $3.8 trillion budget for 2011, which equates to spending $7.3 million a minute. (The federal budget was only $1.9 trillion in 2001.)
Tragically, the president expects Americans to live one way financially (fiscally prudently) and the federal government to live another (extravagantly wildly). Not so surprisingly, the day after the president proposed his 2011 budget, Moody's Investors Service announced that his fiscal policies "test the AAA boundaries" and pushed the U.S. government's credit rating below those of Canada, Germany and even France.
8) Obama's reckless spending and fiscal policies have added more to the national debt than most U.S. presidents combined — roughly $6 trillion in his first term in office (making the total debt nearly $16 trillion and, by White House projections alone, $21.3 trillion by the end of fiscal 2017, $25 trillion in 2021 and $25.9 trillion in 2022).
In 2007, when I began writing my New York Times best-seller "Black Belt Patriotism," unemployment was less than 5 percent; the annual federal budget was about $2.9 trillion; the federal deficit was $161 billion; and the national debt was $9 trillion.
Today unemployment is stuck at 8.3 percent; the federal budget is $3.8 trillion; the national deficit is $1.3 trillion; and the national debt quickly is approaching a staggering $16 trillion.
And to add insult to injury, our vassalage to other countries deepens as they bankroll increasing amounts of U.S. debt. More than one-half of our public debt is held by private investors in foreign lands.
The International Business Times reported recently: "China overtook Japan as the largest holder of U.S. national debt in 2009. As of December (the most recent data available), it held about 23.1 percent, or $1.15 trillion, of all foreign investment in U.S. privately held federal debt, according to a newly released report by the Congressional Budget Office, or CBO. ... Without monetary policy change, the CBO warned in its 2012 Long-Term Budget Outlook on June 5, the U.S. federal debt could be twice the size of the U.S. gross domestic product by 2037."
America, is that really the burden you want to place upon yourselves and your children?
7) Obama has detrimentally increased not only the costs of entitlements but also the dependency of citizens upon government subsidies rather than empower the people's autonomy, responsibility and freedom.
Obama has been called the "food stamp president" because more federal grocery subsidies have been given out under his presidency than under most others combined. A record 44.7 million people, or 1 in 7 Americans, were on food stamps last year, up 33 percent from fiscal 2009. But far more than that, this president has radically increased government entitlement expansions.
The Heritage Foundation documented that Obama's 2011 budget increased total welfare spending to $953 billion, a 42 percent increase over welfare spending in 2008. And over the next decade, welfare spending is projected to cost taxpayers $10.3 trillion.
The Congressional Budget Office recently released updated figures that reveal how Obamacare will cost twice as much as the price tag first soft-lobbed at the American public, from $900 billion to $1.76 trillion between now and 2022.
6) Obama demeans private enterprise and the entrepreneurial spirit — the very heart of America.
In 2009, right after taking office, President Obama emphatically stated that "only government" is our savior, and then he supported his socialistic platform through multiple company and corporate bailouts.
Recently, Obama reiterated his anti-individual and -capitalistic beliefs when he defined the "somebody" who's responsible for the success of your business as being the federal government: "If you've got a business — you didn't build that; somebody else made that happen. The Internet didn't get invented on its own. Government research created the Internet so that all the companies could make money off the Internet." (Italics added.)
The Wall Street Journal even confessed that the president is "subordinating to government the individual enterprise and risk-taking that underlies prosperity."
(Next week, I will continue my list of the top 10 reasons not to re-elect President Obama.)
Follow Chuck Norris through his official social media sites, on Twitter @chucknorris and Facebook's "Official Chuck Norris Page." He blogs at http://chucknorrisnews.blogspot.com. To find out more about Chuck Norris and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com.
